All courses numbered 500 and above are graduate courses.
Undergraduates need to submit a course permit to enroll.
HIST 529 African-American History to 1900
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
This reading and discussion seminar will review the issues and resulting historical literature on the major transitions in the African American experience from the 16th thru the 19th century. Emphasis will be on such topics as the Transatlantic Slave Trade; the creation of African Americans in new world colonies, especially the future US; the partial emancipation of the revolutionary era; antebellum slavery and the rise of cotton agriculture, internal slave migration, and slave resistance; the "Great American Slave Rebellion" and the failure of emancipation; the rise of sharecropping, debt peonage and Jim Crow. There will be a weekly common reading with reports from three sources: 1) a classic study which defined the approach to the subject of the week; 2) a modern re-interpretive study or series of articles, 3) a survey of primary resources on the subject. Along with periodic oral reports with written synopses, students will prepare a proposal at the end of the seminar for a major research paper on some aspect of the subject matter covered by the seminar. the proposal will include a literature review, statement of thesis and its significance, research design, and annotated bibliography.
Course Syllabus (PDF)
