All courses numbered 500 and above are graduate courses.
Undergraduates need to submit a course permit to enroll.
HIST 610 Race, Gender, and Nation in Civil War America
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
This graduate level course invites students to engage a series of issues about nationalism, state formation, and citizenship presented forcefully in the United States in the context of civil war. At that crucial moment, a war of unprecedented scope drove a process of state building in the United States, and a policy of state-sponsored slave emancipation which ultimately reconfigured the nation and remade the terms of political membership in it. Less well understood is the process of nation building that was simultaneously underway in the Confederate States, the massive expansion of state power that involved, the racial state and white citizenship Confederates envisioned, and the significance of those developments for region and nation in the post-war period. Finally, neither of these regional literatures has yet to grapple meaningfully with the question of gender and nation: the gendered apparatus of nation-making, the configuring of women within the state and their relation to state authority, or the hard boundaries of male citizenship that emerged in the period of constitutional revision in the postemancipation period. Using the Civil War as a pivotal moment, the course ranges back to the early national period and forward to the late nineteenth century to trace out of the nexus of gender, race, and nation in the Civil War.
