BA History / Course details

This module examines the African American experience in the United States from the colonial period to the contemporary era. It is interdisciplinary in design, using different approaches to understanding the history and culture of Africans who gradually became African-Americans as the British North American colonies became the United States.  

In the nineteenth century, the American South was not merely a society with slaves but was a genuine slave society, although African-Americans were found in the American North as well, and slavery was critical to the development of the United States as a whole. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery was abolished and African- Americans were granted full citizenship rights, but the imposition of “Jim Crow” laws in the southern states in the late nineteenth century took away many of those hard-earned concessions. In the early twentieth century, African Americans struggled to combat the material and psychological effects of statutory and habitual racial discrimination.  

This module explores the ways in which African-Americans fashioned vibrant forms of popular culture and pioneered various tactics of political and economic resistance. These efforts provided the foundations for a civil rights movement that gathered momentum in the era of World War Two and reached its zenith in the 1960s. The course will consider the cultural and political dynamics of that movement and the transition to that of Black Power. It finally addresses the contemporary black American experience, allowing some reflection on the long history of African- Americans in North America.  

• To encourage students to understand, appreciate, and engage critically with concepts and issues in the history and culture of African Americans;
• To allow students to read and respond to a variety of texts, including primary and secondary sources drawn from a variety of genres and historical contexts;
• To develop students' research skills and their ability to work individually, researching chosen topics for essay and examination assessment;
• To promote excellence in written expression, to deploy critical and analytic modes of thought, and to make use of evidence to form a lucid and coherent argument appropriate to the second-year level of student assessment.

By the end of this course, students will have demonstrated:

 

• Knowledge of the experiences of African-Americans from the beginnings of plantation slavery up to the contemporary era;
• Familiarity with the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies;
• Proficiency in locating, studying, and analysing sources of information;
• An ability to construct and sustain written arguments to a level appropriate to second-year students.

1x2-hour lecture and 1-hour seminar

• An ability to use non-traditional materials, such as music, film, and poetry, as sources of historical understanding
• An understanding of the innately limited sources for much of the study of African-American history and culture 

• Use of both traditional and non-traditional sources in written and verbal contexts
• Presentation of ideas in a variety of assessment contexts 

• Research, analysis, and expression of ideas in written and verbal contexts
• Organisation of time in relation to class attendance and preparation and assessment deadlines 

Written feedback on essays; additional one-to-one feedback (during the consultation hour or by making an appointment)

Scott and Shade, Upon These Shores: Themes in the African American Experience  
Wright, Black Boy: American Hunger  
Hine, Hine and Harrold, African Americans: A Concise History  
Finkenbine, Sources of the African American Past: Primary Sources in American History  
Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877  
Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration  
Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow  
Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration  
Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America  
Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks  
Cook, Sweet Land of Liberty: The African-American Struggle for Civil Rights in the Twentieth Century  

Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves

Jamil W. Drake, To Know the Soul of a People: Religion, Race, and the Making of Southern Folk

Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al., eds., The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century

Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of American Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South

Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation

Vanessa Holden, Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community

Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew: A History of African-Americans

Kevin M. Kruse and Steph

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation en Tuck, eds., Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement

James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance