Unit name | Strangers in the Land: Making America and Becoming American (Level I Lecture Response) |
---|---|
Unit code | HIST25006 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | I/5 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Dr. Julio Decker |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of History (Historical Studies) |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
A 'nation of immigrants': dissecting this familiar cliché, this unit examines changing patterns of migration and its underlying motives in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. We will analyse the immigrant and how native-born Americans’ response to immigration varied according to time, place and the immigrants’ race, class, and gender. The unit thus covers intellectual, legislative, and cultural history to develop an understanding of American self-conceptions and views of migration as well as the immigrants’ experience of “Americanization” and strategies of retaining and reinventing their cultural identities.
Aims:
To enable students to form individual views and to develop a critical interpretation of the scholarship in the field
1 x 3000 word essay (50%) and 1 x 2 hour exam (50%)
King, Desmond. Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Ngai, Mae M.; Gjerde, Jon (Eds.) (2013): Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History. Documents and Essays. 2nd ed. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning (Major Problems in American History Series)
Ngai, Mae M. “Immigration and Ethnic History.” In American History Now. Edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, 358–75. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.
Roediger, David R. Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White; the Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Tichenor, Daniel J. (2002): Dividing Lines. The Politics of Immigration Control in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press (Princeton Studies in American Politics)
Ueda, Reed, ed. A Companion to American Immigration. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.