DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
Second Summer Session 2008
HIST-A 379
Blacks and the City:
The African American Urban Experience
WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORD “URBAN” WHAT COMES TO MIND?
Since the mid-20th century, this term has increasingly become identified with the culture of this country’s citizens of African descent...
And with good reason: In the year 2000, almost 90 percent of African Americans lived in metropolitan areas!
The purpose of this course is to help students gain an understanding of the historical situations that informed the African American experience in urban centers. This course will prepare students to engage in broad discussions about Black urbanity in the colonial period and into the 18th and 19th centuries when most African-Americans were in bondage. We will delve into the 20th and 21st centuries by looking at the Black experience in terms of labor and the migratory experience, cultural production, and class formations. We will study the changing meanings and implications of race, the impact of slavery and emancipation, and the effects of conflict and community building on Americans who happen to be both Black and urban. Additionally, we will investigate the role of gender in the evolution of the African American family; surmise how interaction with Native Americans, native and ethnic Whites, Asians and Asian Americans, and Latinos/Latinas have impacted the experiences of African Americans; and make meaning in how leisure and entertainment, worship and activism, and health and institution-building have all been negotiated by African Americans in their quest to make lives for themselves in cities, all in order to answer one overarching question: What does it teach us about American history and culture? The above will be achieved will by looking at Black urban life in the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West and drawing upon primary source material and both historical and sociological scholarship.
Finally, this course is designed to help students learn how to make inferences and interpret texts to create their own meaning, analyze and structure arguments, view issues and situations from varying and diverse perspectives, and to familiarize them with the historical profession and different historical methodologies.
The required books—Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration & Trotter, Lewis and Hunter’s, The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present—will be available for purchase at the Indiana Memorial Union bookstore. Other required readings are available on-line at the course website, on E-Reserve, or contained in Internet links.
There will be two take-home writing assignments and two in-class exams.
A379 (sect. 5225) Blacks and the City: the African American Urban Experience (3 credits)
S. Carter-David
Meets 11:10-12:20 MTWR in BH 236
