Course Description
History 300 explores the African American civil rights movement from the solidification of segregation at the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s. By stretching the movement’s history beyond its traditional boundaries, the course will emphasize the power of the American racial regime and the complexity of the movement that tried to topple it. We will be paying particular attention to the various strands of African-American political activism that ran through the movement, from the NAACP’s emphasis on equal rights before the law to the Nation of Islam’s call for racial separatism. We will also trace how the movement broke the nation’s racial regime – and how portions of the regime endured.

Course Description
You can think of telling stories in two ways. It’s an action: the telling of tales. It’s also a description: a story that in its details reveals something larger, that has something to say. In this course we’ll be exploring both those forms of telling stories. We’ll be drawing on a scholarly framework developed by anthropologists and adopted by historians. We won’t simply be reading other scholars’ work, though. We’ll be doing the work of history, digging deeply into one profoundly troubling story to see what it has to say.