African American History, 1444-1877
AFAM 203
Fall 2010 not offered
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| Crosslisting:
HIST 241 |
The period between 1454 and 1877 of African American history is dominated by the context of slavery in the Americas. The overall goal of the class is to more comprehensively and efficiently interpret the predominant historical phenomenon of African slavery in the Americas. We will utilize five principle methodologies to interpret the African American experience in North America and the United States: political-economy, anthropology, sociology, history, and epistemological archaeology.
The political-economy section will address the geography, institutions, and simultaneous processes that contributed to the trans-Atlantic slave trade (technical innovation and a secular revolution in Europe, the growth and development of the Atlantic plantation complex, slavery in Africa) that then provided the conditions of possibilities for an early African American experience. This section will also address major sources of scholarly debate such as the profitability of slavery, newer sources of scholarly inquiry such as the institution's contribution to the American system of law, and determining the extent to which the legal abolition of slavery was based on moral or economic motivations.
The anthropological and sociological section will personalize, individualize, and compare the experience of blackness during New World and capitalist slavery in the modernizing Americas. This section will employ some of the fundamental conditions by which sociologists and anthropologists have used to define what constituted slavery--extraneousness, social death, and sterility--and first apply it to the African experience in the Americas between 1454 and 1877, and then seek points of comparison across the globe and throughout history. These sections will address the relative severity of the institution of slavery--as measured by slave law--and the psycho-social effects of the institution on the ruling groups--drivers, planters, white southern society, and the United States.
The epistemological archeology section will expand discussion of the collective perceptions of the African American experience and the character and destiny of the slave laborer to determine its contributions to grander theories of civilization (romantic racial nationalism) and the template of conscious experience in the Americas. The historical section will summarize change and continuity in the African American experience from the expansion of Europe, through the making, expansion, perfection, and fall of the institution of slavery in the United States (and beyond). We will arrive at the reality of the first generation after emancipation. |
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Essential Capabilities:
None |
| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS AFAM |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (AFAM-MN)(AFAM)(AFST-MN)(AMST) |
Major Readings:
David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Joseph F. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on the Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992).
Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death of the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1991)
Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution 2nd Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Wilma A. Dunaway, The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Demetrius L. Eudell, The Political Languages of Emancipation i! n the British Caribbean and U.S. South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Mark M. Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Additional Readings:
D.W Meinig, ¿Enslavement and Change: Africans in America,¿ 226-231 in The Shaping of America, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
Franklin Knight and Peggy Liss, Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, Society in the Atlantic World (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). [excerpts]
John Thornton, ¿Slavery and African Social Structure,¿ in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Elizabeth Fox Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). EXCERPTS.
Robin Blackburn, ¿Slavery and! the American Revolution¿ and ¿Abolition and Empire: The United States ,¿ The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London and New York: Verso, 1988).
Don E. Fehrenbacher and Ward M. MacAfee, The Slaveholding Republic, 3-14 and 231-252.
Jack P. Greene and David William Cohen, ¿Introduction,¿ 1-18, Neither Slave Nor Free: the Freedmen of African Descent in Slave Societies of the New World, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
Peter Kolchin, ¿The Origin and Consolidation of Unfree Labor,¿ 1-48 in Unfree Labor and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
James C. Scott, ¿Normal Expectations, Normal Resistance,¿ from Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
John Majewski, ¿Imagining a Confederate Economy,¿ from Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Charles F. Irons, ¿Introduction: The Chief Cornerstone,¿ from The! Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854: Northern Democrats and the Sectional Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Tyler G. Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
David Brion Davis, ¿Slavery and the Meaning of America,¿ The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
David Brion Davis, ¿The Boundaries of Idealism,¿ The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1975]).
Leslie M. Harris, ¿Slavery in Colonial New York,¿ In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Anthony S. Pare
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Examinations and Assignments:
Responses/Quizzes: 20%
There are ten assignments that prompt student responses to the general class activity. There will also be two in-class quizzes in response to the reading and course material. Finally, students are required to write a 1000¿word review of two of the required course books.
Midterm: 25%
The midterm will cover the material related to the slaving process.
Writing Assignment: 20%
The writing assignment is a 12-15 page paper that responds to a major historical problem.
Final Exam: 30%
The final exam comprehensively covers the course material.
Participation: 5%
This portion of the grade covers class attendance and student responsiveness to the course material. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Students are expected to attend two weekly lectures, to read documents/chapters, and to regularly participate in class discussions. |
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