Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Historisches Institut
M.A. Seminar: Constructions of Race in U.S. History
Professor Dr. Martha Hodes, martha.hodes@nyu.edu
Summer Semester 2009/Tuesdays, 12 - 14/Room: Fürstengraben 13, Seminarraum
This course begins with the premise that ideas about race and categories of race are not
timeless or unchanging. Rather, such ideas have a history, and continue to change over time
and across geography. Alongside the fabricated nature of race, we will study the powerful
social, cultural, and political effects that race has exerted in United States history from the
colonial era to the present.
Reading: The reading packet is available at Die UniKate, Hinter der Kirche 2.
Students are not required to read footnotes, but may wish to skim them.
Presentations: Students should summarize, contextualize, assess, and reflect upon the
additional reading, speaking for 15 – 20 minutes.
14 April. Introduction
21 April. Race as a Social Construction
Reading:
Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and
Reconstruction, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (1982), pp. 143-52 only.
Ian F. Haney-Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” in Critical Race Theory: The
Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2000), pp. 163-72.
George M. Fredrickson, “Introduction,” in Racism: A Short History (2002), pp. 1-13.
Presentation topic: Science and race
Additional reading for presentation: Armand Marie Leroi, “A Family Tree in Every Gene”;
Alan Goodman, “Two Questions About Race”; Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Straw Men and
Their Followers: The Return of Biological Race”; and R. C. Lewontin, “Confusions About
Human Races,” all in “Is Race „Real‟?: A Web Forum Organized by the Social Science
Research Council” (2006). Available on-line at <http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org>
28 April. The History of Racism
Reading:
George M. Fredrickson, “The Rise of Modern Racism(s): White Supremacy and
Antisemitism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Racism: A Short History
(2002), pp. 51-95.
Presentation topic: Explaining racism
Additional reading for presentation: Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-making, and the
Writing of History,” American Historical Review 100 (Feb. 1995), pp. 1-20. Available on
JSTOR.
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5 May. Natives and Newcomers
Reading:
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Reading Indian Bodies,” in Indians and English: Facing Off in
Early America (2000), pp. 41-76; please read the captions under the many illustrations.
Nancy Shoemaker, “Race,” in A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in EighteenthCentury North America (2006), pp. 125-40.
Presentation topic: Visions of race in Europe
Additional reading for presentation: Nicholas Hudson, “From „Nation‟ to „Race‟: The Origin
of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29
(Spring 1996), pp. 247-64. Available on JSTOR.
12 May. African and African American Slavery
Reading:
Michael A. Gomez, “Talking Half African: Middle Passage, Seasoning, and Language,” in
Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial
and Antebellum South (1998), pp. 154-85.
Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination
in the 1850s,” Journal of American History 87 (June 2000), pp. 13-38.
Presentation topic: Slavery in global perspectives
Additional reading for presentation: David Brion Davis, “Looking at Slavery From Broader
Perspectives”; Peter Kolchin, “The Big Picture”; Rebecca J. Scott, “Small-Scale Dynamics”;
and Stanley L. Engerman, “Slavery at Different Times and Places,” American Historical
Review 105 (April 2000), pp. 452-84. Available on JSTOR.
19 May. The Problem of Whiteness
Reading:
David R. Roediger, “Irish American Workers and White Racial Formation in the Antebellum
United States,” in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (1991), pp. 133-56.
Thomas A. Guglielmo, “Encountering the Color Line in the Everyday: Italians in Interwar
Chicago,” Journal of American Ethnic History 23 (Summer 2004), pp. 45-69.
Presentation topic: International discussions of race
Additional reading for presentation: Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism, and Antiracism:
UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public,” American Historical
Review 112 (Dec. 2007), pp. 1386-1413. Available on-line or from the professor.
26 May. No class meeting.
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2 June. Law and Racial Classification
Reading:
Michael A. Elliott, “Telling the Difference: Nineteenth-Century Legal Narratives of Racial
Taxonomy,” Law and Social Inquiry 24 (Summer 1999), pp. 611-34.
Ian F. Haney Lopez, “The Prerequisite Cases,” in White By Law: The Legal Construction of
Race (1996), pp. 49-77.
Presentation topic: Citizenship and race
Additional reading for presentation: Ariela Gross, “„Of Portuguese Origin‟: Litigating
Identity and Citizenship among the „Little Races‟ in Nineteenth-Century America,” Law and
History Review 25 (Fall 2007), pp. 467-512. Available on-line or from the professor.
9 June. National Identity and Racial Classification
Reading:
Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Anglo-Saxons and Others,” in Whiteness of a Different Color:
European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), pp. 39-90.
Presentation topic: Eugenics and gender
Additional reading for presentation: Laura Briggs, “The Race of Hysteria: „Overcivilization‟
and the „Savage‟ Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology,” American
Quarterly 52 (June 2000), pp. 246-73. Available on JSTOR.
16 June. Crossing Borders
Reading:
Mae M. Ngai, “The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the Reconstruction of Race in
Immigration Law,” in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
(2004), pp. 21-55.
Clara E. Rodriguez, “Challenging Racial Hegemony: Puerto Ricans in the United States,” in
Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (1994), pp. 131-42.
Presentation topic: European influences on American racial thought
Additional reading for presentation: Axel R. Schäfer, “W. E. B. Du Bois, German Social
Thought, and the Racial Divide in American Progressivism, 1892-1909,” Journal of
American History 88 (Dec. 2001), pp. 925-49. Available on JSTOR.
23 June. Sexuality and Racial Classification
Reading:
Heide Fehrenbach, “Mischlingskinder and the Postwar Taxonomy of Race,” in Race After
Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (2005), pp. 74-106.
Henry Yu, “Mixing Bodies and Cultures: The Meaning of America‟s Fascination with Sex
between „Orientals‟ and „Whites,‟” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North
American History, ed. Martha Hodes (1999), pp. 444-59.
[week 11 continued on next page]
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Presentation topic: Sex and race in the courts
Additional reading for presentation: Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and
Ideologies of „Race‟ in Twentieth-Century America,” in Journal of American History 83
(June 1996), pp. 44-69. Available on JSTOR.
30 June. Defying Classification
Reading:
Langston Hughes, “Who‟s Passing for Who?” (1952), in The Collected Works of Langston
Hughes, vol. 15 (2002), pp. 163-66.
Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity,
ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (1996), pp. 234-69.
Carol Kalafatic, “Knots,” in As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity, ed.
William S. Penn (1997), pp. 67-81.
Presentation topic: The problem of segregation
Additional reading for presentation: Mark Golub, “Plessy as „Passing‟: Judicial Responses to
Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson,” Law and Society Review 39 (Sept. 2005),
pp. 563-600. Available on JSTOR.
7 July. Recent Inquiries
Reading:
Ian F. Haney-Lopez, “Race on the 2010 Census: Hispanics and the Shrinking White
Majority,” Daedalus 134 (Winter 2005), pp. 42-52.
Louise Cainkar, “The Social Construction of Difference and the Arab American Experience,”
Journal of American Ethnic History 25 (Winter/Spring 2006), pp. 243-78.
Presentation topic: Hurricane Katrina and questions of race
Additional reading for presentation: “Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue?”
Journal of American History 94 (Dec. 2007), pp. 693-876, but read only the articles by
Capanella, Scott, Germany, Hirsch, Leong et al., Long, Landphair, Fussell, and Powell.
Available on-line or from the professor.
14 July. Thinking Back and Looking Ahead
Reading:
Kenneth Prewitt, “Racial Classification in America: Where Do We Go From Here?,”
Daedalus 134 (Winter 2005), pp. 5-17.
Jennifer L. Hochschild, “Looking Ahead: Racial Trends in the United States,” Daedalus 134
(Winter 2005), pp. 70-81.
Nina G. Jablonski, “Color,” in Skin: A Natural History (2006), pp. 76-96.
No presentations this week.
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Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Historisches Institut
B.A. Lecture: American Civil War and Reconstruction
Professor Dr. Martha Hodes, martha.hodes@nyu.edu
Summer Semester 2009/Mondays 10 – 12/Room: Fürstengraben 1-HS 144
This course investigates the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction from the perspective of
social and cultural history, with attention as well to politics and economics. We will study the
central conflict between the Union and the Confederacy over slavery, alongside class
conflicts in the North; conflicts between masters and slaves in the South; and conflicts among
African Americans, white Northerners, and white Southerners after the war.
Note well: This is not a course in military history.
Readings: The reading packet is available at Die UniKate, Hinter der Kirche 2.
Students are not required to read footnotes, but may wish to skim them.
20 April. Significance and Context of the American Civil War
27 April. African American Slavery
Reading:
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (1853), pp. 145-58.
Harriet A. Jacobs, “The Trials of Girlhood” and “The Jealous Mistress,” in Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl (1858), pp. 44-57.
4 May. Ideologies: Anti-Slavery, Free-Labor, Pro-Slavery
Reading:
David Brion Davis, “What the Abolitionists Were Up Against,” in The Anti-Slavery Debate,
ed. Thomas Bender (1992), pp. 17-26.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, “Slavery: Proceeding from the Lord,” in
The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview
(2005), pp. 505-13.
11 May. Politics in the 1850s and the Meaning of the West
Reading:
Manisha Sinha, “The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the Age of
the Civil War,” Journal of the Early Republic 23 (2003), pp. 233-62.
18 May. Southern Secession, Northern Response
Reading:
Charles B. Dew, “The First Wave” and “The Alabamians,” in Apostles of Disunion: Southern
Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2001), pp. 22-36, 51-58.
During this class, students will receive a hand-out lecture, “Fighting the War.”
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25 May. Fighting the War
No class meeting.
Reading:
Hand-out lecture, “Fighting the War.”
James M. McPherson, “This War is a Crusade” and “The Cause of Liberty,” in For Cause
and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), pp. 3-13, 104-16.
1 June. University holiday
8 June. African American Soldiers and Emancipation
Reading:
Ira Berlin, “Freedom Generations,” in Generations of Captivity: A History of African
American Slaves (2003), pp. 246-70.
15 June. The Home Front
Reading:
Drew Gilpin Faust, “„The Dread Void of Uncertainty‟: Naming the Dead in the American
Civil War,” Southern Cultures 11 (2005), pp. 7-32.
22 June. Union Victory and Confederate Defeat
James M. McPherson, “No Peace Without Victory, 1861-1865,” American Historical Review
109 (2004), pp. 1-18.
29 June. Suffrage, Land, Labor, and Violence
Reading:
Eric Foner, “The Facts of Reconstruction,” in Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and
Reconstruction (2005), pp. 159-80.
6 July. Counter-Revolution and the Color Line
Reading:
Leon F. Litwack, “Hellhounds,” in Without Sanctuary, ed. James Allen et al. (2000), pp. 833.
13 July. Legacies and Memories of the Civil War
Reading:
David W. Blight, “„For Something Beyond the Battlefield‟: Frederick Douglass and the
Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” Journal of American History 75 (1989), pp.
1156-78, reprinted in Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War
(2002).
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