Undergraduate Fields of Specialization: United States

Although the United States was not created until the late eighteenth century, this field of specialization takes as its purview the long history of areas currently constituting the U. S.  Beginning with studies of Indigenous peoples before European conquest and concluding with today’s headlines, specialists in U. S. history will explore processes that have shaped and reshaped a country founded on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and racial slavery as well as claims that all men were created equal and that governments gained their legitimacy only from the consent of the governed.  In each era, students analyze how contending social, political, economic, and cultural forces expanded or circumscribed the lives of a broad range of peoples within the borders of the (eventually to be) United States and how those diverse peoples shaped U. S. policies, institutions, and culture.  They investigate the constantly shifting place of the United States in networks of global interaction and exchange.  Labor and economics, public policy and social movements, war, African American history and race relations, gender and sexuality, cultural production and circulation, migration and immigration all constitute central focal points of courses in U.S. history.