HSY2985

Race and Rights: Black and White in America 1870-2000 (6 points)

(ARTS)

Leader: Mark Peel

Offered:
Not offered in 2003.

Synopsis: This unit examines the history of racial identities and the contest over civil and social rights in the United States between 1870 and 2000. It focuses on the continuing re-creation of America as a nation of discrete races, with a particular emphasis on: post-Civil war reconstruction, the 'Jim Crow' South and legal segregation; the invention of whiteness in the South and the North; lynching and the anti-lynching campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s; the Southern civil rights movement; the 1960s ghetto and radical black protest; the discovery of the black 'underclass'; the meaning of white and black in the context of other ethnicities and other issues.

Assessment: Source criticism exercise (500 words): 10% + Class test (1 hour): 20% + Collaborative project report (500 words): 20% + Research essay (2500 words): 50%