about
This seminar focuses on how cultures in the United States have embraced specific sets of ideas, and how those ideas have changed over time. The cultures explored in this course include national cultures, regional cultures, and class, ethnic, and gender cultures. The first book surveys the intellectual community of the North during the American Civil War. The last two books examine the highly politicized cultures of a county and city in Southern California.
Cultures—the collective ways that people ascribe meaning to their lives—constantly change. The events associated with war and peace force people to publicly assess and reassess their realities: to show how new things conform to old ways, or to change their minds and embrace hitherto foreign ideas and assumptions. Wars, riots, migrations, economic depressions, opportunities, career necessities, and controversies all compel people to reify or revise their beliefs about nationhood, culture, race, gender, religion—whatever concepts they hold central to their personal and mass reality.
This course defines history as the study of how human communities change over time, and cultural history as the study of how the ideas of human communities change over time. The task for the historian then, is to identify the causes of those changes. Power and Culture will examine how historians have handled this challenge.
Power and Culture will hold a seminar once a week, on Wednesdays, 2:00PM - 5:00PM, at Soc Sci 1 145