HIST 321(F) Gender and Community in Early America*

This course is a study of the lives of men and women in the territory that became the United States, from the early-seventeenth century to the Civil War. Experiences of kinship, work, religion, and sexuality will be studied in the context of culturally and geographically varied communities, which constructed different codes of behavior and followed different paths through the complexities of economic and political modernization. Among the topics investigated will be gender systems among the Native Americans east of the Mississippi and the consequences of European incursions; the difference that evangelical religion made among communities of British-Americans; the complex construction of community life and gender systems among African-Americans; the evolution of ideologies of masculinity when brainwork replaced physical labor as the norm for the middling classes; the critique of a developing consensus about gender that was offered by utopian reform groups; and westward migration of Euro-Americans and the Civil War as episodes in the history of gender. This course involves extensive reading and discussion of primary and secondary sources.
Evaluation will be based on a short interpretive essay, a midterm exam and, then, either a research paper or a final exam.
Groups A and D

Hour: TRACY