HIST 211: Race in late 19th and 20th Century North America

This course is the second of a two-part, in-depth survey of how racism has functioned in North America from the colonial era to the present. This course focuses especially on the mid-late 19th Century and the 20th Century. It works to understand and distinguish between racial and cultural identity formation; ‘identity politics;’ white-black; slavery; abolition; ‘Manifest Destiny’ and settler-colonialism; racial segregation; xenophobia toward immigrants; the migration of minorities to cities; ethnic community formation and spatial segregation; Black, Asian, Hispanic, and anti-racism movements; and the anti-affirmative action backlash. It will employ a comparative perspective that requires students to consider how racial and ethnic concepts and ideas have evolved and changed over the long 20th century into the current century since the abolition of slavery in North America and how they have varied geographically in both Canada and the United States. In a moment of renewed racism and xenophobia as well as profound changes in both European and North American political systems, efforts to better understand these issues in historic terms should prove salient.