A seminar course designed to involve Ethnic Studies students directly in the research process. Emphasis on examination and analysis of primary sources, methodology, and the development of theoretical constructs. A major research paper is required.

This course explores the intersection between race and the history of U.S. foreign relations. It operates from the double premise that 1) the nation’s rapid evolution from 13 former colonies to “superpowerdom” by 1945 would not have been possible absent the conquest, colonization, and/or exploitation of racialized populations and that 2) one of the best ways to understand the position of Native American, African American, Asian diaspora, and Latinx populations in the United States today is understand their entanglement with this longer history of empire. Students in this course will learn about the histories (including recent events) of these racialized groups through the long trajectory of American foreign relations from westward expansion, the acquisition of overseas possessions, and the search for markets to twentieth-century decolonization, the attempt to secure strategic resources in the Mideast and elsewhere, and on-going immigration debates. Two texts for background reading are Walter LaFeber’s The American Age and Michael Krenn’s The Color of Empire. The first 12 weeks will be spent reading additional monographs that address such population-specific topics as continental colonialism, cold war civil rights, Asian exclusion laws, 1960s solidarity movements, and Islamophobia, among others. Ideally, several of these monographs will prove useful to help you prepare for exams. The latter portion of the course will be spent developing and writing individual research papers (between 18 and 20 pages) that addresses in detail some topic that falls at the crossroads of race and U.S. empire. Drafts, in various stages depending on the week, will be shared with other students enrolled in the class.

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