This course examines how U.S. cultures are constructed, reinforced, and changed--particularly in reference to place and material culture. Qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis drawn from several disciplines will help students develop skills in cultural interpretation. Case studies may focus on a neighborhood, a city, or a region. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, UC Berkeley was more than just California’s flagship public university. It became a potent and often powerful cultural symbol. To invoke Berkeley or Cal became shorthand for academic excellence, or transformative student activism, or radical politics, or the devastating power of nuclear war. But when the university was founded over one hundred and fifty years ago, it was, simply, the University of California: California’s first land grant university, tasked with the responsibility of educating the people of the country’s then-westernmost state. Yet from its inception, the University of California’s purpose was fraught, contested, and contingent. The founding Organic Act proclaimed that the state would build this new university on “donat[ed] land” that was granted “to the State of California under and by the provisions of an Act of Congress”—yet this land was composed of over 2,300 uncompensated Indigenous land parcels. What—and whom—was the University of California actually for? This small, experiential-learning-focused course will combine lectures, readings, campus field trips, and extensive hands-on work with documents from university archives and library collections as we examine UC Berkeley’s first fifty years—from its founding in 1868 through the establishment of the system’s second campus, a southern branch in Los Angeles, in 1919. In this class, Berkeley students will become Berkeley scholars as we engage in a critical examination of early Berkeley as a place, and consider both the formation of the institution’s cultural meaning and how it has changed over time. By combining history, geography, material culture, and popular media, our interdisciplinary study of early Berkeley will consider what the early history of this campus can teach us about politics, public education, race, gender, class, colonialism, identity, and power in the United States. This course fulfills the American Cultures requirement. For American Studies majors, it also fulfills both the Place requirement and the Pre-1900 U.S. requirement.

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Requirements class fulfills