We will trace this history with a focus on four central themes: (1) U.S. domestic and foreign policy and the fear of annihilation, from the Cold War, the specter of nuclear warfare, and the War in Vietnam to the War on Terror and climate change; (2) the growth and convergence of movements for social justice, including African American, Latinx, Asian American, indigenous, feminist, and LGBTQ+ rights and liberation; (3) the rise of the New Right, neoliberalism, the reshaping of party politics, and their impact on social welfare, healthcare, and the environment; and (4) the politics of popular culture, especially television, music, and digital media. Across these themes, we will consider where government leaders and popular culture have worked to reinforce social norms and sharpen political divides and how social movements have reshaped American politics and society.

We will investigate the ways scholarly, curatorial, archival, and creative practices shape conceptions of the American past, in particular understandings of racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression and resistance.

Students will build skills in historical interpretation and archival research and explore possibilities and challenges in preserving and presenting the past in a variety of public contexts—monuments, memorials, museums, historical sites, movies and television, and community-based history projects.

For their final project, students will conduct original research in a digital or material archive, chosen in consultation with the instructor, to produce a draft of an exhibit, providing popularly accessible historical context and interpretation.

We will consider, in particular, the shifting meanings of sexual and gender variance and LGBTQ+ identities; changing forms of romantic and sexual relationships; the emergence and policing of LGBTQ+ communities, as shaped by class and race; the history of LGBTQ+ activism and its intersections with broader movements for social and economic justice; and the relationship between LGBTQ+ people and the state.

Students will learn to read and analyze a range of historical scholarship, as well as primary texts in the history of gender and sexuality including memoirs and letters, periodicals, photographs, and political manifestos.

(1) How have understandings of mental illness been developed and deployed by psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and social workers, and how have those understandings varied across time and place? (2) How have understandings and treatments of mental illness shaped, and been shaped by, conceptions of race, class, gender, and sexuality? (3) In what ways have treatment of mental illness and “social deviance” operated as a form of social control? (4) How do conceptions of mental illness come to circulate in popular culture and everyday life?

Pairing primary and secondary sources, the course moves chronologically in order to track, and draw connections between, a wide range of movements within American psychological and social welfare history, including the creation of asylums, the emergence of homosexuality as a clinical category, the pathologization of racial and gender difference, social welfare movements, the Americanization of psychoanalysis, social psychiatry, psychopharmacology, and the politics of diagnosis.

We will consider how U.S. culture and politics shifted with the “Reagan Revolution” and the end of the Cold War, and their connections to and ramifications for social activism, social welfare, media, foreign policy, and everyday life. At the same time, we will consider the methodological opportunities and challenges in researching, writing, reading, and presenting recent history.

Students will complete a research paper, and work together to design and launch a digital exhibition on the 1980s. We will also explore how 1980s culture and politics was shaped by nostalgia for the 1950s, and how the 1980s and remembered and misremembered today. Topics include the rise of neoliberalism, privatization of civil and social services, the emergence of digital technologies, activism in response to HIV/AIDS, transnational feminisms, the consolidation of the Christian right, and the “Culture Wars.”

In this course we will examine how we have come to narrate LGBTQ history in the United States, investigating the ways archival, scholarly, curatorial, and creative practices shape conceptions of LGBTQ life, politics, and culture.

Students will build skills in archival research and historical interpretation, and explore possibilities and challenges in building archives and presenting LGBTQ history in a variety of public contexts—museums, libraries, movies and television, and community-based history projects. For their final project, students will locate and research a selection of archival objects (periodicals, letters, pamphlets, songs, advertisements, etc.) at local or online archives to produce a digital exhibit, providing popularly accessible historical context and interpretation.

Students will critically analyze a range of modes of public humanities practice, including monuments and memorials, museums and archives, historic preservation, oral history, public art, film and performance, and digital humanities, to consider the histories of those forms and their political, social, and affective meanings. Over the course of the semester, students will develop and workshop public humanities projects based on their scholarship, independently or in potential collaboration with the Johnson Museum of Art, Rare and Manuscript Collections, the Kheel Center, The History Center, and other university departments and community organizations.