Academic Salon
HST 110: United States History Since 1865
This course examines the growth of the American Republic from the Civil War to the present. The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the social, economic, and political circumstances and forces that have shaped America and its people. This course will underscore the transformation and traditions of Americans and emphasize the diverse cultures and concepts that have driven this nation’s unprecedented growth and its promise of freedom and democracy. We begin with the emancipation and reconstruction eras, and move to a sustained consideration of Westward expansion, immigration, business, labor, Progressivism, World War I, the Great Depression, the New Deal era, World War II, the emergence of the Cold War, the happy “daze” of the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, America’s shift to the right, the rise of the global economy, and the emergence of individual and collective leaders throughout the twentieth century. Key issues include the changing status of the nation’s racial and ethnic minorities and women, the relationship between power and exploitation, and the emergence of corporate capitalism as a powerful force in American society and throughout the world.
United States History Since 1865
HST 204: The Vietnam Experience
This Learning Community (LC) provides students with a thoroughly integrated learning experience that incorporates four academic courses that are usually taught separately. While there are different class listings for each of the four components English (ENG 102 or ENG 294), Religious Studies (REL 201), History (HST 204), and Political Science (POS 294), students in this LC will examine the Vietnam Era in a highly interdisciplinary fashion. The Vietnam Experience will investigate theories of international relations, the rise of Communism and Anti-Communism, theories of nonviolent social change that underlie the Civil Rights Movement and subsequent anti-war movement, and ethical and religious issues involved in violent and nonviolent struggles of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. While some time will be devoted to the traditional lecture format, a substantial portion of the LC involves small group seminar discussions, blackboard journals, films, documentaries, guest lectures, and student study groups. It is important to keep in mind that this is a twelve (12)-credit course. Students will be receiving three (3) credits in each of the four courses mentioned above.
HST 300: Urban Rebellion
The many urban rebellions that rocked U.S. cities and forced Americans to confront inequity and injustice embedded in our nation can be looked upon as causative components of myriad dynamic and influential movements. These movements include the black freedom struggle, the Chicano and American Indian Movements, protests against U.S. military action in Vietnam, the Feminists Movement, contemporary conflicts ignited by racial tensions and allegations of police brutality, and more clandestine acts of individual and collective resistance. This course will examine that which has inspired, and continues to inspire, the cultural and tactical responses to various forms of marginalization, exploitation, and discrimination in twentieth century America on the one hand, and systemic and societal constructs that create and perpetuate racial, economic, gender, and political disunity and inequality in urban America on the other. By analyzing this history, and referencing core “American” values, such as freedom, the desire for self-determination, and resistance to oppression, this course ultimately seeks to help students develop a more holistic intellectual base from which to evaluate the importance and limitations of urban rebellion as a device to secure and maintain justice and freedom.
HST 306/AAAS 394: The Civil Rights Movement
This course examines the African American struggle for civil and human rights in America from the end of World War II (1945), to the present. Although this course will focus primarily on the Black freedom struggle in the United States, it will also connect this struggle for justice and equality to similar movements that were influenced by America’s Black freedom struggle (i.e. the Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement, the Feminist Movement, and Anti-colonial movements in Africa, etc.). In doing so, this course will closely examine the transformation and transitions of African Americans and emphasizes their creation of a unique culture of struggle and resistance as they sought to give meaning to freedom. Students will analyze the Civil Rights Movement by exploring the agency and self-determination of African Americans, and their sustained and creative challenges to the nation’s “separate-but-equal’ doctrine, “Jim Crow,” disfranchisement, political marginalization, and economic exploitation.
HST 333/AAAS 363: African American History to 1865
This course examines African American history since the arrival of the first Africans in the “New World,” throughout the era of African American emancipation and enfranchisement. It will focus on the transformation and transitions of African Americans and emphasizes their creation of a unique culture of struggle and resistance, as they fought to give meaning to the freedoms that were pronounced in America’s Declaration of Independence, and embedded in its Constitution. Key issues will include the emergence of African slavery as a powerful and “peculiar” institution in American history, creolization and the acculturation process, miscegenation, black culture and community building, the changing status of African American women, abolitionism, the emergence of black leadership, black protest movements, ideologies such as and Black Nationalism, and the emergence of race and racism as a powerful forces in American society.
African American History to 1865
HST 334/AAAS 364: African American History Since 1865
This course examines the transformation and transitions of African Americans and emphasizes their creation of a unique culture of struggle and resistance as they sought to give meaning to freedom since 1865. We begin with the emancipation and reconstruction experiences of African Americans, and move to a sustained consideration of migration processes and the emergence of individual and collective black leaders throughout the twentieth century. Key issues include the changing status of African American women, the emergence of black men and women in the professions, the dynamic dimensions of black popular culture, black protest movements and diverse black ideologies such as Afrocentricity and Black Nationalism, an assessment of the current “urban crisis,” and the emergence of the Hip Hop nation as a powerful force in the U.S. and throughout the world.
African American History Since 1865
HST 498: Sports, Inequality and the “American Dream”
“Playing for Keep…Sports, Inequality and the American Dream,” will examine the social, cultural, political, and legal influence of professional and amateur sports in modern North American history. The seminar will discuss American sports as positive outlets for athleticism, creativity and competition, and constructive channels that sometimes lead to upward mobility, fame, and power. The course will also examine the full scope of issues pertaining to discrimination and inequality in sports, specifically the history and life of bias, racism, sexism, and homophobia in American athletics. This seminar will analyze the emergence of intercollegiate sports, and the unprecedented growth, power and omnipresence of professional sports. It will also examine major sports figures such as Jack Johnson, Babe Ruth, Ellen “The Babe” Didrickson Zaharious, Arthur Ashe, Muhammad Ali, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Billie Jean King, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods. Course topics will also include racial inequalities on the playing fields and in the front offices of amateur and professional sports; the impact of NCAA eligibility criteria; the history and life of Title IX; gender segregation and exclusion in professional sports; the impact and persistence of segregated private sports clubs; the relationship between sports and sexual violence; covert and overt homophobia and sexual orientation discrimination in sports; and sports opportunities for people with disabilities.
Playing for Keeps Sports Inequality and the American Dream
HST 598: Priviledge, Power, and Protest in 20th and 21st Century North America.
In the past decade or so, a new generation of intellectuals, activists, law makers and everyday people, dramatically transformed the ways in which the history and exigencies of economics, law, culture, race, gender and “power” in 20th century America are understood and discussed. This seminar will examine this change over time, and its relevance for historians of the 21st century. It will also probe into the ways that public policy, education, housing, asset accumulation, political power, social status, work and professional opportunities, and the power to shape and narrate one’s own history, have been greatly influenced by the history and life of white supremacy, ethnocentrism, economic inequity, and various resistance movements which endeavored to bring parity and justice to America and its people. By questioning the old assumptions of both “liberals” and “conservatives” with respect to race, class, gender and social mobility, this seminar will also investigate the factors that have restricted the political and cultural agency of people of color and women. The ongoing pursuit of freedom and equality underlies, if not justifies, the need to assess the limitations and consequences of American “progress,” and the possibilities for positive change that various American liberation movements have manifested. This seminar will ultimately challenge the capacity of students to develop sound, imaginative, and well-grounded analyses of domination and resistance in modern American history, and the manner in which individuals and movements during this period engaged these competing, yet interdependent forces.
Privilege, Power and Protest in 20th and 21st Century North America
HST 598: Race, Ethnicity and Nation
This course will provide a conceptual foundation that seeks to explore or challenge Eurocentric, essentialist, “conservative,” and “liberal” orthodoxies of race and ethnicity in North America. It is based upon the premise (reality) that race and ethnicity lies at the very nexus of American history and life, and that students of history should ask several fundamental questions including but not limited to: 1) What are nation, race, and ethnicity?; 2) What historical processes have contributed to the formation and maintenance of national, racial and ethnic hierarchies in North America?; 3) How have revisionist interpretations of history, critiques of liberalism and conservatism, material determinism, structural determinism, biological determinism, postmodernism, decolonization studies, and popular culture influenced our understandings of race, ethnicity and nation, and the ways we continue to negotiate them in society?; 4) How can we better understand the exigencies and intersectionality of race, ethnicity and nation, especially through the use of inclusive modes of information gathering and analysis (such as language, storytelling, counter-storytelling, personal narratives, material culture, informal communication, public monuments, celebrations, and commemorations)?
The legacies of invasion, conquest, slavery, colonization, immigration, and creolization are inseparable from issues of race, ethnicity and nation, and they contribute to the structural foundation supporting the current hegemonic order permeating all of society. This course, therefore, is based on the supposition that the study and analysis of race, ethnicity and nation is not mere ornamentation in the production of North American history, it is instead essential to the achievement of scholarly excellence.
Graduate Fields Offered by Professor Whitaker
AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY, CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, THE AFRICAN DIASPORA, AND URBAN HISTORY
Areas of Teaching and Research Interests
The areas described here reflect my broadly defined research and teaching interests in the field of history. I am prepared to work with students admitted into the Department of History Graduate Program and the School of Justice and Social Inquiry, who share these interests. These areas, however, are not exclusive. With many specialists within the Department of History and the School of Justice and Social Inquiry in allied fields, including African and African American, Asian American, Indigenous, Chicano/Chicana, early America, 19th Century, 20th Century, U.S. West, gender, urban, and social and cultural history, there are numerous opportunities for graduate students to craft research agendas that connect centuries, continents, regions, peoples and ideas to my primary interests in African American history, civil and human rights, social movements, comparative Black history and urban history.
The precise content of the fields of African American history, civil and human rights, social movements, comparative Black history and urban history, including the required courses, and the coursework completed under my supervision, will be determined in consultation with individual graduate students and their committee members. Below you will find a short list of the names of other Arizona State University scholars and their areas of related specialization that directly compliment my interests.
Related Faculty and Fields:
- Brooks D. Simpson (Civil War/Reconstruction, Political, Presidential)
- Catherine Kaplan (Early American, Intellectual, Women and Gender)
- Chouki El Hamel (Africa, African Diaspora)
- Jewell Park Rhodes (African America Literature, Creative Writing)
- Karen Leong (Asian American Studies, Women and Gender, U.S. History)
- Myla Vicente Carpio (American Indian Studies)
- Neal Lester (African American literature, Children’s Literature)
- Keith Miller (African American Oratory, Martin Luther Ling, Jr.)
- Paul Hirt (20th Century, American West, Environmental)
- Pat Lauderdale (World Systems, Global Inequity, Social Movements)
- Thomas J. Davis (African American, Constitutional, Legal History)
- Wendy Plotkin (20th Century, American, Urban)
Research and Writing Aids:
- For Arizona State University’s Student Code of Conduct, and its policy on academic integrity, contact Student Judicial Affairs in the Office of Student Life at (480) 965-6547, or refer to the TA/RA Handbook