Explores race, class, and gender in American history and culture. Secondary source material by scholars of American Studies and primary source materials in a variety of genres, including music, poetry, art, and material culture, convey the ways in which American culture has been shaped by and has helped to shape ideas of race, class, and gender.

Energy policy is typically evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary. We can look to historical policies to understand how we've inherited the policies governing our energy use today. But looking backward only tells us part of the story. In the face of climate change, we need to look ahead and instead envision a more revolutionary change to our energy systems and the policies that govern them. This class takes you on that journey to energy policies past, present, and future. We look at the political realities of addressing climate change at various scales of governance and work together to craft our own ideal scenarios of what a responsible energy future will be.

This CUNY Student Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is intended to provide a free-to-use, reliable text for students and instructors. It is published under a Creative Commons license which allows almost unlimited free-use. The text is based on the first American edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885. CUNY student editions are created and maintained by a community of student-scholars. Join them on GitHub: https://github.com/CUNY-Student-Editions

African American History to Emancipation explores the history, memory, and representation of enslavement and abolition in the United States. The key questions we are posing are: how do we recover the unrecoverable and how do we remember the “unrememberable?” We will consider the history of enslavement in the Atlantic World, its legacies in the United States, the gaps in our knowledge, the global trauma of Atlantic World Slavery, and contemporary and contemporaneous representations. Key themes include: the formation of the Atlantic World, enslavement, the transatlantic slave trade, slavery in the United States, the formation of African American cultures, the emergence of race and racism, resistance and rebellion, abolition, emancipation and the meaning of freedom.

This class is Introduction to Black roots from ancient Africa to contemporary America as an orientation to the nature of Black Studies emphasizing its relationships to world history, Europe, Asia, the Americas, slavery, Reconstruction, colonization, racism, and their politico-economic and cultural impact upon African descendants worldwide. In this course we will learn to do close readings of texts to draw evidence from them and use that evidence to produce well developed, historically situated arguments using evidence to support conclusions. Students will evaluate evidence and arguments critically and analytically to build their critical thinking skills.
Finally, students will gather, interpret, and assess information from a variety of sources and points of view.

This art history video discussion examines Washington Allston's "Elijah in the Desert", 1818, oil on canvas, 125.09 x 184.78 cm / 49 1/4 x 72 3/4 inches (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

This course focuses on the Great Depression and World War II and how they led to a major reordering of American politics and society. We will examine how ordinary people experienced these crises and how those experiences changed their outlook on politics and the world around them.

This class examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the ‰ŰĎgood life‰Ű through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. We will explore how such things as department stores, nationally advertised brand-name goods, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics. The course is organized both thematically and chronologically. Each period deals with a new development in the history of consumer culture. Throughout we explore both celebrations and critiques of mass consumption and abundance.

This course provides a basic history of American social, economic, and political development from the colonial period through the Civil War. It examines the colonial heritages of Spanish and British America; the American Revolution and its impact; the establishment and growth of the new nation; and the Civil War, its background, character, and impact. Readings include writings of the period by J. Winthrop, T. Paine, T. Jefferson, J. Madison, W. H. Garrison, G. Fitzhugh, H. B. Stowe, and A. Lincoln.

This course is an introduction to American Studies through the questions of identity. How are our identities formed and how do they function? What does it mean to be “American,” who claims this identity, and on what terms? How do American identities shape—and how are they shaped by—factors such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, language, nation, and sexuality?

This semester, we will examine diverse American identities, with an emphasis on the social and cultural forces that mold them. We will explore the structural differences that divide individuals and groups, and ways that people challenge or transcend these divisions. This interdisciplinary course integrates materials from literary studies, history, ethnic and gender studies, and sociology. We will read some academic theories about identity, but will more often read what a wide range of Americans have written about their own individual and collective identities.

The aim is to help you better understand your own and other people’s identities, the languages and conventions that writers use to analyze identities, and how varied perspectives on identity in the United States and the Americas speak to—and at times against—one another. Rather than settle on a final definition of either “America” or “identity,” we will explore both as products of on-going dialogue, debate, and change.

This collection of stories was written by Dakota Sioux author Zitkala-Sa, also known as Gertrude Bonnin. Helen Keller sent a testimonial letter to the author on August 25, 1919: "I thank you for your book on Indian legends. I have read them with exquisite pleasure. Like all folk tales they mirror the child life of the world. There is in them a note of wild, strange music." The text here presented was published in 1921 by Hayworth Publishing in Washington, D.C.

This resource collocates open resources in American History to 1877, and organizes them by theme for all faculty teaching this course. It also provides students with links to books, essays, newspaper and journal databases offered at CUNY. Supplementing this material are images, audio and videos related to the period.
The guide is available at http://libguides.brooklyn.cuny.edu/americanpluralism/
The XML file is available for download above.

English and American backgrounds of the Revolution; issues and arguments in the Anglo-American conflict; colonial resistance and the beginnings of republicanism; the Revolutionary War; constitution writing for the states and nation; and effects of the American Revolution. Concerned primarily with the revolutionary origins of American government. Readings emphasize documents from the period -- pamphlets, correspondence, the minutes or resolutions of resistance organizations, constitutional documents and debates.

This is a seminar course that explores the history of selected features of the physical environment of urban America. Among the features considered are parks, cemeteries, tenements, suburbs, zoos, skyscrapers, department stores, supermarkets, and amusement parks. The course gives students experience in working with primary documentation sources through its selection of readings and class discussions. Students then have the opportunity to apply this experience by researching their own historical questions and writing a term paper.

This course is a seminar on the history of institutions and institutional change in American cities from roughly 1850 to the present. Among the institutions to be looked at are political machines, police departments, courts, schools, prisons, public authorities, and universities. The focus of the course is on readings and discussions.

This is the syllabus for an open educational resource for a United States History Course, with a link to its primary source documents.

This art history video discussion examines George Bellows' "Pennsylvania Station Excavation", oil on canvas, c. 1907-08 (Brooklyn Museum).

This art history video discussion examines John Singleton Copley's "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel" (Henry Pelham), 1765, 77.15 x 63.82 cm / 30-3/8 x 25-1/8 inches (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

A study of what "culture" is; how we see it based on several factors, how it influences the choices and decision we make; how to deal positively with conflicts that inevitably arise in working /living situations with people of diverse cultures. This is a course structured to raise multicultural awareness and fortify students' social skills in dealing with cultural differences. It includes ethnographic study of cultural groups in the U.S.A and responses to shared values, observations or experiences based on student's ancestry, heritage, travels. Students will learn about culture "do and donts" around the world and provide the class with their own culture shock experience and how they overcame them. Through the study of cultural concepts, this course develops skills in critical thinking, writing and scholarly documentation. This is an OER course.