DISSENT AND PROTEST: US SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

This course surveys the long history of social movements and protest in the U.S.. Beginning with 19th Century movements against slavery, the course charts the way everyday Americans came together to make demands on the state, the economy, and American culture. From abolitionism, students move onto close study of the history of American feminism, Civil Rights, agrarian revolt, the labor movement, antiwar politics, gay liberation, Chicano rights, and grassroots conservatism with an eye toward commonalities and divergences in protest strategy and a close attention to the historical contexts in which various movements arose and their long-term effects on American society. Throughout the course we will pay special attention to how various movements and organizations conceived of what victory would look like and the extent to which they built or failed to build sequential strategy around both how to win and what to win; that is our subject is both the history of these movements but also a critical stance toward successes and missed opportunities in achieving demands and goals. The unit will utilize the insights of the disciplines of history, sociology, political science, anthropology, communication studies, and philosophy in order to build on inter- and multi-disciplinary studies of social movement formation in the U. S.--one of the main subjects of deep fascination that has engaged the multitude of the humanistic social sciences and encouraged debate between them as well as interdisciplinary cross-fertilization.