Postgraduate Course: Race, Religion, and Ridicule: The American South from Reconstruction to World War I (online) (PGHC11609)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
| Course type | Online Distance Learning |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | The American South's distinctive history can be traced through slavery, secession, Civil War defeat, Reconstruction, Lost Cause ideology, populism, and the era of Jim Crow. Seminal southern journalist W. J. Cash summarized such understandings in his 1941 book, The Mind of the South, in which he claimed that the region's 'peculiar history ... has so greatly modified it from the general American norm' that it is 'not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it.' In this course, we will chart the short-lived promise of Reconstruction, and the development of 'Jim Crow modernity,' as shifting residential patterns and urban expansion prompted a new form of racial control through legalized segregation and extra-legal violence at the turn of the twentieth century. |
| Course description |
The course charts the development of the Lost Cause, Confederate memorialization, and the 'romance of reunion' that prompted the reconciliation of white Americans, North and South. It also addresses the significance of religion to southern life and culture, and foregrounds the experiences of African Americans, who theorized, questioned, and resisted each new manifestation of white supremacy. In its concluding weeks, the course considers the 50th anniversary of the American Civil War, which coincided with World War I, and the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to be elected president since 1848.
Content note: The study of History inevitably involves the study of difficult topics that we encourage students to approach in a respectful, scholarly, and sensitive manner. Nevertheless, we remain conscious that some students may wish to prepare themselves for the discussion of difficult topics. In particular, the course organiser has outlined that the following topics may be discussed in this course, whether in class or through required or recommended primary and secondary sources: racist language, racist violence (including lynching), sexual violence. While this list indicates sensitive topics students are likely to encounter, it is not exhaustive because course organisers cannot entirely predict the directions discussions may take in tutorials or seminars, or through the wider reading that students may conduct for the course.
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 18 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
| Course Start Date |
16/09/2024 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Online Activities 22,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
80 %,
Practical Exam
20 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Coursework:
3,000-4,000 word essay (80%)
Non-Written Skills:
Forum posts, weekly (20%) |
| Feedback |
Students are expected to discuss their coursework with the Course Organiser at least once prior to submission, and are encouraged to do so more often. Meetings can take place with the Course Organiser during their published office hours or by appointment. Students will also receive feedback on their coursework, and will have the opportunity to discuss that feedback further with the Course Organiser. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- exhibit a detailed and critical command of the body of knowledge concerning the history of the American South
- analyse and reflect critically on relevant scholarship concerning the history of the American South, including relevant primary source material
- connect, through coursework and class discussion, historical events to contemporary societal issues
- develop and sustain original scholarly arguments, by independently formulating appropriate questions and by utilising relevant evidence considered in the course
- analyse the work of other historians
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Reading List
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (Vintage, 1999) - ebook
Ta-Nehisi Coates, 'Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War,' The Atlantic, The Civil War Special Commemorative Issue, August 2011.
Heather Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) - ebook
Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993 - ebook
Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, 2007).
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Michigan, 2012).
Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) - ebook
Jessica Adams, Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) - ebook
Karen L. Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) - ebook
Catherine Clinton (ed), Confederate Statues and Memorialization (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019) - ebook
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
- Skills in research development and analysis
- Oral communication skills, developed through seminar participation
- Written communication skills and presentation of argument
- Understanding of complex issues and how to draw valid conclusions from a range of historical sources
- Ability to question and problematize evidence, considering the relationship between evidence and interpretation |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr James MacKay
Tel: (01316) 503774
Email: jmackay5@exseed.ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Lindsay Scott
Tel: (0131 6)50 9948
Email: Lindsay.Scott@ed.ac.uk |
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