Depkat, Volker

Illiberalism in a county built on liberal ideas seems to be a contradiction in terms, and yet, U.S. history witnessed many and multifaceted practices, regimes, and currents of illiberalism – racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, xenophobic nativism, Christian fundamentalism, to name just a few. The lecture will trace the history of illiberal America in a series of case studies and episodes spanning the time from the colonial period to contemporary America. Topics and moments to be discussed are the illiberal potential of Puritanism, the illiberal visions of settler colonialism, the pro-slavery argument, xenophobic nativism, the illiberalism of social reform in the Progressive Era, the Red Scares of the twentieth century, and the right-wing populism in contemporary America.
Readings: Steven Hahn, Illiberal America: A History (New York: Norton, 2024). Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2010). Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015). Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).
Credit requirement: final exam (for BA, LA); final exam on Wednesday, February 4, 2026, 8:30am-10; room tba, and book review (for MA)

Drawing on a broad range of textual, visual, and audiovisual materials, the course will give an in-depth overview over the cultural, social, and political history of the U.S. from the earliest European encounters with the ‘New World’ to contemporary interpretations of what ‘America’ might mean for different groups inside and outside of the U.S. We will cover a broad range of cultural and historical issues, including ideological interpretations of American landscapes and spaces, attitudes toward demographic developments and immigration, controversies about the U.S.-American political-economic system and foreign policy, the plurality of the American religious landscape, and multilingualism and the diversity of cultural traditions in North America to familiarize students with materials, areas of study, and theoretical approaches in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies and their significance for the study of American cultural history. The course is organized into a two-hour lecture outlining the major problems, contexts and trajectories of the individual session topics, and a one-hour seminar that will deepen the knowledge gained in the lecture and do in-depth work with selected textual, visual and audiovisual materials.

Credit requirement: final exam for participants of all sections of this class on Tuesday, February 3, 2026, 10am-noon, room tba.
Course materials: weekly readings; Hebel, Udo. Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008. Print.
Recommended history textbooks: Depkat, Volker. Geschichte Nordamerikas: Eine Einführung. Köln: Böhlau, 2008. Print. ---. Geschichte der USA.Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2016. Print. Boyer, Paul S., et al. The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People. 10^th ed., Cengage 2024. Print.

On the basis of key texts and visual documents, we will discuss mutual perceptions, political interaction, social ties, and cultural exchange between Europe and the United States from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Among the topics covered in this course are Europe’s co-lonial expansion into the New World, eighteenth-century debates about progress and decline, European-American relations in the “Age of Atlantic Revolutions,” migration history, and Amer-ican capitalism and notions of modernity..