Depkat, Volker

The lecture will discuss the major topics, problems, contexts and transformations of African-American history in the period from the end of the War of 1812 to the eve of World War I. This period saw the expansion, differentiation, and collapse of slavery as a “system of many systems” in an emerging cotton-industrial-complex. The rise of an increasingly vociferous and militant abolitionist movement is as much part of nineteenth-century African-American history as are the Civil War that abolished slavery and the period of Reconstruction that held open a window of change in race relations, if only for a short period of time. The final third of the century discussed in this lecture saw the advent of Jim Crow in the South and the beginnings of black resistance against this system of racial segregation. At the same time, African Americans became a growing presence also in the rapidly growing urban centers of the North. In discussing all these major problems of nineteenth-century African American history, the lecture transcends conventional periodizations and opens up new perspectives on the (dis)continuities of the American past.

Readings:
Lois E. Horton and James Oliver Horton, Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of Black America (2 vols., New York: Oxford UP, 2022); Thomas C. Holt and Elsa Barkley Brown, eds., Major Problems in African-American History: Volume 1: From Slavery to Freedom, 1619–1877: Documents and Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); the same, eds., Major Problems in African American History: Volume 2: From Freedom to ‘Freedom Now,’ 1865–1990s (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
Credit requirement: final exam (for BA, LA); final exam on Thursday, February 6, 2025., 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 11, 2025, 9am-noon (writing time 120 mins), rooms H 3 and H 4.
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. 10th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2023. 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..