Depkat, Volker

Two years from now, we will be celebrating the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which laid the revolutionary basis for the American nation. Looked at it as an isolated American event, the American Revolution is the process that established the United States as a modern nation-state. Yet, the Declaration of Independence and all that came off it can also be put at the beginning of an Age of Revolution spanning the period from 1776 to 1850 that created the modern world. In the eyes of eminent scholars like R.R. Palmer, Jacques Godechot, and more recently Jonathan Israel, the American Revolution initiated a series of democratic revolutions in Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America that continued the fight for individual freedom, self-government, and popular sovereignty against the old forces of monarchy, aristocracy, and religious authority. Other approaches drawing on continental, hemispheric, Atlantic, and imperial frames have moved away from the focus on ‘democratic’ revolutions and point to the many contradictory developments of the period that, after all, also witnessed the perpetuation of slavery, the consolidation of empires, and the formation of a modern conservatism born from the rejection of the radically liberal ideas of 1776 – both within and outside of the U.S. The lecture will introduce listeners to the major events and problems of the American Revolution and then approach it from several transnational angles to assess its place in the Age of Revolution.

Readings: Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History (New York: Norton, 2016). R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (2 vols., Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959-1964). Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York UP, 2009). C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017).

Based on a selection of autobiographies by and biographies of American politicians, the seminar will approach these two modes of life writing as acts of meaning making and social communication through which social groups are negotiating who they are and who they want to be. In a series of close readings of political auto/biographies, we will interpret autobiographies and biographies as narratives between fact and fiction, discuss their status as both literary texts and historical sources, position them in the cultural traditions of American life writings, and assess their role and function as prisms of the past that are situated between memory and history. Above all, we will investigate the specifically political functions and effects of auto/biographical narratives.
Readings: Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (ed.), Handbook of. Autobiography/Autofiction (3 vols., Boston: de Gruyter, 2018). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2nd ed., Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010). Volker Depkat, „The Challenges of Biography: European-American Reflections,“ Bulletin of the GHI 55 (Fall 2014): 39-48. Volker Depkat, „Biographik im 21. Jahrhundert – Tendenzen und Debatten,“ Handbuch Biographie: Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien, ed. Christian Klein (2nd ed., Berlin: Metzler 2022), 383-391.

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, July 23, 2024, 9am-noon (writing time 120 mins), room H 2.
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.