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Not offered during 2022-23 academic year.

Since the emergence of a field called "women's history" in the early 1970s, the amount of information we have gathered about women has mounted astronomically. Historians have discovered the presence of women in every aspect of American life and culture. In more recent years they have begun to ask a different kind of question. Does it matter?  If so, how?  What is a gender analysis and how, if at all, does it alter the way we look at our past? How does the new knowledge we have acquired change our understanding of America's past? Or does it? This course is intended to introduce you to some of the newest questions now being asked by historians of women and gender and to some of the intriguing information we have uncovered about women in the American past.  Along the way, we will explore how this material shapes our interpretations of U.S. history and examine the relationship between the history of women and the history of gender. Readings are organized roughly chronologically, moving through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and rotating around encounters with some of the most salient ideas in American life, including: Liberty, Democracy, Equality, Individualism, and Nationalism. At each juncture we will ask how introducing a gendered perspective changes our perceptions of the past. Field(s): US