2023-2024 Academic Catalog

Dec 30, 2024

2023-2024 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HIST 044 - Picking up the Gun: A History of Violence in African American Social and Political Movements

This course takes up the history of radicals, revolutionaries, and reformers by examining the role of violence in their struggle for democratic rights, or what some scholars now call “freedom rights”. It explores the use of violence within movements to end slavery; it looks at the use of violence to attain political rights by women, black Americans, and other ethnic and religious minorities; it examines the advocacy of violence during movements against Jim Crow segregation and lynching; it considers how people and groups employed violence to end economic exploitation and class-based oppression; and it explores the use of violence by those who challenged state-violence, mass incarceration, detention, and police shootings. We will approach the topic of violent resistance by reading historical documents, philosophical treatise, analyzing poetry, pouring over fiction, and viewing films. Thus, our approach to the America’s violent past will cut across academic disciplines in order to examine the vantage point of both those who advocated (and participated in) violent actions against the government and other citizens and, those who rejected violence on principal and/or because they did not believe the use of violence to be an effective means to attain citizenship rights.

Course Designation/Attribute: HP

Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually