American Social Movements From Cap-Ha t

This graduate seminar encourages students to take up the challenge of doing historical work on social movements from the late 18th century until the present. During the past two decades, mobilization from different points in the political spectrum, including the Occupy Movement, the Movement for Black Lives, and right-wing movements, among other impactful mobilizations, has vividly illustrated the impact of social movements on the shaping of political struggles. Moreover, activists in these movements have served as knowledge producers that have defined, sharpened, and propagandized understandings of exploitation, displacement, and justice in the past and present. This course invites students to explore the impact of social movements within a national and transnational context. Although the class will begin in with the period of slave resistance during the era of the Haitian Revolution, the bulk of the seminar will focus on 20th century movements. Abolitionism serves as a framing device for the course, given its historic importance in the ending slavery and its current iteration as an objective for many of the movements to be explored throughout the semester. Moreover, the seminar also examines how right-wing movements have co-opted and transformed the tactics and strategies of progressive movements. The central questions of the course are: what is/was a social movement? How can historians document and historicize their emergence and impact? How have historians sought to engage with these movements, including those that promote authoritarian rule? How can activist scholars harness their research and expertise in the interests of progressive social transformation? In our age of resurgent xenophobic nationalisms and crisis for liberal conceptions of democratic governance, the need for innovative historical research on social movements is as urgent as ever.