The Carceral United States

This class introduces students to major changes, developments, continuities, and institutions of carceral control in nineteenth and twentieth century United States history.  Students will understand how prisons, policing, jails, and related apparatuses developed in the United States and will learn how opposition to carceral expansion has taken shape at different historical moments.  We will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will engage the centrality of patriarchy, capitalist antiblackness, zenophobia, and nationalism to the consolidation of the modern carceral state.  The class combines social and cultural history to understand how the United States emerged as the largest carceral behemoth in the world.  Students will also develop skills in critical analysis especially primary source analysis.