Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Jennifer Brady
Meeting time: Thursday, 9:45 - 11:45
This seminar focuses on the United States before 1865. Poised halfway between our current moment and the seemingly archaic, superstitious fervor of the Salem Witch Trials, America in the antebellum era was in the process of fitfully, at times reluctantly, becoming modern. We will focus on strange objects, photographs of dead children, the spectacles created by P. T. Barnum, the seedy newspapers of antebellum New York, and texts that figure the disorienting changes to media, transportation, personhood, and nation that unfolded as the United States settled uneasily into nationhood. Considering literary and subliterary texts, religious beliefs, visual culture, and political practices with an eye to race, gender, sexuality, and class, students will learn about a period that is in many respects deeply alien to contemporary Americans but offers surprising moments of coincidence with the present.