32402
Advanced Seminar
WiSe 15/16: Frontier Childhoods: Gender, Ethnicity and Coming of Age in the 19th Century (Mid-)West and Canada
Rebecca Brückmann
Comments
Exploring the history of childhood and family life on the (mid-)Western
frontiers of the United States and Canada from the 1840s onwards, this
course will highlight the interdependent complexities of emerging
nationhood and expanding empire/imperialism in a “globally Western”
context, ethnic and race relations, and childhood and adolescence gender
politics. We will examine the living conditions and socialization of, for
example, (white) settler families, American Indians, and
African-Americans, (mission) schooling, and ethnic conflicts. Whereas
childhoods on the frontier have traditionally been portrayed as girls
being raised in the Victorian spirit of domesticity and boys being formed
into future explorers and leaders, children’s experiences, through
encounters with nature’s persistent wilderness or their work duties on
farms, gave rise to pragmatic latitudes. On the other hand, settler
expansionism, including the cultural re-education of American Indian
children, encroached on diverse traditions of gendered education, and the
continuously increasing codifications of race created a field of tension
which we will dismantle in this course. Students will be familiarized with
current historiographical debates in childhood, family, and rural history
of the 19th century United States and Canada, which are lenses through
which negotiations of Manifest Destiny, the displacement of American
Indians and First Nations people, the global context of Western empire(s)
and its gendered and racialized manifestations will be scrutinized. close
16 Class schedule
Additional appointments
Wed, 2016-01-06 14:00 - 16:00 Wed, 2016-01-27 14:00 - 16:00Regular appointments
Wed, 2015-10-14 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2015-10-21 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2015-10-28 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2015-11-04 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2015-11-11 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2015-11-18 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2015-11-25 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2015-12-02 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2015-12-09 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2015-12-16 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2016-01-06 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2016-01-13 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2016-01-20 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2016-01-27 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2016-02-03 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2016-02-10 12:00 - 14:00