This course aims at giving students an introduction to the history of African Americans in the United States, positioning this history as central to the construction of the nation, and seeing how it unsettles established narratives of the United States as a land of freedom and opportunity. The first part of the semester will be devoted to a historical overview from the colonial period to the post-Civil Rights era; the second part of the semester will deal with important areas of US society and culture (education, electoral patterns, cultural representations…) that are shaped by race and will enable the students to understand key concepts and policies that have developed overtime to address or avoid the issue of race in these fields.
