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OSUN Theme: Global Justice
American Empire?: Introduction to the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, 1776-Present
Term:
January 30, 2023 – May 10, 2023
Level
: 100-Level
Day/Time:
Mondays and Wednesdays, 08:30-09:55 New York Time, 14:30-15:55 Vienna Time
Instructor:
Justin F. Jackson
, Bard College at Simon's Rock
Register here
Credits
: 3 US / 6 ECTS
Has the United States historically been the world’s “indispensable nation,” dedicated to promoting freedom, equality, and democracy for other peoples? Or has it acted like a great power, ruling and exploiting other countries? This course explores the history of U.S. foreign relations history, from the American Revolution to the present, through the interpretive paradigm of “empire.” It asks whether or not the United States’ foreign relations have assumed an imperial character in different times and places, especially relative to “foreign” peoples, and why, or why not, and how. By attempting to narrate U.S. foreign relations history partly from the perspective of other nations and cultures–and gesturing to disciplines of international relations and cultural studies–this course explores how both Americans and non-Americans have together made, and unmade, the United States’ foreign policies over time. We survey U.S. foreign relations history through a set of questions: What ideas have influenced Americans’ interactions with the wider world, and other peoples’ responses to them, and how and why have they changed over time? How has the United States’ presence in the world been shaped by identities and discourses of nationality, religion, race, gender, class, and “civilization” and “modernity”? How have shifting political and economic structures in North America influenced U.S. foreign policies and, over time, boomeranged back on “domestic” U.S. society in ways that reshaped U.S. politics and economics? How have “foreign” peoples determined the nature, dynamics, and outcomes of Americans’ shifting power in the world, and used it to their own ends? How have “non-state” actors, both individuals and organizations, and not just U.S. policymakers, shaped their nation’s diplomacy? We answer these questions by chronologically examining major developments in U.S. foreign relations, including how Protestant belief and Anglo-American political thought informed the U.S. founding in 1776, and notions of “American exceptionalism”; how tensions between freedom and slavery shaped U.S. relations with Native Americans, Mexicans, and African-Americans in an expanding early republic; how Americans and tropical peoples in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia between the 1890s and 1930s confronted colonialism and anti-colonialism, imperialism, and globalization; how debates between nationalist “isolationalism” and liberal “internationalism” shaped U.S. policy in the eras of World War I, the interwar period, and World War II; how and why World War II remade the United States into a “great power,” and how this power was expressed, and challenged, during the Cold War, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and the nature of U.S. power in a globalizing world, especially in light of its global War on Terror. We read scholarship by historians and other scholars, and “primary” sources from the past of various kinds, from textual documents and art to music, film, and fiction. Students are required to participate in class discussion regularly, and write six brief responses to primary sources, and three brief essays synthesizing primary sources and academic scholarship. They also offer a co-presentation regarding a “key source.”