About

This course explores the stories Americans tell about who “we” are, where “we” came from, and what those stories make possible. From foundational myths and narratives of freedom to stories that justify conquest, exclusion, and empire, the course examines how national origin stories shape identity, authorize power, and organize political life. These stories are not simply inherited from the past; they are continually revised, contested, and mobilized in moments of social conflict and national anxiety.

The course approaches these questions through the interdisciplinary lens of American Studies, which understands culture broadly—not only as literature or art, but as the shared meanings produced through political rhetoric, fiction, textbooks, film, live performance, social media, and popular entertainment, as well as through museums, monuments, material artifacts, institutions, and everyday rituals of belonging. Rather than treating culture as neutral or decorative, the course examines it as a terrain of both consent and struggle, where national myths can naturalize hierarchy and exclusion but also be challenged, reimagined, and resisted.

Throughout the semester, students will learn to read cultural texts historically and politically, attending to whose stories are centered, whose are marginalized, and how counter-narratives emerge from the diverse peoples who have inhabited—and contested—the territory now known as the United States.