America to 2025: Expressive Culture, History, and Identity

America to 2025 combines the study of history and expressive culture to explore historical, social, and personal identity. Together we will explore music, film, food, and politics in American life from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, and even beyond.

This program will focus on the political, social, and cultural history of the United States from the Civil War to the present. There will be several deep dives into questions of particular interest to many Evergreen students. These will include migrations and settler colonialism, including enslavement and forced and voluntary immigration; market capitalism and resistance to it; racism and racial inequalities as well as how people of color have demonstrated resistance and resilience; and gender and sexuality, particularly how queer, non-binary, and trans Americans have challenged structural oppression. These essential elements in United States history will be explored through expressive culture, including the creation of archetypes (and stereotypes) through literature and film, the shifts in popular music from minstrelsy and vaudeville through post-punk, and the ways in which food and music engage issues of identity, nostalgia, and home.

Program materials will include popular and documentary films, musicals, songs, poetry, television, and plays, as well as academic books and articles. Credit-bearing assignments will explore multiple modes of learning, including creative assignments as well as research papers. Program activities will include lectures, workshops, seminars, and local field trips. The program will serve as a foundational to intermediate program in the Culture, Text, and Language in World Societies Path of Study. The program will center reading, writing, and research. Students will be expected to demonstrate growth in reading historical texts, researching in primary and secondary sources, writing analytically, and thinking critically. By the end of the program, students will develop skills in asking critical questions, finding answers to those questions through independent research, and communicating findings in writing.