This course explores the field of African-American women's history from 1619-1900. Topics include Black women's experiences in the slave trade, in colonial America, in the revolutionary period, in the pre-Civil War North, in antebellum slavery, in the Civil War and Reconstruction era, and, at the century's end, in the era termed both the nadir of American race relations and the women's era. The course will ask how understandings of African-American women's histories may transform more long-standing interpretations of the history of family, labor, politics, social movements, health and sexuality in the U.S. It will also take up the challenges particular to research in this field, asking how historians have overcome what has been understood to be the absence of African-American women's voices in the historical record.

Note: if you previously completed AAS 337 — Black Women in the United States, Part I: From the American Revolution through the Women's Era with Prof. Martha Jones, this course AAS 336 is the same course. The number has been changed effective Fall 2012.