HIST 4726: Nation of Immigrants

   3 Credit Hours

  A&S Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts & Humanities, Diversity-U.S. Perspective

   Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only

View in Class Search

Examines the shifting kaleidoscope of immigration to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Considers immigrant motives, cultures and experiences; changing cultural and political ideas about the value of immigration; the relationship of immigration and immigration policy to ideas about the American national project; the creation and consequences of immigration law. We focus on both the human drama of immigration and on making sense of the statistics and policy arguments regarding immigration.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand the historical contours of immigration to the U.S. and American responses to immigration, as well as basic terminology related to this;
  • Assess the argument and evidence in academic articles and distinguish between different types of argument and evidence (e.g. quantitative vs. qualitative, primary vs. secondary sources);
  • Synthesize information from different academic articles on related topics;
  • Locate and make use of academic, peer-reviewed scholarship in immigration history in their own research projects;
  • Contextualize individual experiences of immigration with scholarship and data on historical patterns.

In this course, you will

   Engage in text-based discussions that hone your skills in assessing evidence and ask you to think creatively about immigrant experience and reception of immigrants;

   Get peer comments on your research and see what other people are working on;

   Conduct a small research project based in family history.**  You might, for example, use databases like Ancestry.com and/or interview relatives, and then use academic scholarship on immigration and more to contextualize an individual’s immigration experience. For examples, see my student showcase webpage, https://www.colorado.edu/faculty/hulden-vilja/student-showcase . (**alternatives available if family history does not work for you)

 

Meet Your Instructor
Vilja Hilden

Vilja Hulden

  vilja.hulden@colorado.edu

My name is Vilja Hulden, and I'm a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of History at CU Boulder. My research is on early 20th-century American labor history, but at CU, I regularly teach classes on immigration as well as on the Vietnam War and the United States in the postwar decades more broadly (HIST 4166, HIST 2166, and HIST 4435). I also teach the department's historical methods class (HIST 3020) with a Vietnam theme and an overview course on American history to 1865 (HIST 1015).

What I like best about teaching is seeing what students make of course materials. My favorite part is those moments when a genuine exchange of thoughts takes place—not as a one-way transmission from me to students but as a multi-directional conversation between historical and scholarly texts, students and myself.