HIST 4726: Nation of Immigrants
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)
Vilja Hulden
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.