The history of the United States is the history of immigration (and migration). This course covers the growth and evolution of the North American population from its beginning (about 20,000 years BC) until the present. Most of our effort will be concentrated on the period after the American Revolution, the colonial and pre-contact eras will get far less attention from us than they deserve.
Major themes of this course include:
* The evolution of racial/ethnic categories and the inclusion of successive immigrant groups into the mainstream
* Demography as both cause and effect of long term change
* Interaction between technological and economic change and immigration
* Religion and intolerance
* Law and public policy
This course will try to present a survey of American History emphasizing the role of immigrants and of immigration. We define immigrant broadly enough to include the enslaved and at times those who probably walked across a land bridge from Asia 20,000 years ago. However, our main focus will be on Africans and Europeans during the 19th Century and Asians and Latin Americans during the 20th and 21st Centuries.