In the first two decades of the twentieth century, large numbers of African Americans exchanged rural, southern addresses for urban, northern ones. In a phenomenon later referred to as the Great Migration, these masses swelled the populations of cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia. Driven by racial violence and dwindling options in the South, and hoping to find better economic and educational opportunities in the North, they helped to define northern urban black culture generally and to shape the Harlem Renaissance specifically. Why and how they came to the cities and what happened to them upon their arrival inform numerous literary creations, sociological treatises, and historical studies. Concentration on the migration sheds light on African American aspiration in a defined historical moment and how that aspiration was realized—or not—in the quest to incorporate black bodies into the American body politic.

This seminar will focus on the factors that both pushed and pulled African Americans from the South. It will analyze the images of the North that prevailed among Southern blacks, the forces that shaped those images, and the prominent themes that the Migration brought to African American literature. How were the realities African Americans encountered in "the Promised Land" of the North comparable to experiences they had undergone in the South? What roles did individuals, agencies, family, and business play in the movement north? And how does an examination of westward migration and migration from rural to urban areas within the South broaden our understandings of the Great Migration?

The Civil War destroyed the institution of slavery and transformed the U.S. socially, politically, and economically, all at great cost to human life: more Americans died in this war than in any other in the nation's history. The War's impact on art was almost as profound and long-lasting. Not only did the subject inspire some of the nation's best painters, sculptors, photographers, and illustrators, it also changed the face of town and countryside as monuments to soldiers and statesmen of the Civil War era spread across the landscape. This seminar will examine the far-reaching impact of the war on American art, both during the conflict and afterward, as it moved from current event into the realm of memory. We will pay close attention not only to the imagery of battle but also to the social and political issues which shaped the image of the war and which in many respects continue to shape us today. Some of the questions we will address include:

• How did artists come to grips with the new realities of warfare and the unprecedented scale of death it caused?
• How did the new media of that era (especially photography) change the way that war was represented and understood?
• What insights did artists offer into the social and political changes happening both on the homefront and battlefront?
• Did the memorialization of the war in public art create new understandings of the conflict or perpetuate old myths?

The radical character of the Revolution still retains the capacity to make many modern Americans uneasy. In our shared memory we have either sanitized the winning of independence—ignoring the pain and suffering that the achievement assumed—or treated it as a kind of Disneyland happening in which men and women in strange clothes performed quaint household tasks. But the Revolution was first of all a colonial rebellion against the strongest military of the 18th century. The odds against the Americans were huge, and yet in the name of rights and liberty they took a chance on forming a new republic. Taking a fresh perspective on the Revolution, we might ask why we still generally concentrate on the lives and thoughts of the Founding Fathers when in fact ordinary people carried the burden of resistance. How should the people be restored to our narratives of Revolution? Were the political ideas that energized their participation the same as those of the celebrated leaders? Did the people stake out more radical positions than did the elite planters and lawyers? What exactly did the Revolution involve for ordinary Americans who lived in small communities?