Diversity Committee
Courses
The History Department is proud to offer an assortment of classes about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or other topics related to diversity in Fall 2021.
HIS 6939: Women and Work in the US, 1870-Present
Women are often left out or pushed to the margins of US business and labor history. Yet from unpaid domestic labor, wage labor, to corporate ventures, women have been an integral part of the US workplace and economy. This seminar goes beyond Rosie the Riveter to explore the nature of women’s work and how their role has changed from the late nineteenth century to the present. During the first half of the seminar students will read a number of books that examine women’s experiences in a range of work environments. We will explore how the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality have shaped the role and status of women’s work. We’ll cover major female innovators, from Madam CJ Walker to Mary Kay Ash, along with women in factories, trade unions, and the service sector. We’ll analyze related issues, including the feminization of poverty, the restructuring of home and family, and sexual harassment, while tracing the effects of urbanization, the women’s liberation movement, and the passage of equal employment laws. In the second half of the semester, students will work on individual research papers that explore gender and labor in North, South, or Central America. During this time we will meet intermittingly for research workshops, peer review, and discussion.
Contact Dr. Yacovazzi if you would like to know more about this course.
HIS 3608: Counterinsurgency and the Cold War
During the 1960s guerrilla warfare became very popular among Latin American youth that radicalized after the Cuban revolution. At the same time, the popularization of French counterinsurgency among the leaders of the military led to a confrontation that ended with the emergence of dictatorships that violated human rights and promoted state terrorism. In this class, we will analyze this conflict in the larger context of the Cold War that increased the violence in the region. We will work with the materials available in the National Archives to analyze the events and understand the conflictive forces that triggered a violence that continued until the 1980s.
LAH 2020: Latin American Civilization
This course will introduce students to the main historical events, trends, conflicts and outcomes that have shaped the Spanish and Portuguese Americas from the Pre-Colombian period (prior to 1492) to the present. Students will learn from lectures, readings (books, articles and primary documents), in-class discussion, images and electronic media. Throughout the course, we will investigate how politics, economics and culture interact to create particular historical experiences for people, and how individuals respond to and shape these larger historical contexts. The course is designed to encourage and prepare students to pursue further work in any field of Latin American studies at USF.
Contact Dr. Novoa if you would like to know more about this course.