ILRLR 3885 - Race and War in History: Workers, Soldiers, Prisoners, Activists

(crosslisted) AAS 3885, AMST 3885, HIST 3884

Fall. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

T. Nagaraja.

Across twentieth-century history, race and war have been dynamic forces in shaping economic organization and everyday livelihoods. This course will approach labor and working-class history, through a focus on global war as well as ‘wars at home.’ Racial and warfare events often intersect—in the histories of presidents and activists, business leaders and industrial workers, CIA agents and police, soldiers and prisoners, American laborers abroad and non-Americans migrating stateside. In this course, we’ll consider how race and war have been linked—from the rise of Jim Crow and U.S. empire in the 1890s, to the WWII ‘Greatest Generation’ and its diverse workplaces, to Vietnam and the civil rights movement, to the Iraq wars and immigrant workers, to debates about what has been called a ‘military-industrial complex’ and a ‘prison-industrial complex’.