MA students can choose from a wide variety of courses each semester. Browse courses below to watch lecture previews, meet your professors, and see course details.
Upcoming Spring Semester Deadlines
Image: Photograph of Illinois Soldiers College, Fulton, Illinois, 1866 (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC05111.01.0010)
$750 per Course
8 Courses in Spring 2025
This course investigates the creation, display, and reception of art and material culture in the United States from roughly 1650 to 1900, grappling with the question of what is “American” about American art. Artists, architects, and designers in the United States mobilized diverse European, African, Asian, and Native American traditions in their work and different groups of Americans used art and artifacts to express who they were and what they wanted America to be. How did such art help to define conceptions of personhood, nationhood, democracy, and citizenship, and also promote colonization, Manifest Destiny, racial and gender disenfranchisement, and attempted cultural genocide? How did paintings, sculptures, buildings, and artifacts of various media represent and shape notions of “America” and American identities?
This course will cover United States politics, political thought, and social movements since 1945. We will discuss pivotal elections and political figures (Truman, Nixon, Reagan) as well as politics from below (civil rights, labor, women’s activism). Emphasis will be placed on political ideas such as liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism and on the intersection between domestic politics and the Cold War.
This is a course of study in the most tragic conflict in the history of our nation, the Civil War. Not only does the Civil War contain all the elements of a national epic—the war of brother against brother, the idealism of the anti-slavery movement, the dramatic intensity of battles, surrenders, and even assassination—but its long-term legacies are still very much with us. The political and social struggles over which the Civil War was fought still await final resolution in our national life.
In this course, we will explore the history of Latinos in the United States—and across the Americas—from the sixteenth century through the early twenty-first century. The history of Latinos in the United States covers themes such as race, migration, labor, and empire. It is the history of a community, or, rather, several communities, including Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, Central Americans, and Cuban Americans. The members of these communities have moved within and between the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean, where they’ve struggled almost continuously for equality and belonging. Ultimately, students will gain a deeper sense of the issues and histories that bring Latinas and Latinos together, and those that continue to divide them.
Widely considered a wellspring for US greatness, immigration has also been an abiding site of our deepest conflicts. The republican foundations of the United States with its promises of democracy and equality for all seem to strain against high numbers of immigrants from parts of the world barely conceived of by the Founding Fathers, much less as sources of new citizens. What is the breaking point for the assimilating powers of US democracy, and how much does national vitality rely upon continued influxes of a diversity of immigrants with their strenuous ambitions and resourcefulness?
More than a century ago, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified making it illegal (and unconstitutional) to deny or abridge American citizens’ right to vote based on their gender. This course will concentrate on the civic campaigns and political battles for women to win the franchise while trying to answer the questions of how and why the struggle for women’s suffrage took over a century. We will examine women’s involvement in reform as well as the intersection of gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the years leading up to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
Students will read and discuss historical interpretations of the American past as they have changed over time.
The course is the capstone seminar for students completing their MA in American History and its sole focus is the production of either a substantial original research paper or a capstone project of comparable significance as determined by the MA program director and faculty.
Enrolled students can register for courses on Campus Experience on the Gettysburg website. If you need assistance navigating the course registration platform, please follow these instructions available as a pdf.