Introduction to American Studies I

This is the gateway course for the AMER program, where you learn to read "America" as a contested object rather than a fixed place — approaching it through history, cultural studies, political science, and textual criticism at once, and asking what each lens catches that the others miss. The work is mostly writing: four short essays plus weekly homework, built around case studies like Lincoln/Douglass/King, immigration, elections, and popular culture, with tutorial support to push your close-reading and argumentation. Alongside that, you build a baseline of factual knowledge — geography, institutions, demographics — that everything in the rest of the major assumes you already have.