9/11 & the war on Terror in U.S. Culture

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the United States’ response to them stand as the defining moment for United States foreign policy and, perhaps until COVID-19, United States culture as a whole in the twenty-first century. This course will examine the history of the post-September 11th period, asking both what the domestic and foreign policy responses to the attacks have been, how Americans engaged with those events and policies, and how they have been represented in popular culture. As we do so, we will read primary documents from the period, the best recent scholarship, and a range of popular texts that includes long-form journalism, documentary and feature film, fiction, and memorials. Our discussions will take seriously the premise that cultural texts do not simply reflect already-extant cultural ideas but rather play a critical role in the production of competing ideas about events, their cultural significance, and their political import. Our goal will be to analyze not only the events of September 11 and the United States’ political, military, and cultural response to them but also how those events and responses are significant within larger debates about of race, gender, citizenship, and patriotism in the contemporary United States as well as questions about the United States’ role in global affairs.

The United States’ War in Vietnam

This course examines the United States’ involvement with Vietnam from 1945 to the present, with particular attention to the Second Indochina War (1954-1975) and its legacies. Among the topics that we will discuss are: the domestic and global political contexts that shaped U.S. involvement and conduct in Vietnam; the impact of U.S. support for a succession of South Vietnamese regimes on the people of Vietnam; Vietnamese and U.S. military and political strategies; U.S. domestic and global responses to the war; and the legacies of the war in both the United States and Vietnam.

As we study this conflict and its legacies, we will pay particular attention to the variety of approaches that scholars have taken in investigating it. In particular, we will spend comparatively little time on the tactical elements of the war and the majority of our time considering the strategic, political, and cultural elements of it. We will particularly interrogate the war’s relationship to discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality as well as to the ways that Vietnam intersected with larger debates about rights and representation (e.g. the Civil Rights movement and other freedom struggles), American liberalism (e.g. the Great Society and the rise of the New Right), and the United States role in the world (e.g. the Cold War, the global third world liberation struggle, etc.).

As well, we will pay particular attention to the various methods, theoretical commitments, and archives that scholars have drawn upon to investigate this history and to the competing historiographical debates that surround the war, and we will discuss which arguments and approaches are most effective and carry the most weight. In doing so, our goal will be to probe the ways in which the history of the Vietnam War remains unsettled and deeply contested, and to analyze the ways in which new archives and new approaches add to our understanding of what is arguably the most significant conflict in twentieth-century U.S. history.

War & Society in U.S. Culture

This course examines the relationship between war, the military, and U.S. culture. We will focus less on how the military has been used in particular instances or on the history of particular wars and instead ask broader questions that emerge from understanding the military as critical cultural institution. Among them will be: What should the relationship between the military and the nation be during times of war and peace? How have Americans, including service members and veterans, sought to define the military's place in American culture? How have wars and militarism created spaces for debating larger questions about national identity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship?

Among the topics we will consider are the relationship between military service, citizenship, and civil rights; debates about the citizen’s obligations during wartime; military recruiting, the draft, and the transition to an all volunteer force; debates about the appropriate roles of women and gay and lesbian service members; and veterans issues.