Research Symposium

BIO

Abby Felde is a first-year viola performance major from Antioch, Illinois. She joined the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program out of a desire to continue to advance the research skills she developed in high school through the AP Capstone program. She hopes to conduct research in the music field in the future as she works to achieve her goal of performing with pit orchestras on Broadway.

Building Undergraduate Courses: American History

Abstract

The goal of this project was to develop an undergraduate history course derived from existing course syllabi and a variety of articles on new research in the field. In doing so, it was realized that this course would focus on the growing emphasis on intersectionality in history and would attempt to incorporate the perspectives of historically under-recognized voices while still covering the material of a traditional American history class. Each syllabus week contains three articles for the students to read (in all or in part, as listed in the syllabus), a book for the instructor to use as a reference for lectures, and one or more primary sources that connect to the material in the articles and textbook for that week. In choosing the articles, preference was given to those that discussed groups and perspectives that may have been under-represented in previous courses and to newly emerging perspectives within the research community that discussed commonly covered topics in a new light. Ultimately, the goal in building this course is to give students an opportunity to learn American history by engaging with new perspectives and emerging scholarship in an increasingly dynamic field.

Keywords: syllabus, history course, American history