Département Lettres et Arts

Cours assuré par Mme Agnès Delahaye (Agnes.delahaye [at] univ-lyon2.fr) 

This course aims to familiarize students of English and anglophones cultures with the themes, the periods, and the broad orientations of United-States history, and the practice of civilization as a French academic discipline. 

After an introductory session on civilization (session 1), we will proceed in reverse chronological order from present-day political issues at the heart of the coming elections (sessions 2 and 3), in order to explore the key texts, the main themes and the burning questions of recent US historiography as its moves away from the exceptionalist tradition of 20^th-century histories (session 4). Since the 1990s, Atlantic history (session 5), the history of slavery and abolition (sessions 6 & 7), gender history (session 8), settler colonialism (session 9) and indigenous history (session 10) have contributed to de-centering the ideals contained in the founding documents and to opening up new avenues of research in social, political and cultural history. 

Each session will consist in a short lecture presenting the key facts, figures, texts and notions of each period or field, followed by a closer analysis of the given primary sources and a general discussion based on the assigned secondary reading. 

Students must read the assigned resources before each class and come prepared to engage in class discussions about each theme or period.