Ampersand: American Stories: St. Louis, Power, and the Making of an American City

A scholar of St. Louis history once claimed, "St. Louis will seem to have been located in entirely different parts of the country throughout its history." In many ways, it's a city that defies easy characterization. It's been a place of great possibility and promise, and of hopelessness and betrayal-and very often all of these things at once. This course will explore the history of St. Louis as a place of many places, reading the city's neighborhoods from the nineteenth century to today. Tracing a legacy of neighborhood fragmentation, students will investigate St. Louis as a city of strong, tight knit communities and grassroots organizations with a rich sense of place, but also as a city of fragmentation and barriers. Discovering what makes St. Louis a uniquely American city, the course will take interdisciplinary approaches to reading compelling primary source documents and will forge connections between St. Louis and other American cities of the past and St. Louis in the present. Students will also take several off-campus trips and engage with local guest speakers from artists to public historians to archivists.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; AMP

Ampersand: American Stories: St. Louis, Power, and the Making of an American City

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 110A

Section 01