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JOAQUÍN MURRIETA AND THE AMERICAN 1848 197 Syllabus 1848 Empire, Amnesia, and American Studies Instructor: Shelley Streeby This course complicates the conventional periodization of nineteenthcentury U.S. history and culture that makes the Civil War the pivotal event in a narrative that moves from sectional conflict to national consolidation and then to imperialism at the end of the century. By examining the early history of U.S. empire-building in Mexico as well as the filibustering attempts in Cuba and Latin America in the years that followed, we will think about how the events of 1848 established patterns for subsequent U.S. imperialist policies in 1898 and beyond. Topics to be addressed include the relationship between Indian Removal and the U.S.-Mexican War; the war and mass culture; cultural nationalism and Young America; the Revolutions of 1848; the complicated politics of anti-imperialism; slavery, resistance , and colonization schemes in the Americas; and migration and racial formation in the wake of the Gold Rush. The premise of this course is that U.S. class and racial formations throughout the nineteenth century were decisively shaped by international conflict and both the internal and the global dynamics of empire-building. PRIMARY TEXTS Alcaraz, Ramón, et al., eds., “Preface” and “Origin of the War” from The Other Side: Or Notes for the History of the War between Mexico and the United States. Trans. Albert C. Ramsey. New York: Burt Franklin, 1850; reprint, 1970. Selections. Alcott, Louisa May. “An Hour.” In Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery , ed. Sarah Elbert. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997, 47–68. Buntline, Ned. The Volunteer; or the Maid of Monterey. Boston: F. Gleason , 1847. Clappe, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith. The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Ed. Marlene Smith-Baranzini. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1998. Selections. Delany, Martin. Blake; or, the Huts of America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970. Douglass, Frederick. “The War with Mexico,” North Star, January 21, 1848. Fuller, Margaret. “These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850. Ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Selections. Joaquin Murieta, the Brigand Chief of California. Fresno, CA: Valley Publishers , 1969. Reprint of the 1932 Grabhorn Press edition. Lippard, George. Legends of Mexico. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1847. 198 SHELLEY STREEBY Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Verso, 1998. O’Sullivan, John. “The Great Nation of Futurity.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 6, no. 23 (November 1839): 426–30. Prescott, W. H. History of the Conquest of Mexico. New York: Modern Library , 1998. Selections. Ridge, John Rollin. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo. The Squatter and the Don. Ed. Beatrice Pita and Rosaura Sánchez. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992. Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno. A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of John N. Seguín. Ed. Jesús F. de la Teja. Austin: State House Press, 1991. Selections. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; and Resistance to Civil Government. Ed. William Rossi. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Selections. Walker, William. The War in Nicaragua. Mobile: S. H. Goetzel, 1860. Selections . Zeh, Frederick. An Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican War. Trans. William J. Orr. Ed. William J. Orr and Robert Ryall Miller. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Selections. SECONDARY SOURCES Almaguer, Tomás. “Ideological Distortions and Recent Chicano Historiography : The Internal Model and Chicano Historical Interpretation ,” Aztlán 18, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 7–28. ———. Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Selections. Foner, Philip, and Richard Winchester, eds. The Anti-Imperialist Reader: A Documentary History of Anti-Imperialism in the United States. Vol. 1. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984. Gutiérrez, David. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants , and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Selections. ———. “Significant to Whom?: Mexican Americans and the History of the American West.” In A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 67–89. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Johannsen, Robert. To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Selections. Kaplan, Amy. “ ‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of...

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