Race in the 20th Century U.S.

Increasingly, our world today acknowledges that race is less about biological features and more about social rules and ideas. So why does race remain so important in the twenty-first century? This course combines ideas from history, public policy, sociology, and political science to examine how ideas of race have changed over from 1877, following the end of Reconstruction, to the present. While we might think of ideas like 'white,' 'Black,' 'Asian American,' or 'Hispanic' as concrete, easily definable categories, all of these categories and their social impact changed significantly over the course of a century.