HIST 231: Music and Ethnic America, 1900 – Present

This history course focuses on musical expressions created in the United States since 1900. We will emphasize how musical performances and the consumption of popular music can reveal notions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality that have circulated in the twentieth and twenty-first century United States. The course will pursue a thematic approach with a loose chronological order. Topics include, but are not limited to: corridos and ethnic conflict in the Southwest Borderlands; work songs, field hollers and African American labor in the rural South; the rise of ragtime as the first form of popular music in the twentieth-century U.S.; origins of blues traditions in the Jim Crow South; the Great Migration(s); women and blues performance; multiethnic contributions to jazz; "race records" and the segregation of popular music; creation of the country and western genre; white supremacist backlash to jazz and blues; the Swing Era; música orquesta and the Mexican American Generation; conjunto traditions in rural South Texas; race, rhythm and blues, and rock `n' roll; Black and Chicano soul music; queerness, race, and disco; Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and African American performance in the creation of hip hop; "gangsta rap," gender, and violence; Asian Americans and hip hop dance; international popularity of hip hop cultures.