Spring 2018

The Immigrant City

Listed in: American Studies, as AMST-351  |  History, as HIST-351

Faculty

Mark Clinton (Section 01)
Francis G. Couvares (Section 01)

Description

(Offered as HIST 351 [US] and AMST 351) A history of urban America in the industrial era, this course will focus especially on the city of Holyoke as a site of industrialization, immigration, urban development, and deindustrialization. We will begin with a walking tour of Holyoke and an exploration of the making of a planned industrial city. We will then investigate the experience of several key immigrant groups – principally Irish, French Canadian, Polish, and Puerto Rican – using both primary and secondary historical sources, as well as fiction. Students will write several papers on one or another immigrant group or a particular element of social experience, and a final research paper that explores in greater depth one of the topics touched upon in the course. The course will include students from Amherst College and Holyoke Community College and is open to all students, majors and non-majors. All students will engage in some primary research, especially in the city archives and Wistariahurst Museum, in Holyoke. Amherst College history majors who wish to write a 25-page research paper and thereby satisfy their major research requirement may do so in the context of this course. Classes will be held at both Amherst and Holyoke sites; transportation will be provided.

Enrollment is limited to ten students per institution.  Spring semester. Professors Couvares and Clinton (HCC).

If Overenrolled: History majors first, then seniors, juniors, sophomores, first-years, in that order

HIST 351 - L/D

Section 01
Tu 02:00 PM - 05:00 PM CHAP 101

ISBN Title Publisher Author(s) Comment Book Store Price
The Parish and the Hill New York: Feminist Press, 2002 Curran, Mary Doyle TBD
Working People of Holyoke: Class and Ethnicity in a Massachusetts Mill Town, 1850-1960 New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1990 Hartford, William Amherst Books TBD

These books are available locally at Amherst Books.

Offerings

2024-25: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2018, Spring 2020