NORAM2576 – An Enlightening Lens: Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life

Course content

In The Uprooted (1951) Oscar Handlin claimed, "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." This was an overstated but natural reaction to the neglect of the role of immigration and ethnicity in American history books until that time. Today, that dimension of the nation’s history is accepted as important to understanding nearly every aspect of American society, past and present.

Immigration to the United States is today seen within the wider framework of global migration history, in a recognition that population movements to the U.S. originate in socioeconomic systems—in the structural and social conditions in both the sending countries and the U.S. Incentives to leave combined with knowledge of opportunities in America have made the U.S. historically the most popular of many nations receiving large numbers of immigrants. Finally, the U.S. is now confronting a new historic peak of immigration and is once again wondering "e pluribus unum?"—can many peoples unite in one nation? And, of course, today that also means considering how immigrants relate to long-resident minorities in the country and how these minorities’ situation is and has been affected by massive immigration.

Learning outcome

After completing this course you will have:

  • learned how to survey and critically evaluate the causes of peoples' migration to America, the means by which they came, the experiences they had because they were immigrants, the responses of American society to their immigration, the ways immigrants have transformed U.S. history, and the interpretations historians have put on these processes.

Admission

Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.

If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.

Prerequisites

Formal prerequisite knowledge

No obligatory prerequisites beyond the minimum requirements for entrance to higher education in Norway.