“Tijuana Fence,” (2006) by Natt Muangsiri is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. Flickr.com.
HIST 3413A: The U.S. & Its Borderlands
Fall 2023
Instructor: Professor Michel Hogue
Description: In recent years, the conversations about immigration and border enforcement in American political life have reached a fever pitch. The heated discussions about banning migrants, building walls, and accelerating deportations—though remarkable for their scope, scale, and intensity—are not entirely unprecedented. Questions about who should be allowed to move across national boundaries—to travel, trade, raid, marry, work, or settle—have long provoked fierce debate. Indeed, the process of constructing and enforcing borders in North America has typically prompted searching questions about belonging. Along the territorial edges of nation-states, such questions about belonging resonate in profound ways.
This course focuses on the historical experiences of border-making in an effort to place current conversations about border enforcement in the United States in a broader historical context. It will examine the efforts to construct and enforce the country’s boundaries with Mexico and Canada, and along the Pacific Rim, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the ways that Indigenous peoples, settlers, and migrants both shaped and were shaped by those efforts. In so doing, we will seek to explore both the policies designed to establish and consolidate the territorial boundaries of the U.S. and to regulate the movement of people across those borders. It will also compare and contrast those policies with the actual practices that emerged on the ground. In the process, we will see how these historical struggles over national borders can shed new light on modern debates.
Format: This course will be delivered live and in-person and will offer a mix of lectures, discussions, and hands-on activities.
Course Requirements and Assignments: I have not yet settled on the course assignments, though these assignments will be designed to help you refine your core reading, writing, and analytical skills. The course will also include a final exam.
Questions? Please feel free to contact me at michel.hogue@carleton.ca