Trump Syllabus Reader

This week we read Impossible Subjects by Mae Ngai to cover the topic “Immigration Policies and the Rise of Islamaphobia.” While the book did not explicitly focus on the latter half of the topic, it offered a rich and nuanced discussion of immigration policy and how it repeatedly has been used to limit groups because of race and religion. Ngai’s book might prove difficult for novice historians to latch onto (for notes, see here ), but the book’s introduction explains its argument to us carefully and with nuance.   Ngai explains that during the twentieth century, immigration policy evolved to appear more color-blind, but in reality immigration shaped how Americans understand race.   Ngai is able to make these arguments because of the particularly impressive range of sources she uses – the book examines oral histories from many different immigrant communities, the papers of various labor and social organizations, immigration enforcement records, and politicians’ papers. ...

This week we read Leah Wright Rigueur’s book The Loneliness of the Black Republican , to help examine the topic “Blackness and Right-Wing Multiculturalism.”   Rigueur’s work connects well to this theme, examining the contributions African Americans have made to conservativism as well as the instances when conservative philosophy has neglected African Americans. Rigueur notes in her introduction that popular perceptions of black Republicans often frame them as anomalous outliers or dupes of party elites, but she argues this analysis is problematic and instead accepts the agency of this important group of African Americans (for notes, see here ).   By choosing to examine black Republicans on their own terms, Rigueur’s approach reminded me of our first reading , as both historians made efforts to challenge popular misconceptions about specific groups by looking at what those groups actually thought and did. To capture these perspectives, Rigueur uses sources from government...

This week we read Carol Anderson ’s book White Rage , which covered the syllabus topic “White Power and Plausible Deniability.” Anderson’s book is very readable and approachable for novice historians and if you are reading these posts looking for inspiration for a book to read, this would be a good place to start.   Hopefully you noticed connections with last week’s book and are gaining a sense that historians build on each others’ work to expand our knowledge of both the past and present.   Anderson examines American history by focusing specifically on famous moments that on their surface made life better for African Americans. The introduction tells us that Anderson will examine five specific case studies: the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the Great Migration to the north in search of better living conditions, Brown v. Board of Education , the passage of major civil rights legislation in the 1960s, and the election of Barack Obama (for a copy of my notes, see...

Hopefully you had a chance to try out some of the strategies I described last week in reading our first book, Kevin Kruse ’s White Flight . Although it was not on the Trump Syllabus that formed the backbone of our reading list, I enjoy following Professor Kruse’s twitter feed where I learned his book would fit well with the first week’s theme “Trumpism’s Antecedents.” If we follow our reading strategy of beginning with the full title of the book we can already see this link to Trumpism’s past, as the subtitle promises us an explanation for “the making of modern conservativism.” From the title we also learn the book will focus on Atlanta and its suburbs, providing us with a substantial amount of information on the type of argument and thesis we can expect (for a copy of my notes, see here ).   The introduction elaborates the book’s argument in greater detail.   Here we learn that Kruse will focus not on the words and actions of political leaders who are so often placed at...