BACK TO SCHOOL -- SEVEN ONLINE COURSES ABOUT AMERICA

Summer’s over, back to school.  But maybe you’re not enrolled.  No problem.  Here are seven unusual online courses — not your basic Revolution/CivilWar/WWII stuff — all about America.

New York City: Real and Imagined — Daniel Walkowitz, NYU — “This course will focus on the social history of the city – the peoples who have built the city and competing efforts by different numbers to authorize their dreams for the city.”

Journalism Under Siege — video — Stanford — The five-week course features 28 journalists and media experts, all offering insights on the emerging challenges facing the media across the United States and the wider world.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner — (Video) Wai Chee Dimock, Yale — Three giants of American lit covered in depth.

African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle — Stanford University. — Clayborne Carson, editor of the MLK papers, gives stirring lectures from slavery to Obama and beyond. 

The American Novel Since 1945 — (vidio) Amy Hungerford, Yale — Reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones. The course concludes with a contemporary novel chosen by the students in the class.

America Through Foreign Eyes — (Video) — Rice University — The United States has always been a source of fascination — both attraction and repulsion — for the people of France, Mexico, China, and African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Sudan. "America Through Foreign Eyes" is a rich, interdisciplinary, international course that features Rice University faculty from a variety of disciplines and area studies.

Introduction to American Studies — (Video) — Michael Cohen, UC Berkeley — 26 lectures covering American studies from a variety of angles.