ENGL-263g “Telling America’s Story”
In May 2027 Andrew is launching a new USC Maymester class set on location in Washington DC.
This class will be different from Andrew’s regular Bookpacking offerings. The focus will be on US history and the way we tell the national story.
Washington DC will be our primary text. Over four weeks, we will read the city as a shifting map of the American idea: its monuments, museums and civic spaces reveal how different generations have re-edited the national narrative. From celebratory visions of exceptionalism to more critical accounts, the capital’s built environment makes visible the arguments that historians, politicians and citizens have waged for more than two centuries.
This work has never felt more urgent. The struggles over the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report, the anti-“woke” backlash and the Trump administration’s attempts to impose a tightly framed, patriotic narrative inside the nation’s museums and public spaces have turned the question of who gets to tell America’s story into a highly visible public battle. In this class, we will treat those controversies not as an aberration but as the latest chapter in an ongoing argument about the meaning of the United States, and who is included in its “we.”
Students will grapple with these issues on the ground, engaging directly with the institutions at the centre of this debate. We will analyze major museum exhibits, visit contested memorial landscapes, and speak with curators and cultural workers who find themselves on the front line of pressure campaigns, funding battles and political scrutiny. Alongside this contemporary focus, we will trace earlier efforts to redefine the national narrative, seeing how each generation has interpreted its own version of the American idea.
Throughout, the class will ask whether a shared national story is still possible, and if so, what it might look like. By setting competing narratives in dialogue - celebratory and critical, exclusionary and expansive - we will practice reading the past from multiple perspectives and imagining more inclusive ways of telling America’s story. The aim is not to arrive at a single, final answer, but to cultivate the historical understanding and empathy needed to navigate a fractured memory landscape together.
ENGL-263g “Telling America’s Story” is a GE-B class, open to all undergraduates at USC. You don’t need to be an English or History major to enroll. What you need is curiosity, a willingness to question assumptions (including your own), and a passion to explore the nature of this country in all its flaws and possibilities.
The class will be held in Washington DC between Monday May 17th and Friday June 11th.
Tuition costs for Maymester classes are covered in your Spring allocation. Students pay for airfares, and for four weeks’ accommodation in USC’s student lodging in Washington DC. Enrollment is by D Clearance. Apply as part of Spring Semester registration.
