Early American Sexuality: Race, Colonialism, Power, and Culture

Abstract

My class explores the relationship of sexuality to the process of colonization in early North America. While traditional colonial American history courses establish the British colonies as precursors to a Great American Nation, and history of sexuality courses in the United States often emphasize the twentieth century, I focus on sexuality as part of the creation of multiple North American societies from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Throughout the course, I ask students to trace the ways in which cultural ideologies about religion, race, class, gender, and culture related to sexual beliefs and practices. My goals are to have students think both about the modern political and social implications of the history of sexuality and about the ways in which the study of sexuality reshapes our image of a given historical time and place. I have taught versions of “History of Sexuality in the United States to 1860,” cross-listed in History and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Irvine in 2000 and 2001, and cross-listed in History and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa in 1998. It is an upper-level lecture course with between forty and fifty students. I teach the class in two weekly sessions of eighty minutes each, where I give interactive lectures for about fifty minutes and spend the remaining thirty minutes discussing that day’s readings with the class. I use a course pack with a wide array of primary and secondary sources. In the past few years, multiple anthologies that address sexuality in early America have hit the shelves (Martha Hodes, ed., Sex,