Research project-1: Family project

This involves research into your family's history. Pauli Murray’s book, Proud Shoes, is an example of what family research can yield. Family documents and interviews with relatives will be the major sources for this assignment, and they must be supplemented with library research. Collecting family stories is only part of this assignment. You must relate your family history to issues and concepts raised in course lectures.

Research challenge: Show how your family's history (or some part of it) illustrates or complicates one, and preferably more than one, of the following issues that will be explained in lectures over the coming weeks.

 Identity issues: "ethnic pride," "cultural retention/change," "varieties of Americanism," "passing," "evaporating ethnicity," "compiled ethnicity" or "panethnic moment," "expanding whiteness," “changing dimensions of whiteness,” “changing race formations,” “dangerous religions”

Citizenship issues: "struggles for equality," "xenophobia, " "exile politics," "14th Amendment, " "using politics," "expanding pluralism"

Economic issues: “job ghetto,” "ethnic enterprise, " "ethnic privilege," "immigrant resources," "productive stereotypes," "the educational divide"

Gendered ethnic issues: "gendered stereotypes," "gendered identity pathways," "gendered cultural guardians," "intermarriage"

Here are some ways to think about connecting a family story to the issues of this course: Does your family background lend itself to a discussion of immigration and Americanization? Think about the issues involved in coming to America and becoming American. Cultural conflicts and identity negotiations will probably be the focus of your analysis. Pay attention to national background, generations, gender, class, and other factors and conditions that might have affected your family's experience.

Some family backgrounds lend themselves to examinations of struggles for basic rights. Perhaps there are family experiences with prejudice and discrimination or perhaps there were ancestors who benefited from the oppression of others. In either case you will want to think about the historical context and try to understand how your family story fits into the changing patterns of pluralism and ethno-racial hierarchy that mark different eras. You may also have an opportunity to discuss the political forces that have changed the fabric of rights and opportunities.

Some of you will be intrigued by family stories about changing economic status, about struggles to attain wealth, position, or a better living. If so, you will want to pay attention to ethnic enterprises and perhaps ethnic privilege. Think beyond the purely personal aspects of these accounts. What events and conditions helped shape family opportunities? How did ethnic connections and communities contribute to the family's experiences?

Some may choose to examine complicated genealogies that stretch back many generations. Here you may find opportunities to discuss issues of intermarriage, cultural retention or ethnic evaporation, and any number of other concepts.

Note: Family history projects must focus largely on experiences in the United States and may not be appropriate for international students unless they have family members who have been in the US for some years.