This course looks at the intersections of labor movements, race, and gender in locations on all three sides of the Spanish-Cuban-American war: Durham, NC, A Coruña, Spain, and Ybor City Florida. We will build connections and comparisons between the three sides, not to affix blame, but to complicate the narrative of the war and to deepen our understanding of this pivotal moment in cultural history. The course will also enter into some of the history and function of the nineteenth century tobacco industry, both as a mirror for the times and as a hotbed of political activism.

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These three tobacco towns work well together because they offer different formulations of the same process. Whereas Ybor’s factories were integrated racially and in terms of sex, the factory in A Coruña was staffed only by women, with their nimble fingers and their lower wages. While Durham and Ybor are both in the South, the ways that they reacted to and interacted with reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, let alone their reckonings of the purpose and importance of the war in 1898, vary wildly. Durham is also a cigarette factory, so a slightly different process, with less artistry, leading to different relationships between owners and workers than can be seen in the other locations.

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Readings for this class will be in both Spanish and English, and will include a large amount of primary documents from the Nineteenth Century (newspapers, advertisements, political cartoons), in addition to political essay, novels, poetry, and film.

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Student Learning Outcomes

Students will analyze diverse media for both their demonstration of cultural history, and as literary texts.

• Students will develop their academic research skills, through investigation using primary and archival sources.

• Students will discuss intersectionality in a historical period, developing a multi-faceted understanding of the course’s period of study, and coming to better understand the subjectivity of history and its investigation through their examination of transnational perceptions of identity.

• Students will build cultural competence in the transatlantic Hispanic nineteenth century, hopefully getting rid of some of their dread and reticence about the old.

• Students will uncover connections between the course’s period of study and contemporary society, developing their understanding of how history informs the present.

• Students will produce high level oral and written Spanish in an academic register on a variety of topics.