I. COURSE DESCRIPTION
Esteemed political scientist Benedict Anderson wrote that a nation is more than a political entity with geographic boundaries; it is an imagined community. As Anderson explains, it is “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”[1] For Anderson, a nation is a state of mind. Following Anderson’s definition, this course looks at the social forces that have shaped the imagined community that is America.