FEMGEN 159A: Making History in Silicon Valley (AMSTUD 159A, CSRE 159, HISTORY 159, URBANST 129)

Course Description

I am the resident historian at the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. I invite you to join me in this course in an experiment and an adventure. First, the adventure. This course provides an introduction to modern American history by diving deep into the past of the very place in which it is taught. We will cover centuries of history: from the lives of the Ohlone people going back to time immemorial to the Spanish Conquest in the 18th century, from the founding of Stanford in the 1880s to the invention of the microchip in the 1950s to the more recent rise of the world-spanning companies now known as the "Magnificent Seven." Through these events, we will learn how history has been made and who has made it - not only by conquistadors and CEOs but by contests over power and freedom led by peoples of all kinds. Second, the experiment. We will learn in this course not only who made history but how history as a body of knowledge is made. We will do this above by all making history of our own. The course will take regular visits to the historians' workshop, which in our case also happens to be the world center for the study of our very subject: the Silicon Valley Archives in Special Collections at Green Library. Through engagement with the archives, students will make history of their own: a paper documenting some aspect of the history of this place. Working in groups, students will also make an important contribution to this history by recording an oral history with a participant in the history of the Valley.