AASP 201: Introduction to African American Studies

AASP 201 at the University of Maryland Global Campus is a three-credit, interdisciplinary course on significant aspects of African American history and culture.

UMGC's catalog describes it as emphasizing the development of African American communities from the Middle Passage to the present, with the objective of conducting research, applying critical thinking and articulating diverse historical perspectives.

It fulfills UMGC's general education requirement in the behavioral and social sciences, so many students take it outside their major.

The challenge is breadth. Four centuries of history, culture, politics and identity cannot be covered in depth in one term, so assignments reward students who can narrow a topic, work from evidence, and show how different historians and participants have interpreted the same events.

What AASP 201 Covers

UMGC lists the course topics as definitions of African American identity, influences and achievements within American culture, and issues confronting African Americans. In practice, readings and assignments usually move through broad periods and themes such as these:

Key Skills Explained

Articulating Diverse Historical Perspectives

The catalog singles this out as a course objective. It means showing that people at the time, and historians since, have understood events differently, and explaining why. A paper that presents one smooth narrative usually misses this outcome.

Primary and Secondary Sources

Primary sources (speeches, slave narratives, newspapers, court decisions, photographs) let you hear participants directly; secondary sources give scholarly interpretation. Good AASP 201 papers use both and make clear which is which.

Interdisciplinary Thinking

African American Studies draws on history, sociology, literature, music, law and political science. The catalog calls AASP 201 interdisciplinary for a reason: a paper on the Harlem Renaissance, for instance, is stronger when it reads a poem or a song as evidence alongside historical context, and a paper on housing segregation is stronger when it connects policy history with data on its effects.

Showing that you can use more than one kind of evidence is a simple way to demonstrate the course's critical-thinking objective.

Typical Assignments and How to Approach Them

Where Students Get Stuck

• Topics that are too broad. "The civil rights movement" is a book; "the role of local organizers in the Montgomery bus boycott" is a paper.
• Summary instead of analysis. Narrating events in order rarely meets a rubric that asks you to interpret and compare perspectives.
• Weak sources. Use library databases and scholarly works rather than general websites, and cite in the style your instructor requires.
• Presentism. Judge choices in their historical context first, then discuss what they mean today.

Study Tips for AASP 201

• Keep a running timeline of key dates and people as you read; it makes essays faster and more accurate.
• Use UMGC Library's databases for primary source collections and peer-reviewed articles.
• For every source, note whose perspective it represents; this makes the "diverse perspectives" outcome easy to show.
• Choose a research topic early and check its scope with your instructor.

How We Help with AASP 201

Send the assignment instructions, the rubric, any required readings and your topic idea or draft. A writer with a history or social science background can help you narrow the topic, build an outline, prepare a custom paper with real, citable sources, or edit your draft for argument, evidence and citation. Our guide to research paper help explains the process.

GradeEssays is independent and not affiliated with UMGC. Model work is for study and reference; your submitted work must be your own under UMGC's academic integrity policy. Orders are written from scratch, plagiarism-checked, and include free revisions within the scope of your original request.