This course will meet as a three-week intensive in Spring 2024. Following the intensive, students will have additional time to complete final papers. Students will become familiar with the powerful internal and external influences – social, economic, and technical – that have transformed the look, feel, and function of ceramics in America from the pre-contact era to the present day. Chronologically arranged, we will learn about ancient Native American pottery and as well as those produced in the Spanish, British, and French colonies of North America, and about the market forces, imported goods, and immigrant talent that affected the making and consumption of goods in pre- and post-Revolutionary America. Recent archeological discoveries in slave quarters and in the post-Civil War homes of free Black Americans will be a special focus, as will be the agency of Black makers, the Edgefield, South Carolina slave, David Drake, in particular. We will contrast and compare work by studio potters versus industry becomes from the late nineteenth century ceramics onward to the present, as set against the artistic developments in the same period (aesthetic, arts and crafts, modern, and contemporary). Similarly, we will consider the influence of the academy on ceramics since World War II, and the evolution of clay from functional and nonfunctional to a singular work of art. Lastly, we will consider the impressive advances of the last twenty years, an era in which a flood of new voices and perspectives continue to expand the discourse into socially conscious, performative, activist, conceptual, and digital realms.