How to Survive

Every time I rewatch the trailer for How to Survive a Plague (2012) — and I find it compulsively rewatchable; I keep playing it in the background as I prepare for my lecture on AIDS on Tuesday morning — I tear up when I get to the part where Peter Staley, speaking in 1990 at the Sixth International Conference on AIDS in San Francisco, says "Some day, there will be a people alive on this earth who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease, and that a brave group of people stood up an fought, and in some cases died, so that others might live and be free."



Well, one small slice of those people will be the students in the course I'm teaching, on Tuesday afternoon. All of them are younger than the drug cocktail that produced the so-called Lazarus effect in 1996; that has shaped their world. But they should hear the story behind.

And if you haven't seen the movie yourself, see it. If you have seen it, see it again. Not only because it is an amazing story. But we have a lot of terrible evils that plague this world. This is how we'll survive them: by acting up. And fighting back.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Introduction

This semester I've been teaching an upper-level history course (called "Contemporary History") which covers the history of this country from 1973 through the present.  (If I decide to get all meta, I'll make the last fact I mention the fact that they are listening to the last fact I mention.)  The course is primarily a lecture course: I'm assigning eight books, and for each book we're having a class discussion, but otherwise I'm narrating a story.

To help them follow, I've been giving out outlines of my lectures, including key names, dates, etc: the idea is that way they aren't scrambling to get down those facts, but can listen to the ideas and narrative around them.  Who knows how much it helps.

At any rate, on the very first sheet (for the introductory lecture, laying out course themes, the problematics of contemporary history, and stuff like that) I put down a few quotes at the end of the outline and labeled them "commonplace book".  (This is the reference; see also here and here)  I didn't discuss them, but just threw them in.

Well, the practice quickly expanded. I started throwing in quotes I actually wanted to discuss, so they had them in front of them (for the same reasons that I was giving them the outline).  I also continued to throw in some quotes I didn't discuss (either ones that I didn't intend to discuss, or simply ones I didn't have time to discuss).  Most quotes were directly from or about the period or topic of the lecture, but some were thematic or associatal.

Anyway, I've decided, both because I think they're interesting and because this blog has been far too quiescent lately, to start posting them.  For the most part, I intend to post one per day, which mean that some lectures' quotes will go on for more than a week.  (The only case in which I intend to deviate from this is when I deliberately paired two quotes to work against each other, as I did sometimes; then I'll put up both in the same post.)

In the interest of both honesty and not going completely bugfuck insane, I'm going to strictly post only those I handed out to my students on the day of the lecture: I won't add or subtract to them.  No new finds or second thoughts.  The one exception to this: in some cases I would repeat quotes on the next handout, either if I hadn't gotten to it in the first lecture on whose handout it appeared,* or, more rarely, if I wanted to remind students of it.  In these cases, I won't repeat the quote, but will include it with the lecture where (to the best of my recollection) I actually discussed it — usually the second set, but occasionally the first.**

Finally, since these quotes will reflect the course's lectures, which are a key part, but only a part, of the class, I want to list the eight books I assigned here.  They include books on key topics I didn't lecture on (or didn't lecture sufficiently on).  I wouldn't choose the exact same books if I taught the course again, but I do think that most of them worked well, and that they, collectively, provided a very good introduction to the history of the period.  Anyway, enough apologetics: here they are:

1. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
2. Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End
3. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture
4. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
5. Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet
6. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
7. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
8. Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

The first quote will go up tomorrow morning — or, actually, the first quotes, since the first are a pair meant to work against each other.

I hope you enjoy them.

Update: to see all quote thus far posted, read this tag.

__________________________
 * Sadly common: I always hoped to cover more than I actually could.

** Except that, even here, in a few cases I considered the beginning of the next lecture to be "really" part of the next one... I guess all I can say is: if I repeated a quote, I'll only post it once, in the lecture that makes the most sense to me.  There won't be any revisionism about what quotes I included, but there might be a tiny bit regarding when they got talked about.

"I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by implying that Joan's history in the world ended unhappily with her execution, instead of beginning there"

Putting together a lecture on Gay Rights in the 1970s (for my class on the history of the US since 1973), I am, of course, including a substantial section on Harvey Milk.  But after talking about his life, his politics, his murder and the immediate aftermath, I go on to talk about how he is remembered.  And in doing so, I am going to explain why with the following quote, which I thought I'd share:

As to the epilogue, I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by implying that Joan's history in the world ended unhappily with her execution, instead of beginning there. It was necessary by hook or crook to shew the canonized Joan as well as the incinerated one; for many a woman has got herself burnt by carelessly whisking a muslin skirt into the drawing-room fireplace, but getting canonized is a different matter, and a more important one. So I am afraid the epilogue must stand.

— George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Saint Joan (1924)

Sometimes what comes after a life is just as important as the life.

And, for what it's worth, I think Harvey Milk might agree.

If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.

— Harvey Milk, in a recording "to be played only in the event of my death by assassination," made November 18, 1977, one year and nine days before his assassination.

Link of the Day

One of the signs, for me, of a really great piece of internet writing (article, blog post, whatever) is that I find myself googling to try and dig it up again weeks or months or years after I first read it.  I just did this, not for the first time, with this article.  So I thought I'd share it with you.  It's by Adam Kotsko, who blogs here.  It's called "A Defense of the Lecture", which was not a title I was (prior to reading it) likely to be sympathetic with.  Now I keep rereading it.

Here's a small bit of it:

A lively discussion of a book by a small, engaged group is an ideal to be aspired to. At the same time, it seems to me that such discussions are pretty rare, even among professional academics (note how often people will express surprise that a conference session had good discussion). Such skills need to be cultivated, and of course you can only learn by doing. Yet there are some base-level confidence issues that need to be addressed as well, and unless we want to cultivate students who believe that their every utterance is intrinsically worthwhile due to their precious snowflake-hood, it would probably be good to get them to a point where their confidence is earned, where it’s based in actual knowledge....

I think that the assumption that students have baseline reading skills is behind the thinking of people who want more or less exclusively discussion-based classes — lectures, they suppose, are just trying to transmit information, which the books can do by themselves. If we assume that the students are reading attentively outside of class, we can use the class time to practice our critical reading with each other. I don’t think it’s at all clear, however, that students typically come to college with the skills necessary to make such a model work. Some will, but it’s much safer to assume that your students need help. And I believe that we should interpret students’ desire for more lectures precisely as a cry for help.

Read the rest.

50 Years Ago Today

Here is a short editor's note from the December 7, 1963 issue of The New Yorker.  As was their custom at the time, it was unsigned; but it was written by John Updike (and was later republished in one of his many volumes of collected nonfiction—Assorted Prose (1965), I believe).  When I teach my seminar on the 1960s—as I am doing this fall—I use this to discuss Kennedy's death, since it captures (so far as I can tell, viewing the event through the lens of history) the experience of living through the assassination—the immediate, human experience of those days—as well as anything I've read.

For the fiftieth anniversary, I thought I'd share it here.

It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved; only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world's great mingled with the faces of landladies who had happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses, temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer's quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.

What did it mean? Can we hope for a meaning? "It's the fashion to hate people in the United States." This quotation might be from one of a hundred admonitory sermons delivered after President Kennedy's death. In actuality, it occurs in an interview granted in 1959 to a United Press reporter, Aline Mosby, by a young American defector then living in Moscow, Lee Harvey Oswald. The presumed assassin did not seem to be a violent man. "He was too quiet, too reserved," his ex-landlord told reporters. "He certainly had the intelligence and he looked like he could be efficient at doing almost anything." In his room, the police found a map on which was marked the precise path that three bullets in fact took. The mind that might have unlocked this puzzle of perfectly aimed, perfectly aimless murder has been itself forever sealed by murder. The second assassination augmented the first, expanded our sense of potential violence. In these cruel events, democracy seemed caricatured; a gun voted, and a drab Dallas neighborhood was hoisted into history. None of our country's four slain Presidents were victims of any distinct idea of opposition or hope of gain; they were sacrificed, rather, to the blind tides of criminality and insanity that make civilization precarious. Between Friday and Monday, three men died: a President, a policeman, and a prisoner. May their deaths be symbols, clues to our deep unease, and omens we heed.

The dream began to lift at the sight, on television, of President Johnson giving his broad and friendly handshake, with exquisite modulations of political warmth, to the line of foreign dignitaries who had come to Washington as mourners. The sanity of daylight has returned, but the dissipated dream should not be forgotten; it must be memorized and analyzed. We pray we do not fall into such a sleep again.

-- John Updike

At some point, in my handing this out, I lost the last paragraph, and gave out only the first two to my classes.  It was an error—hence my adding it back here—but I think it was the sort of error that, in popular memory, sands the rough edges off of famous quotations.  Which is to say that I think that, in certain respects, the passage reads better truncated at the word "heed"—that it does not feel incomplete without the final paragraph, and indeed that it is in some ways diminished with it.  Hence, in reading it over, I did not notice the lack, since the lack improved it.

Seven Songs Per Decade: 1970s (Part 1 of 4.5)

In the spring, I am teaching I brand-new class, on the history of the United States from 1974 - 2014.  I am currently in the process of preparing the course.  One thing I thought I'd do, mostly just for fun, is play a song as the students walk in every day as a processional.  I'm only going to do this on days I lecture (not on discussion days or exam days), so it won't be every day.

But I want to come up with a list of songs which are A), Good, B) Representative, and C) Iconic.  Some songs will be on the list primarily for one of those reasons, but ideally most will be a mix of all three.  In order to get a comparatively even chronological mix, I'm going to try to do 7 songs each from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, plus 3 from the 10s.

And I'm soliciting suggestions!

To give you a sense of the sort of thing I'm thinking about, here is a preliminary, mostly off-the-top-of-my-head list of six songs (leaving one TBD):

1. Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974)
2. Born to Run (or Thunder Road), Bruce Springsteen (1975)
3. Stayin' Alive, Bee Gees (1977)
4. Psycho Killer, Talking Heads (1978)
5. Gotta Serve Somebody, Bob Dylan (1979)
6. London Calling, The Clash (1979)
7. ??

At the moment, all six are by white men. I'm not happy about that (it's not true for other decades).  That's one dimension I'd like suggestions on how to fix.

Note that as a general rule, I am limiting every single musician to one song on all five lists.  (I am making an exception for one, and only one, musician, to be revealed later.)  But bear that in mind: if you think someone's best or most representative or most iconic song is from a later decade, don't put them on this list!  Save them for later.

Note that while all suggestions are welcome, I'd prefer complete lists, either just a set of seven, or telling me what you'd add/subtract to my rough draft.

Update, November 15:

This query, cross-posted to facebook, generated a vigorous and (for me) very informative discussion, and far, far, far more suggestions than I could actually use.  After reading what everyone had to say, and painfully cutting it back down to seven, I came up with this revised list:

1. After the Goldrush by Neil Young (1970)
2. Search and Destroy, Iggy and the Stooges (1973)
3. Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd (1973)
4. The Payback, James Brown (1974)
5. I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor (1978)
6. The Promised Land, Bruce Springsteen (1978)
7. Rapper's Delight, Sugar Hill Gang (1979)

 ...with the idea that the Talking Heads will be on the 80s list instead.

So now I'm soliciting suggestions, comments and revisions on this second draft list.  I'd love to hear what you think — but please, only suggest an addition if you also suggest which it should replace.  Also, remember that we are going for a representative list of iconic songs; quality is important, but only within that larger constraint.

Myself, I am liking the list pretty well.  The one I am most tempted to cut is "After the Goldrush", not as any reflection on the song itself, but since the chronology of the course really starts a few years later, in 1973/1974.

Up next: the 1980s. Stay tuned.

Quote of the Day

Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It as a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.

— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, "On the Rainy River"

I'm teaching the first of three classes (in my seminar on the 1960s) on Tim O'Brien's amazing book The Things They Carried tomorrow.  It will be the fifth or sixth time, I think, I've taught it.  At least fifth, plus one time I taught the title story by itself.

Anyway, now, rereading it for class tomorrow, for the sixth or seventh or whateveritisth time, this quote struck me.  I've read those words before, of course, many times.  But each time through, of course, different quotes stand out; this one stood out tonight.

50th Anniversary of March on Washington Link Round-Up

I'm teaching my seminar on "America in the Sixties" again this semester -- but, sadly, we just began and won't get to the March this week.  Pity  (I did skip ahead and talk about it a bit yesterday -- I couldn't resist -- although I don't know if it was useful or just confusing.)

Some reading about today's anniversary:

• In my seminar, we read the speech of John Lewis as delivered -- it was considered too radical by other March organizers and, with a personal appeal from A. Philip Randolph narrowly avoiding a walkout by SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, pronounced "snick"), Lewis rewrote it to tone it down.  It's on the web, though; you can read it here.  (Lewis, by the way, just published the first volume of a graphic-novel autobiography; I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but flipping through it it looks fabulous.  (They got a great artist, it seems -- thankfully, and crucially.))

Some recent media-provided historical context on the March:

• Rick Perlstein, "The March on Washington in Historical Context"  Perlstein talks mostly about the fears people -- not just conservatives, but mainstream liberals (and whites generally) had about the march beforehand.

• Harold Meyerson, "The Socialists Who Made the March on Washington"  Meyerson reviews some background about the march too often forgotten today

•, William P. Jones, "How Black Unionists Organized the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom"  Similar in theme to the previous link; an excerpt from a just-released book on the topic.

• Speaking of whom, both Jones and another historian with a timely book out about the March (in the latter case, I believe, specifically on King's speech) were guests on the amazing radio show Democracy Now! last week.  (Link to a transcript.)

• Relatedly, Democracy Now! has a good round-up of march-relevant interviews and materials from their show.

• Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic has some good photographs of the March by Leonard Freed (which I'd never seen before).

• Dave Zirin notes some differences between the original 1963 March and this past weekend's commemorative anniversary march.

• An interview with one of the co-authors of a new book on the Freedom Budget, an ambitious policy plan (never seriously considered) which arose out of the March coalition.  The connecting hook:

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech cannot be comprehended unless we understand it as the culmination of a March for Jobs and Freedom, linking economic justice with racial justice. From his college days in the late 1940s until his death in 1968, King was deeply committed to overcoming poverty and economic exploitation no less than to overcoming racism. He came to see the struggles to overcome economic and racial oppression as inseparable.

Read the rest.

• And Digby puts up some really stunningly good clips from MSNBC (!) about King's legacy and its depoliticization in American memory.  Is Up with Chris Hayes always this good?  I may need to actually watch it.

• I hadn't realized, until Angus Johnston pointed it out this morning, that William Zantzinger (op. cit.) was sentenced on the day of the March.  (Nor that his sentence was deferred until after the tobacco harvest.)  Bury the rag deep in your face.

• The official program from the March is online here.

• Did you know that the "dream"section of MLK's famous speech was improvised?  If not, the story's retold in the Times today.

• Joseph Stiglitz on a common theme, touched in many of these links, about the forgotten "jobs" part of the March for Jobs and Freedom:

Like so many looking back over the past 50 years, I cannot but be struck by the gap between our aspirations then and what we have accomplished. True, one “glass ceiling” has been shattered: we have an African-American president. But Dr. King realized that the struggle for social justice had to be conceived broadly: it was a battle not just against racial segregation and discrimination, but for greater economic equality and justice for all Americans. It was not for nothing that the march’s organizers, Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, had called it the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In so many respects, progress in race relations has been eroded, and even reversed, by the growing economic divides afflicting the entire country.

Read the rest.

...and that's what I've seen so far.  I'll add more later if I see more.  (Update: Yup.)

American Studies 100: Cover Image Version 2.0

Since today is the last day of my second run-through of my class American Studies 100: A History of American Culture in 21 Examples, I thought I'd post the (slightly) revised cover image.  The syllabus (pdf) is pretty much what it was when I taught it in the fall -- the order switched a little bit (often for practical rather than pedagogical considerations), tweaked a few of the readings, but mostly it was the same.  (I didn't change any of my examples.)  But here's the cover image (without accompanying text):

And, just to correlate with the picture, here are the 21 examples which I used to outline the history of American culture:

1. Minstrel Shows
2. Central Park
3. A Sears & Roebuck Catalog, 1898
4. Hull House
5. Coney Island
6. The Five Foot Shelf (a.k.a. The Harvard Classics)
7. D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915)
8. Billy Sunday Sermons
9. Louis vs. Schmeling (New York City, June 22, 1938)
10. The Lone Ranger (radio and TV show)
11. Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit" (words & music by Abel Meeropol)
12. Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) 
13. Drive-in Movie Theaters
14. Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965
15. Charles Schultz, Peanuts
16. The Moon Landing, 1969
17. Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974)
18. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Maya Lin, 1982)
19. Fast Food 
20. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon, 1997 - 2003)
21. Steroids in Baseball

For more details on the ideas & reasoning behind the class, see this post, or the whole syllabus (pdf).

It was a fun class to teach.  Next year I'm teaching in the history department, rather than American studies, again; but I'd like to teach it again sometime, if I ever get the chance.

Your Grumpy Pedagogical Thought of the Day

My students are engaging in the Audacity of Adequacy.

Sentences One Finds Oneself Saying During Class

Federalist 10 is about dealing with threats from the left; Federalist 51 is about dealing with threats from the right.

(PS: Yes, I know that this terminology is anachronistic.  Don't hock me a chonic.)

Good Reading on College Pedagogy (and a few other matters)

I came across these two essays by Adam Kotsko, and wanted to commend them to anyone working as a teacher in a college-or-later setting as rich food for pedagogical thought.  They repeat themselves somewhat -- he reuses some paragraphs -- but they both add something to his overall picture.  And while they start in a direction I would have said I disagree with, he makes some pretty compelling points.  Anyway, check them out:

• "A Defense of the Lecture"
• "The Immersion Method - I"*

Kotsko, by the way, is an interesting guy all around.  Until now I've known him mostly from his blogging, but poking around after reading these essays his main work looks pretty interesting too.  (Indeed, a few pieces of it I'd already read and liked -- e.g. his review of Red Plenty -- without remembering who wrote them.)  Here's an excerpt from one of his books, on Zizek and theology; here's an excerpt from another one, on sociopaths in contemporary TV shows.    I found both more interesting than I thought I would based on their announced subjects.  Kotsko was also kind enough to point out that Orson Welles's The Trial is available for free online. (He teaches at a pretty interesting looking college too -- an interesting variant on the St. John's College model.)

__________________
* If there was ever a follow-up 'Immersion Method II' essay, I couldn't find it.

Tidbits, Short Takes and Links

• Overall, the Obama win feels less like a glorious victory & more like a near-miss car collision that you're thankful to have walked away from unscathed.

• So if Romney *had* shown his tax returns, would he have won? Or would he have lost even bigger? We'd have to see them to know...

• LBJ famously said, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that it would cost the Democratic party the South for a generation.  Perhaps he should have added, after signing the 1965 immigration reform bill, "...and this is how we'll get it back."

• Dear students: folding over one corner does not keep two pieces of paper together. Use a stapler. Love, a grumpy teacher.

• So I understand that we're now all supposed to be interested in former CIA director Petraeus's sex life, and his mistress's enemies lover, and so forth.  My inner paranoid thinks the media's obsessing over Petraeus to distract us from the robbery of the public under cover of deficit hype.

• If you remove Jindal's "we must not be the party that" qualifiers from in front of them, then these seem like pretty accurate descriptions of the Republican party today:

• "the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes"
• "the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys"
• "dumbed-down conservatism... being simplistic... [and] insulting the intelligence of the voters"

Sounds about right.  In fairness, the first definitely applies to the Democrats too, albeit less so.

• NPR reporter misreads present-day novel as future apocalypse due to denial about climate change.

• Call it peace or call it treason, call it love or call it reason, but I ain't marchin' any more.

• Yglesias on the larger-picture problem with GOP poll denialism:

Common sense just turns out to be a poor guide to a lot of complicated social phenomena.... sociologically speaking, being on the same side as expert opinion is a high-status concept inside liberal and Democratic Party circles. This sociological embrace of expertise acts to temper the psychological mechanism of confirmation bias. On the right, the idea of academic expertise is held in low esteem. Conservatives accurately perceive that academia is hostile to nationalism and religious traditionalism and thus become much more prone to become out of touch with academic knowledge or to reject valid academic insights even on other topics. The same mechanism that can make you clueless about the meaning of "independent" self-identification can also lead to dangerously misleading public policy conclusions. Common sense and going with your gut are a poor way to understand the world.

• Wow. Or should I say 惊人.

• Buffy episodes summarized in limericks.  They're up to mid-season-three so far...

• I think the Walmart strikes are the most hopeful story in the news right now.

Lines Which, I Fear, May Seem To My Students To Apply To the Text They Are Drawn From

...which they are supposed to have read for today's class:

...in illustrating of any point touching the stirring personages and events of the time he would be as apt to cite some historic character or incident of antiquity as that he would cite from the moderns. He seemed unmindful of the circumstance that to his bluff company such remote allusions, however pertinent they might really be, were altogether alien to men whose reading was mainly confined to the journals.

-- Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Chapter 7

...except that in fact none of my students will note the irony, since for those who understand that passage it won't apply, and those who really do feel that frustration won't understand this passage either.

Ah students! Ah humanity!

You gotta FIGHT! For your RIGHT! To --

So far this semester, I have seen these comparisons made in student papers:

• Coney Island is like college weekends -- a place to unwind & go crazy
• Civil disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement is like college kids' drinking -- a protest against an unjust law

...and we're not quite yet a third of the way through the semester.

Someone's doing something wrong.  I don't know if it's me, or them, or Our Society, or all of the above.  (My default is to blame everybody.)  But someone's doing something wrong.

Syllabus for American Studies 101: Myths and Paradoxes

Last week, I posted my syllabus for my new course, an introductory course in American Studies; next up, the syllabus for my other new course, a different introductory course in American Studies.

I'm formatting it differently. Again I'll start with the "About this Course" introduction I put on the syllabus. But then I'm posting the section on the graded work for the class, since it's more offbeat than was the assigned work for my other class, so I thought I'd highlight it by putting it on the actual blog. And lastly, since the class really makes no sense without the specific readings assigned for each unit, I'm listing those, too. (In the coursepack, each subsection of the syllabus is prefaced by a title page, with an image: I'm using those images as headers here, just to spruce up the post.)

As was true for the other class, while I'm basically pleased with how this course came out, it's still a first draft; it will most likely change when I offer it in the spring semester (based on how things went this time around, of course).

Now, without further ado...

About This Course

This course is about the myths and paradoxes of America. We will examine six ideas, each of which is a myth -- not (particularly) in the sense of being fictional, but in the sense of being an organizing idea (aspiration, self-description, ideological belief) which is applied to this country. Each is also, in itself, paradoxical, as well as being in a paradoxical relationship to the others. We will examine each myth/paradox through a variety of approaches, including literature, philosophy, history, sociology, songs, art and others, hoping to gain a richer understanding of each of these ideas than any single approach would give us.

Those six ideas, in the order we will consider them, are:

Freedom
Democracy
Individuality
Equality
Opportunity
Identity

Note that these are hardly the only six that I could have chosen. There were lots of others myths that I considered, and which, had we but world enough and time, I would have us look at too. (Some examples include newness/youth, empire, community (republic/union), progress -- and many others.) But they are six of the most important ones.

We will be looking, as we examine these ideas, at a series of conflicts. First, each of these ideas is contested, which means that people argue over what it means (and what it should mean) and how it works. So each idea is an intellectual battleground between those with different beliefs and agendas. Second, each of these ideas, as ideals, are (in some ways) in conflict with the reality in America. Further, this conflict between the myth and the reality can lead to a variety of responses . (Reject the myth as false? Work to make it true? Deny that it could be false?) And third, each of these ideas is (according to some people) in conflict with others -- perhaps democracy and freedom are in conflict, or perhaps individuality and equality, or perhaps opportunity and identity.

Finally, of course, all of these ideals are tied up, in various complex ways, with others. People often use various ones of them synonymously -- perhaps democracy means equality, or freedom means democracy, or equality means opportunity, or individuality means exploring one's identity -- or is it rather refuting it? These complexities means that we will engage with all six ideas throughout the term, even as we try to focus our discussions primarily on the one at hand. (As we explore these issues with our mélange of readings, one thing to bear in mind is that almost all of these readings could be shifted to a different unit.) But the interrelations here are a feature, not a bug. These ideas are important in part because they relate in such complex ways.

In addition, of course, to their relation to the seventh, unspoken yet ubiquitous idea on our agenda: "America" itself.

Response Papers

There will be no final exam, in-class tests or longer writing assignments in this course.

Apart from attendance and class participation -- which will be counted seriously -- the grades in this class will be determined by near-daily one page response papers. Each response paper should be a page in length, and should primarily be a response to the reading due in that day's class (although comparisons and contrasts with other readings and ideas from the class will certainly be worthwhile). These responses will be graded √/√-/√+ (or, in rare cases, no credit).

The baseline expectation for the class is that you will do 35 one-page response papers. Note that there are 42 days of class in the semester, meaning that you are expected to do one nearly every day. The seven that you don't do are intended to deal with sickness, emergencies and other exigencies of life that may crop up. But it is your responsibility to hoard the passes until really needed; if you "spend" them early, and then get caught out in genuine emergencies or illness, your grade will still go down. You should, at the very least, save three or so for genuine emergencies; anyone who has to do a response paper the final week of the term is either unlucky or planning poorly -- probably the latter.

Response papers can be about any of the readings due on a particular day. If there are multiple readings due on that day, then you don't need to discuss them all -- one will do. All that is required is that you have a response to the reading. Obviously you will need to be particularly intelligent or thoughtful or creative to get a √+, but a √ will be given just for a plain, ordinary, response. (Evidence that you've seriously misunderstood the reading, or genuinely poor writing (i.e. not just a mistake or two), will merit a √-. Handing in only one sentence (rather than a page), or not discussing the reading at all, or other, similar things will result in getting no credit.)

Please note that no more than one response can be turned in per class, nor will late responses be accepted. If you have not turned in a response paper by class time, then that day will be one of your skipped responses.

Also note that on days you don't do a response paper, you are still required to do the reading, attend class and participate in the discussion.

If you turn in 35 response papers which receive a grade of √, you will get a B for the class (assuming normal participation and attendance). Grades of √+ will raise your grade, and grades of √- will lower it. Turning in fewer than 35 responses will lower your grade significantly. Extra credit will be given for turning in more than 35 responses (but bear in mind, again, that only one response paper per class will be accepted -- the only way to do more than 35 is to not use up all of your skips).

The reason that I am making this the only form of assignment is two-fold: first, I want to make sure that everyone does the reading (since it is the heart of the course); and second, I want everyone to think about the reading. This class is not about memorizing information or learning facts, but about thinking about these issues. Do that in your response papers and you'll do fine.

This class is a marathon, not a sprint. The work in it is not something that can be done in bursts; it requires steady application of effort. Make sure you get off to a good start, and then keep a steady pace throughout.

Class Assignments

Note: I haven't reproduced the specific days when each assignment is due. Some days we discuss more than one reading; some readings get more than one day.

Prologue: America

Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"
"Extracts" (supplied by a Sub-Sub Librarian)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"

Unit One: Freedom

David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (Introduction, pp. 1-13)
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed (excerpts on Freedom Ways)
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (brief excerpt)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (chapters 1-2, 5-7 & brief excerpt from chapter 10)
Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (excerpt from opening)
William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (chapters 1-2 only)
Ronald Reagan, "A Time to Choose"
Langston Hughes, "Refugee in America" (aka "Words Like Freedom")
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "Four Freedoms"
Martin Luther King, "The Birth of a New Nation"
Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Free Bird" (lyrics)
Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour"
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Yellow Wallpaper"
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (a few very brief excerpts)
Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus"
David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (excerpts on the statue of liberty)
** Liberty and freedom as images (look at slideshow, which has been posted separately on blackboard; we'll view & discuss the images in class)

Unit Two: Democracy

James Madison, Federalist Papers, #10 and #51
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (excerpt)
John Dewey, "Creative Democracy"
Mark Twain, "The Curious Republic of Gondor"
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (excerpt)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Declaration of Sentiments from Seneca Falls"
Leonard Cohen, "Democracy" (lyrics)
Martin Luther King, "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
Herman Melville, Billy Budd (entire book)

Unit Three: Individualism

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance"
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse"
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Forethought & Chapters 1, 6 & 11)
David Riesman, et. al., The Lonely Crowd (Chapter 1)
Tracy Chapman, "Fast Car" (lyrics)
Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Unit Four: Equality

Thomas Paine, excerpt from "Dissertation on First Principles of Government"
Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites (Chapter 2)
Plessy v. Ferguson (excerpt)
Brown v. Board of Education (excerpt)
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (chapters 10-11)
Bob Dylan, "Only a Pawn in Their Game" (lyrics)
Kurt Vonnegut, "Harrison Bergeron "
William F. Buckley, "Why the South Must Prevail"
Ayn Rand, "The Age of Envy" (excerpt)
Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery"
Octavia Butler, Fledgling (entire book)

Unit Five: Opportunity

Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success (Introduction)
Horatio Alger, "Henry Trafton's Independence"
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Chapters 15 & 20, plus some additional images)
Carl Sandberg, "Chicago"
Bruce Springsteen, "The River" (lyrics)
LBJ, "To Fulfill These Rights"
Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Chapter 6)
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (entire book)
Stephen Sondheim, Assassins (entire book)
Stephen Sondheim, Assassins (listen to music)

Unit Six: Identity

Philip Gleason, "Identifying Identity"
James Baldwin, "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American"
Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History"
Peggy McIntosh, " White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"
Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America"
Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity (Chapter 5)
** Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills (1977 - 1980) (This series of black and white photographs by American artist Cindy Sherman is online at the web site of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  The link is to the first one; please look at all the ones they have online (there are 70 of them). Note: the name of this series is "Untitled Film Stills"; the following work that Sherman did was another series, this one called "Untitled". We're going to focus on the former. Basically, when you see color, you can stop (unless you're interested, ¬of course).Dar Williams, "When I Was a Boy" (lyrics)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (entire book)


Coda: America

Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"


Update: Broken link to Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills fixed, typos corrected.

Update 2: Changed the final unit to reflect a mid-course revision of Unit Six (I shuffled the order of the readings, and replaced Baldwin's essay "Encounter on the Seine" with his essay "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American".)  I've also decided to eliminate the coda (nice idea but we're short on time).

_______________________
Credits for unit images (in order):

J. M. Flag, US Army recruiting poster, 1917
Samuel Jennings, Liberty Displaying the Arts & Sciences, 1792
Alfred R. Waud, The First Vote, 1867
Composite of three images from series: Nancy Burson, Mankind, 2003
Barry Deutsch, A Concise History of Black-White Relations in the U.S.A., 2008
Margaret Bourke-White, Kentucky Flood, 1937
Composite of eight images from series: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, 1977 - 1980

Some Worries Date Back Longer Than You Think, Education Edition

...exemplifying the whole spirit of our big colleges -- their insatiable desire for more students and more funds, their readiness to resort to the same methods as those by which hustling business men promote their enterprises, their forgetfulness of the higher and finer aims of learning in the mere perfecting of mechanical means.... Most of our big colleges and universities have drifted into the adoption of methods that are too suggestive of the "drummer" and the advertising man.

-- The Nation, October 7, 1909, p. 321

This is from an unsigned editorial about Harvard president Charles Eliot's Harvard Classics (aka "the five foot shelf"), which had just come out. I can't confirm it, but Hugh Hawkins, in Between Harvard and America: the Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot (Oxford, 1973) claims (p. 376, n. 11) that this piece was written by Fabian Franklin (1853 - 1939), at the time the associate editor of the New York Evening Post.

Syllabus for American Studies 100: The History of American Culture

As I've alluded to, but haven't yet spelled out, this year I'm teaching two introductory-level American studies courses (both this semester and again next semester). The classes are American Studies 100: The History of American Culture, and American Studies 101: Myths and Paradoxes. Apart from the course titles and descriptions, I was given a pretty free hand. Of course, both preparing and teaching a new class are a lot of work -- and doing two, particularly in an area you haven't taught before (this is my first time teaching American Studies as such, although most of my history classes have been cross-listed and some have even been offered as 'concurrent' AS courses with the same title/number in a different department) is pretty nuts. And coming up with two introductions to one subject -- even with the direction provided by the course titles -- was yet another level of craziness. (The courses, by the way, had to be independent -- neither was a prerequisite for the other -- but also non-overlapping, as some people would take both (and majors were required to take both.))

It was a busy summer.

But I'm basically pleased with how the courses came out, at least for the first go-around (updates will be made before the spring versions, based on the first run). So I thought I'd post the syllabi in case anyone's interested. First up: Amst100. What I'm going to do is to put here, on the blog, the title page, the general information about the course, and the list of items (you'll know what that means when you get to it). Then I'll link to the complete syllabus as a pdf document on Google Docs for anyone who wants to read the details of the assignments, etc. So, without further ado...

About This Course

It's ridiculous, of course: you can't sum up American culture in fifteen weeks. We might as well all go home.

...but, uh, since we shan't --

The approach of this class will be to work through examples: not precisely representative ones, since they don't represent the whole, but suggestive ones: ones that will introduce a lot of themes and issues that you will encounter again, should you go on to study American Culture further -- or just live in it. More specifically, we shall be talking about twenty-one things, where a "thing" can be a work of art, an event, a place, a genre, or any of a number of other more specific nouns. This is a history of American culture in twenty-one examples, the way we might have a history in five volumes, or in five minutes. Which is to say, it is limited by them, contained within them: they are meant to be, not complete, but informative.

Even apart from the limitations inherent in the example form, there have been a lot of other limitations involved in narrowing a culture down to fifteen class weeks. Two in particular are worth noting. First, our temporal focus shall be on the last hundred and fifty years -- mostly, indeed, the last hundred. American culture (depending on how you define it) goes back at least to the seventeenth century, if not before. But for the purposes of pedagogy, we will focus on the more immediate history of the culture we all live in.

Second, we shall take "culture" in a somewhat (but not extremely) narrow sense. The word is often used quite broadly, to include patterns of work, family, and such things. We will be talking about culture in a narrower sense: movies, television, paintings, food, memorials, sermons, sporting events, amusement parks, scandals, comics, cultural events, and so forth. But, of course, sometimes "culture" is used just to mean things like books, paintings and music. We will include those, but we'll go somewhat further than simply that.

The examples have been chosen with the hope of touching on many of the forms, modes, and issues which have been important in American culture, given those limitations. We will be touching on a lot of issues about which entire courses can be offered -- the history of American popular music, television, theater, film, painting, sports, comics, commercial culture, etc. (Indeed, you can take many of those classes here at Hobart and William Smith, should you be so inclined.) Thus we will be experiencing, of necessity, quick glances rather than long stares at these issues.

Nevertheless, we will cover a fairly broad ground. We'll be looking at two TV shows (and one TV event), one radio show (and one radio event) and one theatrical play. We'll be discussing one park, one historical monument and one amusement park. We'll talk about one painting and one comic strip. We'll do one unit on Jazz, and one on Folk and Rock music (specifically, their intersection). We'll talk about a preacher, a settlement house, a set of books, a type of movie theater, a type of food and a store catalog. We'll touch on sports twice, on public media events at least once and several controversies. We'll look at something from the Western genre, the Mystery/Noir genre, and the Fantasy/Science Fiction genre. Issues that will come up include race relations, commercialism, immigration, nativism, urbanism, suburbanism, cars and drugs.

It'll be a wild ride. We're going big, taking on too much, trying to do and have it all. After all, this is a course on American culture, ain't it?

The 21 Examples

1. Minstrel Shows
2. Central Park
3. A Sears & Roebuck Catalog
4. Hull House
5. Coney Island Amusement Park
6. The Five Foot Shelf (a.k.a. The Harvard Classics)
7. D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation
8. Billy Sunday Sermons
9. The Lone Ranger (radio and TV show)
10. Louis vs. Schmeling (New York City, June 22, 1938)
11. Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit" (words & music by Abel Meeropol)
12. Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)
13. Charles Schultz, Peanuts, 1961 - 1962
14. Drive-in Movie Theaters
15. Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965
16. The Moon Landing, 1969
17. Roman Polanski, Chinatown
18. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
19. Fast Food
20. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
21. Steroids in Baseball

***

If you want to read the complete syllabus, it is available as a pdf online here.

Lines in Larry Kramer's Seminal Essay "1,112 and Counting..." Which Could Be Written Today About Global Warming

I'm teaching Larry Kramer's astonishing article, "1,112 and Counting...", on Monday for part of a unit on AIDS we're doing in a class on the social history of medicine. About this article, Randy Shilts wrote in his astonishing history of the early years of the AIDS pandemic, And the Band Played On:

Kramer threw a hand grenade into the foxhole of denial where most gay men in the United States had been sitting out the epidemic. The cover story of the New York Native, headlined "1,112 and Counting," was Kramer's end run around all the gay leaders and GMHC organizers worried about not panicking the homosexuals and not inciting homophobia. As far as Kramer was concerned, gay men needed a little panic and a lot of anger.... Kramer's piece irrevocably altered the context in which AIDS was discussed in the gay community and, hence, in the nation. Inarguably one of the most influential works of advocacy journalism of the decade, "1,112 and Counting..." swiftly crystallized the epidemic into a political movement for the gay community at the same time it set off a maelstrom of controversy that polarized gay leaders....

-- Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On, pp. 244, 245

Rereading it, it occurred to me how appropriate the tone of the article is -- not the specifics, obviously, but the tone in general -- to global warming.

I herein presented the edited version: sentences we could say about global warming, right now. Of course "killing us" in Kramer's work was in the present; now it is still -- mostly (global warming-induced wildfires and hurricanes aside) -- in the future. But the scale of the possible devastation is, of course, greater than even that great calamity.

We -- the people of the earth -- need someone to rouse us to action. Where is the Larry Kramer of global warming?

***

If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, [human beings] may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get....

I repeat: Our continued existence as [human beings] upon the face of this earth is at stake. Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die. ...we have never before been so close to death and extinction....

Why isn’t every [person on this planet] so scared shitless that he is screaming for action? Does every [person on this planet] want to die? ...

Priorities in this area appear to be peculiarly out of kilter at this moment of life or death....

To continue to allow [status-quo politicians] to represent us in [any government] will, in my view, only bring us closer to death....

With his silence on [global warming], the [President of the United States] is helping to kill us....

I am sick of our electing officials who in no way represent us. I am sick of our stupidity in believing candidates who promise us everything for our support and promptly forget us and insult us after we have given them our votes....

I am sick of the [mainstream media], which has yet to quite acknowledge that there’s anything going on....

With the exception of... a few, very few, other [small] publications, the [mainstream] press has been useless. If we can’t get our own papers and magazines to tell us what’s really happening to us... how are we going to get the word around that we’re dying?

Unless we can generate, visibly, numbers, masses, we are going to die....

I am sick of everyone in this community who tells me to stop creating a panic. How many of us have to die before you get scared off your ass and into action?... Over and over again I hear from [people], “Why aren’t you guys doing anything?” Every politician I have spoken to has said to me confidentially, “You guys aren’t making enough noise. Bureaucracy only responds to pressure.”...

Get your stupid heads out of the sand, you turkeys!...

How can they value life so little and [gas-guzzlers and profits] so much?...

I don’t want to die. I can only assume you don’t want to die. Can we fight together?

I hope we don’t have to conduct sit-ins or tie up traffic or get arrested. I hope our city and our country will start to do something to help start saving us. But it is time for us to be perceived for what we truly are: an angry community and a strong community, and therefore a threat. Such are the realities of politics....

I hope I have not been guilty of saying ineffectively in five thousand words what I could have said in five: we must fight to live.

I am angry and frustrated almost beyond the bound my skin and bones and body and brain can encompass. My sleep is tormented by nightmares...

I know that unless I fight with every ounce of my energy I will hate myself. I hope, I pray, I implore you to feel the same....

If we don’t act immediately, then we face our approaching doom.

* * *

Volunteers Needed for Civil Disobedience

It is necessary that we have a pool of at least three thousand people who are prepared to participate in demonstrations of civil disobedience. Such demonstrations might include sit-ins or traffic tie-ups. All participants must be prepared to be arrested. I am asking every [...] person and every [...] organization to canvass all friends and members and make a count of the total number of people you can provide toward this pool of three thousand.

Let me know how many people you can be counted on providing. Just include the number of people; you don’t have to send actual names – you keep that list yourself. And include your own phone numbers. Start these lists now.

It Seems That There Are Fashions In Student Errors Too

This spring a fair number of students, from both of my classes, have been repeatedly using the word "advancement" when they just mean "advance", e.g. "The law was a huge advancement for African Americans". My guess is that they think it sounds 'sophisticated' or something, since it's longer. But I don't have any idea why that particular error has had a sudden spike in popularity. Has anyone else seen this?