HISTORY
728: Colloquium in United States History II (since 1865)
Spring, 2001
THE
SYLLABUS
Please
note: Although this syllabus is reasonably complete, it may change over
the course of the semester. For example, new readings may be added,
or old ones deleted. While I will alert you to major changes, you
should always look to this on-line version of the syllabus for the most
current information about the course. RG.
Time:
Mondays, 5:30 - 8:00 p.m.
Place:
McKinley 405B
Click here
to navigate the web site for History 728:
About
the Course: This graduate seminar will explore some of
the major historical and historiographical issues of the years 1865 to
the present. It will require of you intensive (and extensive) reading,
thoughtful reflection, and a willingness to share your thoughts both orally
and in writing. We will use Lotus Notes to extend and deepen the interactive
character of the seminar, posting and commenting upon one another's work.
The course is organized in a series
of two week sequences, each of which focuses on a major historical theme:
e.g., race, gender, empire, government and politics, etc. In the
first week we will read and discuss broad historical and historiographical
issues. Each member of the class will submit an essay on these Core
readings, posting the essay on Lotus Notes in advance of the class meeting.
(For details, see Core Readings and Essays.)
In the second week, we will focus on a single important issue or topic.
Half of the members of the class will prepare Essay Reviews on one or more
major studies, posting them to Lotus Notes in advance of the class meeting.
The remainder of the class will post thoughtful comments on the Essay Reviews,
also in advance of the class meetings. (For details, see Additional
Readings and Essay Reviews.)
THE
SCHEDULE
Click here
to navigate the schedule for History 728:
Monday,
January 22:
Introduction to the Class
Mapping
the Changing Topography of American History.
Lotus Notes Workshop. See Using
Lotus Notes.
Monday,
January 29. On Race: The civil war and reconstruction,
the rise of Jim Crow, the Great Migration(s) and its (their) aftermath,
the Civil Rights movement(s) and the contemporary debates over affirmative
action and reparations; but also how race is constructed over time, over
who gets to be “white” and when and how (see below, On Ethnicity), and
how class and gender interact with race in the shaping of American history,
etc. In our Core Readings, we will survey these themes broadly. In
the second week, our topic will focus on the rise of “Jim Crow” during
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tracing the evolving historiography
from C. Vann Woodward's classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow to
more recent studies that focus on the role of gender and the social construction
of whiteness..
Essay:
Please Post Your Essay to the Lotus Notes Discussion Database no later
than 5:00 p.m. Sunday, January 28.
Core
Readings:
Eric Foner, “Slavery, Civil
War & Reconstruction,” Foner (ed.), The New American History.
Thomas C Holt, “African American
History,” in ibid.
Howard N. Rabinowitz, “More Than
the Woodward Thesis: Assessing the Strange Career of Jim Crow, The Journal
of American History (Dec., 1988), 842-856, with a commentary by C.
Vann Woodward. (JSTOR)
Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Then,
Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” The American
Historical Review (April, 1991). (JSTOR)
Arnesen, Eric, "Up From Exclusion:
Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History," Reviews
in American History (March, 1998), (Project Muse).
Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots
Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban
North, 1940-1964,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No.
2. (Sep., 1995), 551-578. (JSTOR)
Monday,
February 5: The Rise of Jim Crow
Essay
Reviews: Please Post Your Essay Reviews on the Lotus Notes Discussion Database
no later than Saturday, February 3. Please post your comments no
later than Sunday, February 4.
Readings
on the origins of Jim Crow:
John Cell, The Highest Stage of
White Supremacy: The Origins of Separation in South Africa and the American
South (1980)
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow:
Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920
(1996).
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness:
The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (1998).
Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind:
Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998)
Joel Williamson, The Crucible of
Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (1984).
Monday,
February 12. On Gender: Including the social construction
of gender, the relationships among gender, class, race and ethnicity, the
role(s) of women (and men) in industrializing America, the struggle for
suffrage and, more broadly, for equality in all areas of life. the history
of the family, the history of sexuality, the new feminism, gay and lesbian
history, etc. In our Core Readings we will discuss many of these
broad themes. In our Additional Readings we will focus on Women and
Work, and on the intersection of “women's history” with (among others)
“labor history,” “social history,” "cultural history," "business history,"
and "urban history."
Essay:
Please Post Your Essay to the Lotus Notes Discussion Database no later
than 5:00 p.m. Sunday, February 9.
Core Readings:
Linda Gordon, “U.S. Women's
History,” in Foner (ed.), The New American History.
Estelle B. Freedman,” The History
of the Family and the History of Sexuality,” in ibid.
Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful
Category of Historical Analysis,”
The American Historical Review
(December, 1986), 1053-1075. (Reprinted in Gender and the Politics of History
(1988).
Paula Baker, “The Domestication
of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” The American
Historical Review (June, 1984), 620-647.
Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine
Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946- 1958,” The Journal
of American History (March, 1993),1455-1482.
Monday,
February 19: Working Women in Industrial America
Essay
Reviews: Please Post Your Essay Reviews on the Lotus Notes Discussion Database
no later than Saturday, February 17. Please post your comments no
later than Sunday, February 18.
Additional
Readings:
Susan Porter Benson, Counter
Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores,
1890-1940 (1986).
Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood
and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (1994)
Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing it
Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (1991)
Margery Davies, Woman's Place
is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870-1930 (1982).
Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift:
Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1988).
Mary Neth, Preserving the Family
Farm: Women, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest,
1900-1945 (1995)
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements:
Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-Century New York (1986)
Susan Strasser, Never Done: A
History of American Housework.
Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning
Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900-1930
(1979).
Monday,
February 26. On Ethnicity: Immigration,
emigration, exclusion, assimilation and resistance; the new world invention
of national identity, the lives of ethnic communities, the intersection(s)
of ethnicity with race, class, gender, region, religion; the recent “fourth
wave” of immigration and contemporary debates over “multiculturalism,”
etc.
Essay:
Please Post Your Essay to the Lotus Notes Discussion Database no later
than 5:00 p.m. Sunday, February 25.
Core Readings:
Alan M Kraut, The
Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921 (2nd edition,
2000).
James P. Shenton and Kevin Kenny,
“Ethnicity and Immigration,” in Foner (ed.), The New American History.
Alice Kessler-Harris, “Social History,”
in Foner (ed.), ibid.
Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion,
and the Making of Americans,”
Journal of American History (September,
1997). Electronic Reserve?
James Barrett and David Roediger,
"Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the New Immigrant Working Class,"
Journal
of American Ethnic History 16 (spring 1997): 3-44. Electronic Reserve?
Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation:
The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,
The
American Historical Review (April, 1995), 437-471.(JSTOR)
Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere
Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,”
The
Journal of American History (December, 1999). (The History Cooperative)
Monday,
March 5: Ethnicity, Race and the Problem of Whiteness
Essay
Reviews: Please Post Your Essay Reviews on the Lotus Notes Discussion Database
no later than Saturday, March 3. Please post your comments no later
than Sunday, March 4.
Additional
Readings:
Richard Alba, Ethnic Identity:
The
Transformation of White America (1990)
Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became
White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (1999)
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish
Became White (1995)
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness
of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
George Lipsitz, The Possessive
Investment in Whiteness (1998)
David Roediger, The Wages of
Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(1991)
SPRING
BREAK, March 12 - March 17
Monday,
March 19.
It's a Material World: The emergence of national
(and international) markets, the rise of Big Business, agrarian protest,
the history of work and consumption, political economy (the interface between
the organization of our economic life and the organization of our politics),
urbanization, the environment, the corporate transformation of American
culture, etc. We will survey these broad themes in our Core Readings;
in our Additional Readings and Essay Reviews we will focus on the emergence
of the large business corporation and its impact on American culture in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Essay:
Please Post Your Essay to the Lotus Notes Discussion Database no later
than 5:00 p.m. Sunday, March 18.
Core Readings:
Glen Porter, The Rise
of Big Business, 1865-1920 (2nd edition; 1992).
Richard L. McCormick, “Public Life
in Industrial America, 1877-1917,” in Foner (ed.), The New American
History.
Leon Fink, “American Labor History,”
in Foner (ed.), The New American History.
Richard R. John, "Elaborations,
Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s., The Visible Hand after
Twenty Years," Business History Review
71 (Summer 1997): 151-200.
(Periodical Abstracts).
Kenneth Cmiel, “Destiny and Amnesia:
The Vision of Modernity in Robert Wiebe's The Search for Order,”
Reviews
in American History (June, 1993), 352-368.(JSTOR)
Louis Galambos, "The Organizational
Synthesis in American History," Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970),
279-90.
Monday,
March 26: The Incorporation of America: Big Business and American
Culture
Essay
Reviews: Please Post Your Essay Reviews on the Lotus Notes Discussion Database
no later than Saturday, March 24. Please post your comments no later
than Sunday, March 25.
Additional
Readings:
Stewart Ewen, PR: A Social
History of Spin (1996).
Roland Marchand. Creating the
Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American
Big Business (1998).
David E. Nye, Image Worlds: Corporate
Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 (1985)
Alan Trachtenbeg, The Incorporation
of America (1983).
Olivier Zunz, Making America
Corporate, 1870-1920 (1990)
William Leach, Land of
Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993)
Monday,
April 2. On Politics & Government:
The history of “Who Gets What When and How,” including elections, political
parties (their rise and fall), interest groups, the changing role of “the
State,” the changing composition of the electorate (including the intersection
of politics with race, class and gender), the history of public policies,
of governmental institutions, of presidencies (two cheers for the “presidential
synthesis”), political economy (see above), political culture (see below),
and of course the “eras” – the gilded age, the progressive era, the New
Deal, the postwar (II, that is) era, etc. In our Core Readings we
will survey these themes broadly; we will then focus on the topic of the
New Deal and its legacies and how its history intersects not only the history
of politics and economics, but also that of race, class, gender and culture.
Essay:
Please Post Your Essay to the Lotus Notes Discussion Database no later
than
5:00 p.m. Sunday, April 1.
Core
Readings:
Richard L. McCormick, “Public
Life in Industrial America, 1877-1917,” in Foner (ed.), The New American
History.
Alan Brinkley, “Prosperity, Depression
and War, 1920-1945, in ibid.
William H. Chafe, “America since
1945,” in ibid.
Robert
Griffith, "Forging Postwar America: Politics and Political Economy
in the Age of Truman," in Michael J. Lacey (ed.), The Truman Presidency
(Cambridge University Press, 1989), 57-88. Copies will be available in
the box outside the copy room.
Mark H. Leff, “Revisioning U.S.
Political History,” The American Historical Review (June, 1995),
829-853. (JSTOR)
David E. Hamilton (ed.), The
New Deal (1999).
Recommended: For good overviews,
see Michael Parish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression,
1930-1941(1992); and David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American
People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999).
Monday,
April 9: The New Deal
Essay
Reviews: Please Post Your Essay Reviews on the Lotus Notes Discussion Database
no later than Saturday, April 7. Please post your comments no later
than Sunday, April 8.
Additional
Readings:
Lizabeth Cohen, Making
A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990).
Michael Denning, The Cultural
Front (1997).
Neil Foley, The White Scourge:
Mexicans, Blacks and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1997)
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The
Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989)
Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the
Problem of Monopoly (1966)
Robin Muncy, Creating A Female
Dominion in American Reform, 1920-1935 (1991).
Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers
and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States
(1992).
Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope:
Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (1996)
Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the
Party of Lincoln (1983).
Monday,
April 16. On Empire: The Republic as Empire:
including, among other things, westward expansion, the Spanish-American
War, World Wars I & II, the Cold War, and globalization (new word,
old history?). In our Core Readings we will survey some of the newer
and more innovative approaches to the study of diplomatic history.
In the second week we will focus on the impact of the new "cultural history"
on the study of the Cold War.
Essay:
Please Post Your Essay to the Lotus Notes Discussion Database no later
than 5:00 p.m. Sunday, April 15.
Core
Readings:
Walter LaFeber, “Liberty
and Power: U.S. Diplomatic History, 1750-1945,” in Foner (ed.), The
New American History.
Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson
(eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (1991).
Robert Griffith, "The Cultural Turn
in Cold War Studies," Reviews in American History (March, 2001).
(For a rough draft, click on "Cultural
Turn."
Monday,
April 23: Culture and the Cold War
Essay
Reviews: Please Post Your Essay Reviews on the Lotus Notes Discussion Database
no later than Saturday, April 21. Please post your comments no later
than Sunday, April 22.
Additional
Readings:
Christian Appy (ed.), Cold War Constructions:
The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966 (2000)
Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and
America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 (2000)
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American
Families in the Cold War (1988)
Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War:
The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2000).
Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United
States and India, 1947-1964 (2000)
Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology:
American Social Science and "Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (2000)
Monday,
April 30. On The History of History:
Essay
Reviews: Please Post Your Essay Reviews on the Lotus Notes Discussion Database
no later than Sunday, April 29.
Core Readings:
Peter
Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American
Historical Profession(1988).
FINAL
EXAMINATION:
The final examination will require you to select two of the
questions that have been asked on previous Comprehensive Examinations.
Check with your classmates to avoid choosing the same questions.
Drawing on the readings for this course (including works cited in the various
bibliographies), prepare an essay in response to each of the questions
you have selected. Cite your sources parenthetically in the text
of your answer. Include a bibliography of all sources cited at the
end of your essay. (Use the Turabian/Chicago Manual of Style).
Your papers must be posted on Lotus Notes no
later than Monday, May 7.
You must post comments on each of your classmates’
essays no later than Friday, May 11. (You will be graded
on the quality of both your essays and your comments).
Last Updated on January 23, 2001
Comments, contact bgriff@american.edu