AMST 202: Historical Approaches to American Studies Fall 2013 MWF 2:00-2:50 Wilson 304 Instructor: Dr.

Seth Kotch, sethkotch@unc.edu Teaching Assistant: Stephanie Barnwell, stephanie.barnwell@unc.edu Office Hours: M 10:00-11:00, Love House and Hutchins Forum Room 101 (house on the corner of E. Franklin and Battle), or by appointment Course Description: This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary methods of American Studies scholarship with an emphasis on the importance of historical analysis. Together, driven by your discussion of course texts, we will seek to understand historic and contemporary conflicts over American identity and how history is used and misused today. Since we are here in the South, we will focus in particular on this region, though without ignoring the rest of the country. This course is divided into four units. The first will introduce you to some of the essential concepts in play in American Studies and liberal arts scholarship. Then we will consider four broad subjects: southern identity, gender and sexuality, American national identity, and race and violence. Each unit will move from the post-Civil War period to the modern day. This course is being taught from a historic perspective and is intended to introduce you to different methods of historical inquiry, from conducting original manuscript research to reading and understanding books and articles by professional scholars. We will make four visits to the Southern Historical Collection in Wilson Library to refine our research techniques. This is a digitally inflected course, meaning that in addition to or instead of traditional research papers and written exams your contributions to the course will take the form of participation in online discussion and the creation of multimedia webpages using Wordpress, an open-source content management system. You do not need to know how to use Wordpress on day one to succeed in this course. We will encounter language and images that may make you uncomfortable. Please feel free to discuss any discomfort with me directly and/or raise it to discuss with your peers in class. Target Audience and Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this course. AMST 202 is a required course for American Studies majors and minors. It is classified as a Historical Analysis (HS) and North Atlantic World (NA) course. Course Goals: Explore American Studies through sources used by American Studies scholars, including archival manuscripts, objects, literature, film, oral history, and online presentations. Encounter and evaluate examples of successful scholarship by American Studies scholars and others. Understand everyday experiences and contemporary controversies and conversations in a historic context. Develop research, presentation, collaboration, technical, and writing skills necessary for success in college and in the wider world. Critically evaluate your own performance in and contributions to this course.
1

Teaching and Learning: This course blends traditional reading with use of instructional technology. Class time will be divided between discussion and work in small groups. Unless otherwise noted, please complete readings before attending the session for which they are listed. The Honor Code: I expect your full participation and observance of the universitys honor code. I, too, must observe the code and am obligated to report suspected academic dishonesty to the Honor Court. If you have any questions about Carolinas honor code--including about plagiarism, which is probably the easiest way to stumble unintentionally into a violation--please feel free to speak with me or visit studentconduct.unc.edu. Important Dates: Monday, September 16: Sheet Music Annotation exercise due Friday, November 8: Visit America! assignment due Monday, November 25: Group Project Due Friday, December 6: Final Exam at 4:00pm Important Links: Our course site: amst202.web.unc.edu Discussion site: reddit.com/r/amst202 Annotation tool: markup.io and annotation walkthrough: https://vimeo.com/72439488 Evaluation: 20% Class participation. Much of the content of this course will emerge in class discussion; therefore both attendance and participation are mandatory. There will be times you will need to miss class, which is permissible with advance notice and documentation (a doctors note, note from coach about traveling for athletic competition, documentation of religious holiday). Exceeding four absences (or frequently showing up late) will result in a penalty of four percentage points per offense. You will be warned if you are approaching this threshold. 15% Online participation. What we discuss and how we discuss it will be driven by your questions and comments, posted to our course site. Maintaining a presence online by posting questions and/or comments on course readings (at reddit.com/r/amst202, minimum two comments per student per week) and liking comments you find particularly insightful. We will address these comments and questions in class. This is a small class, so everyones participation is necessary to make this experiment work. 10% Sheet Music Annotation. Select a piece of late 19th or early 20th Century sheet music from the course collection and use the markup.io tool available to annotate it, noting the significance of the lyrics, imagery, music (if you read music; you will not be penalized if you do not), and more. You are required to make a minimum of four annotations. 15% Visit America! Enter the debate over American meanings with this research paper or online presentation (4 pages or 1,000 words) that advances a point of view through creative use of historical and contemporary material supplemented with secondary research. You can use research to support a contemporary argument, your own or one gathered from current

conversations (e.g., America is a Christian nation, or Martin Luther King would not have supported affirmative action.) 30% Group Curation Project. This online multimedia project will curate (select, present, and interpret) a small body of primary sources and other materials for online presentation. Your subject will be selected and refined over the course of the class and each student in each group is responsible for developing one section of a larger exhibit. Each group members section must include at least two primary source texts (manuscript, oral history) and two cultural artifacts (film, TV show, fiction, object) as well as secondary research and a bibliography. Each student will write a minimum of 1,000 words. The project will be explained in detail in class. See examples of such online projects here: http://lumbee.web.unc.edu/online-exhibits-2/ 10% Final Exam. December 6, 4:00 pm. The final exam, written and submitted during the exam period, will be a critical self-assessment of your group research and analysis project. It will be described in detail well in advance of the exam date. Course Resources: Our course website is https://amst202.web.unc.edu. There you will find this syllabus, basic information about the class, links to readings and manuscripts, and more. This will also be the site of your group research projects: each project will constitute a page at the site. For our online discussion we will use reddit.com/r/amst202. Please create a new user name that is your name or close to itour discussion will be online but not anonymous and your use of the site is subject to the same standards of ethics and courtesy I expect in class. Once you have created your username, email it to me so I can add you as a user. I will create a discussion thread for each week. Each week, twice a week, you will add to that thread a question or comment for each set of readings by 1:00pm of the day of our class meeting to discuss them. Please read fellow students questions and comments. You can suggest answers to those questions by commenting and most important, vote up questions you want answered or comments you think are insightful. Please restrain yourselves from downvoting anything unless you find it particularly objectionableand then be prepared to justify your downvote in person, in class. Comments and questions rated most highly will shape our discussion. Course readings are available via this syllabus and through the course site. The only books you may need to purchase are the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, which need to be purchased with careful attention to the publication date. Used copies are available widely. Please let me know well in advance if you have trouble locating these books. Schedule: This schedule is subject to change. Any changes will be announced as early as possible. Wednesday, August 21: What Is This Class? In class: Introductions, goals, dire warnings, technology survey. Unit I: Defining Our Terms and an Introduction to Methods

 define and discuss concepts like race, gender, class, and culture develop and improve skills in locating and analyzing primary sources develop and improve skills in reading and interpreting secondary sources Friday, August 23: Essentialism and Constructionism Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery, Race, and Ideology in American History, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 181 (May-June 1990), 95-118. Daniel Wikberg, Heterosexual White Male: Some Recent Inversions in American Cultural History, The Journal of American History, Vol. 92, No. 1 (June 2005), 136-157. Monday, August 26: Cultural History and Material Culture Lawrence Levine, The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences, in The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; published online 2013). Mira Rubin, What Is Cultural History Now? in David Cannadine, ed., What Is History Now? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. (optional) Richard J. Evans, What Is History? Now, in Cannadine Wednesday, August 28: Social History Jurgen Kocka, Losses, Gains, and Opportunities, Journal of Social History, Vol. 1, No. 37 (2003), 21-28. Paul Cartledge, What Is Social History Now? in Cannadine, What Is History Now? Friday, August 30: Understanding Archives In class: Visit to the Southern Historical Collection. We will meet on the 4th floor of Wilson Library. Monday, September 2: NO CLASS (Labor Day) Unit II: Remembering the Old Folks Back Home: Creating Southern Identity explore the creation and re-creation of southern identity after the Civil War consider the importance of memory and memorialization explore the role of southern identity in shaping American identity Wednesday, September 4: Southern Identity in the Aftermath of the Civil War Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 43-75. Steven Hoelscher, Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 93, No. 3 (September 2003), 657-686. Friday, September 6: Memorialization and Reconciliation

Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, The Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 37-46, 63-75. Steven I. Weiss, You Wont Believe What the Government Spends on Confederate Graves, The Atlantic (July 19, 2013). Monday, September 9: Remembering the Old South Norman R. Yetman, An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives WPA slave narratives (choose five) In class: sheet music and recordings Wednesday, September 11: Confederates in the Attic Part I Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic, 3-88 Friday, September 13: Confederates in the Attic Part II Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic, 89-124 Monday, September 16: Forgetting, Remembering, and Reparations Thomas McCarthy, Coming to Terms with our Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery, Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 6 (December 2004), 750-772. Watch: This Is Prelinger Archives In class: The Plantation System in Southern Life (1950) **Sheet Music Annotation assignment due.** Wednesday, September 18: Group Project Planning Project brainstorming, group selection, and proposals. Bring group project questions and ideas to class. Be prepared to pitch your idea to your peers. We will form approximately four groups of four around four of your ideas. Friday, September 20: Working in Archives Our second library visit. We will meet on the 4th floor of Wilson Library. Unit III: The Changing Nature of Gender and Sexuality explore how gender roles and notions of sexuality changed over time examine the impact of understandings of gender on popular culture and vice versa examine the role of age categories in shaping gender identity, femininity, and masculinity Monday, September 23: The Curious Case of Nancy Drew Part I Ilana Nash, Radical Notions: Nancy Drew and Her Readers, 1930-1949 in American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 29-70. Carolyn Keene, The Secret of Red Gate Farm (1931)

(optional) Carol Billman, Nancy Drew: Gothic Detection, in The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Million Dollar Fiction Factory (New York: The Ungar Publishing Company, 1986), 99-122. Wednesday, September 25: The Curious Case of Nancy Drew Part II Leona Fisher, Race and Xenophobia in the Nancy Drew Novels, in Michael G. Cornelius and Melanie E. Gregg, eds., Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths: Essays on the Fiction of Girl Detectives (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008), 63-76. Carolyn Keene, The Witch Tree Symbol (1955) Friday, September 27: Group Project Work In class: With your group, discuss and create a contract, a specific topic, an outline, deliverables, and determine individual responsibilities. Monday, September 30: More or Less Gay George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994),1-32, 33-99. Wednesday, October 2: Being (the Hardy) Boys Part I Larry T. Shillock, The Hardy Boys Identity Narrative and The Tower Treasure in Michael G. Cornelius, The Boy Detectives: Essays on the Hardy Boys and Others (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2010), 19-35 (optional) Introduction: The Nomenclature of Boy Sleuths, in The Boy Detectives, 1-18. Franklin W. Dixon, The Tower Treasure (1927) Friday, October 4: Being (the Hardy) Boys Part II Franklin W. Dixon, The Tower Treasure (1959) Monday, October 7: Thinking about Feminism Kirsten Fermaglich and Lisa M. Fine, eds., Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013), 9-55. Joanne Meyerowitz, Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, The Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 4 (March 1993), 1455-82. Abigail Pogrebin, How Do You Spell Ms., New York, October 30, 2011. Wednesday, October 9: Feminism in Popular Culture Before class: Watch Scream (screening TBA) Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminisms Third Wave, Genders (Issue 3, 2008).

Unit IV: American Identity

 Assess how context informs the definition of American. Explore how some Americans have drawn boundaries around belonging. Discuss how Americans have used history to argue for their beliefs. Friday, October 11: Group Project Work In class: Devise and by the end of class email me a list of proposed sources and brief justifications for their use. Monday, October 14: The Mismeasure of Man Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1981), 50-72, 112-144 David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 36-53. Nicholas Wade, Scientists Measure the Accuracy of Racism Claims, New York Times, January 13, 2011. William Saletan, The Mismeasure of Stephen J. Gould Discover (Vol. 33, No. 1), 66. Wednesday, October 16: Americanism in the 1920s Lawrence W. Levine, Progress and Nostalgia: The Self-Image of the 1920s, in The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; published online 2013). David M. Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil RightsEra Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 16-42. Friday, October 18: NO CLASS (Fall Break) Monday, October 21: The Strange Career of Jim Crow G.W. Cable, The Silent South, Century Illustrated (September 1885):, 674. Klansville, U.S.A., 73-98. Wednesday, October 23: The Civil Rights Movement Jacquelyn Hall, The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past The Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (March 2005), 1233-1263. Watch: I Have a Dream, speech by Martin Luther King Jr. Friday, October 25: Looking at Americans In class: Who Are the People of America? Monday, October 28: Making Use of the Past with Archival Sources Our third library visit. We will meet on the 4th floor of Wilson Library. Wednesday, October 30: American Indian Nations and Federal Recognition

Malinda Maynor Lowery, Telling Our Own Stories: Lumbee History and the Federal Recognition Process, American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Fall 2009), 499-522. Unit V: Natural and Unnatural Spaces Explore the significance of the frontier, mobility, and confinement in American culture. Examine the history of incarceration as punishment for crime. Examine the history and significance of the West in American history and culture.

Friday, November 1: Wilderness William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness, Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, pp. 69-90 in William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), pp. 69-90. **Visit America! site selection due by 1:30** Monday, November 4: The Frontier Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History Dan Moos, Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, and the Role of the American West in National Belonging (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2005) Chapter 2: pp. 53-76. Wednesday, November 6: Confinement in Context David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (New York: Little, Brown, and Co.), 1980. Heather Ann Thompson, Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History, The Journal of American History, vol. 93, no. 3 (December 2010): 703-734. Friday, November 8: Group Project Work In class: Wordpress training **Visit America! assignment due by 1:30** Monday, November 11: Yegg Life Jack Black, You Cant Win (1926) Wednesday, November 13: Edge City, East Coast Version Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), Chs. 1 & 2, pp. 1-68. Friday, November 15: Edge City, West Coast Version Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 267-322.
8

Unit VI: Group Project Planning and Implementation Monday, November 18: Using Archives in Context Our fourth library visit. We will meet on the 4th floor of Wilson Library. Wednesday, November 20: Group Project work In class: Build the basic architecture of your Wordpress page. Friday, November 22: Group Project work In class: Begin or continue populating your Wordpress page with content. Monday, November 25: Group Project due In class: Final review and submission. **Group Project Due** Wednesday, November 27: NO CLASS (Thanksgiving break) Friday, November 29: NO CLASS (Thanksgiving break) Monday, December 2: Final Thoughts I [format TBD] Wednesday, December 4: Final Thoughts II [format TBD] December 6: Final Exam (4:00pm) In class self-assessment.