Dynamic Syllabi for American Studies
History
History of the United States I
Dr. Reinhold Wagnleitner, University of Salzburg
The lecture will deal with the (pre-) history of the United States of America from the first colonial contacts to the American Revolution. Some keywords: discovery or conquest; "Indians" as "involuntary Americans"; the American Dream; the colonial period; slavery; the capitalist world system; the American Revolution; the conquest of the continent; a land of immigrants; the role of women, democracy vs. ethnocracy. The second and third parts of this series of lectures, which will deal with the history of the United States until the present, will be presented during the coming semesters.
American History to 1877
Gary Kornblith, Oberlin College
An electronic syllabus with links to relevant web sites, documents, etc. This effort stems from the New Media Classroom Summer Institute that Randy Bass helped lead.
The Industrial Revolution in America
Gary Kornblith, Oberlin College
This course focuses on the 19th century and includes links to a wide array of documents and downloadable files.
Civil War to the Present
Stanley Schultz, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This course, conducted in the classroom, online, and on local Wisconsin cable TV, traces American history from the Civil War to the present. Key texts include Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
History of American Religion
Briane Turley, West Virginia University
Pluralism vs. cultural identity in light of the historical development of religion in the United States/European religious traditions transplanted into 17th century America; traditions indigenous to North America; and the underlying American consciousness of manifest destiny, sacred space, and the characterization of Americans as a 'chosen people.' Syllabus, assignments, and links to related materials.
History of the Old South
Sally Hadden, Florida State University
Syllabus, calendar, assignments, exams, and links to related materials, such as Old South websites, research guides in history, and maps of the South.
Multicultural Pasts
Robert A. Gross, William and Mary
This course explores the field of American Studies through the lens of multiculturalism. It offers a critical scrutiny of past and present scholarship about the United States as a pluralistic society.
The Beat Begins: American Culture in the 1950s
Michael L. Hall and Peter Losin, The University of Maryland at College Park
The '50s was a decade of enormous, growth, energy, and variety. Movements that would explode in the '60s were gathering momentum. We look at the shifts that were taking place beneath the deceptively calm surface in the years after World War II and prior to the assassination of President Kennedy. Syllabus, calendar, assignments, and links to related materials.
Popular Cultures and Media Cultures
The Jazz Age
Lori Landay, Berklee College of Music
Youth Culture in Modern America
Michael Goldberg, University of Washington, Bothell
This is an advanced, interdisciplinary course that explores the development of various youth cultures in post-1945 America. It seeks to understand the relationship between youth cultures, mass culture, and adult mainstream society, and the way each shapes and is shaped by the other. Beyond the dynamic between youth and society, this course explores the intersection of youth cultures and relations based on gender, race, class, region, and geography. By studying the image and reality of these youth cultures, and the cultural forms created both by and for them, we can learn much about both youth and American society during this period.
Popular Culture in the 1960s
Tom Bacig, University of Minnesota, Duluth
The 1960's are often described as a period which produced profound changes in European and American Culture, and subsequently throughout the world. What is interesting about these perceptions is that increasingly many recognize that these "revolutionary" times were part of a continuing tradition of tension between the generations that seems typical of the emergence of the "modern world." The purpose of this class is to explore the ideas that were at the center of the sixties counter-culture in the United States and discover their connections to the long history of such ideas in human experience.
American Popular Culture
T.V. Reed, Washington State University
This course provides an upper-level introduction to critical issues and approaches in the study of recent American popular culture.
Literature and Text Studies
1925 in American Literature and Culture
Prof. Nicolas Witschi, Western Michigan University
A cultural studies/historicist examination of what is at stake in literary periodization, this course will explore the many intersections, convergences, and divergences evident in the cultural production of this single year.
American Indian Literature and Cultures (Laura Arnold, Reed College, Oregon)
This course examines American Indian literature and cultures with a particularattention to the Pacific Northwest; we will also consider literature from the Plains, the Southwest, and the Midwest.
American Literature to 1865 (Tom Scanlan and Matthew Kirschenabum [TA], University of Virginia)
Survey course from the early exploration and colonial writings through the American Renaissance. Site includes links to Web-based projects undertaken by students in lieu of a term paper.
American Literature to the Civil War (Phil Landon, University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
English 307 is a familiar survey of early American literature. It emphasizes the Puritan influence on American literature.
Gender & Sexuality in Early American Literature & Culture (Laura Arnold, Reed College, Oregon)
This course explores the origins and development of masculinity and femininity in American literature to 1865, paying close attention to how gender and sexuality were used to construct individual, communal, and racial identities and how definitions of transgressive behavior changed during periods of social unrest and cultural anxiety.
American Nature Writing (Ann Woodlief, Virginia Commonwealth University)
Taught every spring, this on-line course is a survey of American nature writing with both literary and an environmental studies emphases.
American Romanticism (Ann Woodlief, Virginia Commonwealth University)
An on-line course which surveys the major 19th century American writers.
American Transcendentalism (Ann Woodlief, Virginia Commonwealth University)
A graduate-level course on American Transcendentalism which produced the American Transcendental Web at http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transweb.
Nation and Narration (Laura Arnold, Reed College, Oregon)
This class investigates how the diverse literary genres of the American Renaissance have been used to construct a national identity in the mid-nineteenth-century, the 1940s, and the 1990s.
Technology for the Humanities: Herman Melville in Antebellum America (Kathie Fox, Northwesten CT Community-Technical College)
In this course, the focus of the class is to use the web as a way to analyze the works of Herman Melville.
20th-Century American Bestsellers (John Unsworth, University of Virginia)
This course focuses on 20th-Century American Bestsellers. Each student picks one bestseller published between 1900 and 1994, and contributes into a web-accessible database a bibliographic description of a first edition, a publishing history, a reception history, a biographical sketch, and a critical essay or an electronic edition.
Print, Literacy and Power: To 1900 (Mary Kay Duggan, University of California, Berkeley)
The course focuses on European Americans, Native Americans, African Americans and, in the western United States, Asian Americans and Chicano/Latinos. It explores the nature of oral and print societies as found in the focus cultures and uses contemporary print material to assess the impact of a controlling print culture on oral cultures. Image in woodcut and engraving is assessed as information and as propaganda.
Fiction of Postmodern America: Multicultural Perspectives (T.V. Reed, Washington State University)
Interrogates the concepts of postmodernity and postmodernism through contemporary fiction texts written by U.S. citizens of varying racial, ethnic, regional, gender and sexual positionings. Syllabus, calendar, assignments and links to related materials.
Visual Culture
Western Art Since 1500 - Fine Arts 121
Andrea Pappas, University of Southern California
Surveys painting, sculpture, architecture and photography in Europe and the United States from the Counter-Reformation to the present (introductory/freshman-level course). Syllabus, calendar, assignments, exams, student work, and links to related materials.
Ways of Seeing
Lori Landay, Berklee College of Music
How is meaning made in visual culture? How do the relations of looking created in painting, photography, film, animation, advertising, digital video, and new media reflect and shape how we define identity and interact socially? How do we see ourselves? Each other? How do visual images combine with words and other media to express different ways of seeing? This interdisciplinary course takes a Cultural Studies approach to explore the methods and practices of "seeing" and what it means to be seen.
Hollywood Cinema and Genre
Michael Goldberg, University of Washington, Bothell
The course explores traditional as well as innovative approaches to the study of film in order to examine the cinema as an institution of cultural affirmation and contestation within modern society. In order to highlight how mainstream cinema supports but potentially also challenges dominant ideologies of our society, the course focuses on genre films and on genre criticism, specifically on Hollywood films (and one non-Hollywood film) from the 30s to the 90s which exemplify romantic comedies and gangster films.
Resistance and Recovery: Cinematic Representations of Femininity by Black Women Filmmakers in the African Diaspora
Y. Sims, Ph.D.
This is a model syllabus for a course and final project that I designed while attending an NEH seminar at the University of Missouri in the summer of 2001. Although I have not taught this course, I hope to teach it in an American Studies Department or Program. It lends itself to an interdisciplinary approach and can also be taught in an Ethnic Studies, Womens Studies, Film Studies or Popular Culture setting. I envision this course as two semesters with the first half of the semester focused on filmmakers in the United States and Great Britain and the second half focused on the West Indies, South America and Africa (leaving individual instructors to name specific countries that they would like to cover).
Music
Jazz Improvisation
Joan Wildman, the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Course description, articles, and pointers to related readings.
Jazz and American Popular Music at Home and Abroad
Reinhold Wagnleitner, University of Salzburg, and Lewis A. Erenberg, Loyola University, Chicago
This site contains the syllabus of the course, a map of the development of jazz styles, rich lists of suggested readings, and many useful links about jazz and American popular music.
Performance
Tourist Productions
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, New York University
Taking a performance studies approach to tourism, broadly conceived, we will analyze specific sites and events, including museums, festivals, historic recreations, and heritage precincts. The course is divided into five parts: the tourism industry, its history, structure, and discourses; primitivism, visuality, artifactuality, and the avant-garde; public memory and the problem of heritage; performed theory in the metamuseum; African tourisms of diaspora and empire, and abject tourisms of war.
Race and Ethnicity
The Souls of Black Folk: Re-reading a World Classic
Jennifer Wager, The W.E.B. Du Bois University
The class is part of a larger endeavor to bring the study of the African Diaspora to to scholars, activists, and students. The site's Virtual University offers free Internet training classes to address the rising inequality between the technology 'haves' and 'have nots.' Syllabus, calendar, assignments, student work, and links to related materials.
Comparative American Studies: Ethnicity, Race, and Nationality (Deborah Whaley, University of Massachusetts, Boston; current Visiting Scholar at UC Santa Cruz)
The course is a graduate level comparative American Studies course that focuses on Ethnicity, Race, and Nationality. It covers popular culture, music studies, critical race theory and critical legal studies, the history of the American Studies movement, theories of ethnicity and race, film studies, visual culture studies, and social and cultural history.The website has a navigation key to help guide users. I included detailed descriptions of assignments, weekly discussion questions, links to readings, links to further reading on terminology and subject matter, links to film and music clips, and a slide show of students' final projects for the Fall semester, 2002. At the end of the syllabus, I provide a link to notes on the course design, how the website was "used" by students, and the outcome of the course.
Religion
Religion in the South (Dr. Terry L. Matthews, Wake Forest )
Graduate course. Syllabus, calendar, lecture notes, assignments, exams, student work and links to related materials.
Religion in the United States (Dr. Terry L. Matthews, Wake Forest )
Undergraduate course. Syllabus, calendar, lecture notes, assignments, exams, student work and links to related materials.
Material Culture
Material Aspects of American Life (Mary Corbin Sies, David Silver [TA], and Psyche Williams [TA], University of Maryland, College Park)
In this course we will investigate together the rich potential of "things" -- objects, landscapes, and buildings -- as sources of insight about American culture. Through readings, discussions, presentations, and exhibitions, we will analyze everything from coke bottles to cosmetics, fashions to fanners, townhouses to terrapins -- to discover the meanings that these cultural products held for those who created and consumed them. Along the way, we will learn and apply a field technique for analyzing artifacts and create three "virtual" exhibitions to display the results of our collective research.
Politics, Government and Public Policy
American Government (Dr. Daniel J. O'Shea, Hillsborough Community College)
Nature, purposes and forms of American government. In-depth coverage of the three branches of government, the relation of function and structure, dynamics of political change, political parties and political campaign management, and an understanding of governmental problems in the modern American society. Syllabus, calendar, assignments, and links to related materials.
Politics and Public Policy (Gary Klass, Illinois State University)
Examines the causes and consequences of American public policies, often involving comparisons of American policies with those of other industrialized democracies. Syllabus, calendar, and links to related materials.
Race, Ethnicity and Social Inequality (Gary Klass, Illinois State University )
Contemporary books on issues concerning race, ethnicity and social inequality, primarily in the United States. Employs an open discussion list Syllabus, calendar, assignments, student work.
Science, Technology and Society
Text, Knowlege, and Pedagogy in the Electronic Age (Randy Bass, Georgetown University, and David Silver [RA], University of Maryland, College Park)
This graduate course explores the shifting nature of knowledge and pedagogy in the Electronic Age. Course particulars include the impact of hypertext on readers and reading, issues surrounding virtual communities and identity, and the shifting paradigms involved with electronic pedagogies.
Interpreting Cyberspace (Susan Garfinkel, University of Pennsylvania)
In this course we will examine what happens to the relationship of subject, author, text and the world in this context of computer mediation, in this "consensual hallucination" where information becomes architecture and words stand in for bodies.
The Nature of Technology (Lori Landay, Berklee College of Music)
Images & stories about technology change over time, as do the hopes & fears that new technologies present. By imagining what might be, we explore new forms of identity & community.
Community Studies
Town Planning in Post-Suburban America (Michael Stern, University of Virginia, Neal Payton, The Catholic University of America, and Keith Robbins [TA])
This is the home page for the urban design studio studying a master plan for the "edge city" of Owings Mills, MD. This course is a joint project between the Department of Landscape Architecture, UVA and the Department of Architecture, CUA.
American Suburbia (Mary Corbin Sies and Psyche Williams [TA], University of Maryland, College Park)
In this seminar, we will consider whether suburbia's reputation is deserved as we explore the people, the environment, and the values associated with American suburbs, particularly in the post-WWII era. Over the course of the semester, we will analyse the evolving patterns of postwar suburban life from a variety of perspectives: history, literature, film, journalism, sociology, architecture, and material culture.
Disability Studies
Disability and the Body (Michael Goldberg, University of Washington, Bothell)
Who is "disabled" or "Ill"? Who is "deformed"? Who is "normal" and "healthy"? How do different groups perceive each other, how is this manifested in their discursive practices, and how does it affect the way people act both individually and as a society? With these foundational questions in mind, we will examine how the historical roots and current cultural context of "disability" in America have shaped the Disability Rights movement(s) and the laws, policies, and legal actions that it generated, especially the Americans with Disabilities Act. In turn, we will consider how the movement, the larger disability community, and the notion of disability in general have shaped American "mainstream" culture.