American Studies Course Descriptions, Fall 2005

AMST 6E: The Indians New Worlds: Southeastern Indian Histories from 1200 to 1800.

Section 1: Michael Green

3:30 TR, Murphey 204

By AD 1200, most Southeastern Indians were farmers who lived in societies ruled by hereditary chiefs. After 1500, encounters between Indians and Europeans changed the lives of all concerned, but the changes took place in and were shaped by existing cultures. This seminar uses reading, discussion, and lecture to examine the cultures and histories of Southern Indians and to understand how European exploration and colonization changed the world of Native Southerners. Students will learn how ethnohistorians study and interpret Native American history. Grades will be awarded for class participation, two short papers and a final essay exam.

AMST 006E: Access to Higher Education

(Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative and First Year Seminar)
Section 2: Rachel Willis

10 MWF; 212 Graham Memorial

Access to higher education requires ability, experience, and skills. Success in application, admission, matriculation, and graduation is a function of numerous other advantages as well. This course explores barriers to access to American colleges and universities with a particular focus on disadvantages created through differences in three linked dimensions: socioeconomic circumstances, the increasing role of digital technologies in higher education, and barriers for students with physical disabilities.

A broad survey of the college admissions process and policies concerning equitable access to higher education will be supplemented each term with a range of resources that focus on a specific disadvantage. As a Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative offering, this FYS has an additional goal of developing the social entrepreneurial skills of seminar students. An active service-learning pedagogy will facilitate the development, implementation, and documentation of a team project to improve access to schools in the UNC system with respect to the current focus.

Immediately after the FYS seminar on Monday’s, students will be encouraged to sit in on the plenary lectures of AMST 94, The Role of the University in American Life. Serving as a supplemental speaker series on related topics, the sessions will also be available on tape at the Undergraduate Library. In the inaugural offering of the course, the focus will be on access for individuals with mobility disabilities. A simulation exercise early in the term will highlight the range of campus access barriers facing students with disabilities. Guest lectures from experts in disability policy and universal design architectural standards will supplement lectures and readings on the Americans with Disabilities Act. The students will implement the UNC ACCESS “Accessible Campus Climate for Everyone Site Survey” Project. The long-term goal of the course is to have some of the FYS students take the initiative to develop projects to improve equitable access in additional dimensions over the course of their college careers.

AMST 06I: Birth and Death in America

Section 1; Tim Marr

12:30 TR; 210 Graham Memorial

This course explores birth and death as essential human rites of passage whose meanings have changed in different American historical and cultural contexts. Since both are defining life events that none of us can recall or relate with experiential authority, examining them offers powerful insights into how culture mediates the social construction of bodies and identities. In contrast to most of American history, birth and death in the United States today remain shrouded behind conventions of privacy and medical confidentiality. This seminar engages in active interdisciplinary learning to expose the ways that different processes of cultural power have historically defined the meanings of the beginning and end of life. Readings and assignments are designed to provoke new understandings of birth and death by examining the changing anthropological rituals, medical procedures, scientific technologies, religious meanings, and ethical quandaries surrounding them. We will also explore a variety of representations of birth and death in literary expression, film, material culture, and social institutions.

AMST 10: Native North America

Section 1: Theda Perdue

11 MWF, Venable 207

This interdisciplinary course addresses the cultures, histories, arts, and literature of North American Indians. Lectures focus on general themes, and small discussion sections explore how these themes apply to a particular tribe.

AMST 40: Approaches to American Studies

Section 1: Jay Garcia

9 MWF; Murphey 204

An introduction to methods and materials in the interdisciplinary study of
American society, including theoretical influences upon research in American Studies. The course explores interpretive practices within the field by focusing on three different historical moments and considering a range of literary and visual artifacts. The course examines the effects of the Spanish-American War on the domestic scene, cultural criticism in the 1910s, and narratives about migration from the 1990s. Throughout the course we will investigate relevant international contexts for understanding developments and changes in American culture and consider scholarship from across the disciplines on "race" and racialized relations in American society.

AMST 57: Herman Melville: Culture and Criticism

Section 1: Tim Marr

5:00-6:15 TR; 302 Greenlaw

This seminar investigates the significance of Herman Melville as an exciting nineteenth-century American author whose works continue to speak with power to different generations of readers. The course places Melville and his literary creations both in the context of their production as well as across a spectrum of evolving critical paradigms. Despite being “the very type of the white, male and culturally elite writer,” claims critic Myra Jehlen, “Melville has been as interesting and compelling a writer for New Historicists, Feminists, Deconstructionists, and African-Americanists as any other American writer.” The course will explore issues and problems in biography, influence, textual authority, and changing reception, as well as examine cultural approaches that analyze Melville’s engagement with nation, gender, sexuality, “race,” ethnicity, class, and the politics of the literary marketplace. Texts include /Typee/; /Moby-Dick/; /Pierre/; /The Piazza Tales/; /Billy-Budd, Sailor/; and selected poems. Readings also include historical sources and examples of critical reception ranging from popular reviews from the time of publication to present analytical readings from a wide variety of theoretical approaches. The course will examine the status of Melville and his work today, especially /Moby-Dick/ and its characters, as central icons of American memory, as shown in recent popular culture, film, and art.

AMST 62: Topics in Mid-Twentieth Century American Thought and Culture

Section 1: Jay Garcia

1 MWF; 204 Murphey

This course examines several topics in the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in the mid-twentieth century, bringing into view many dimensions of a formative and complex period in the making of modern American culture. Using a range of cultural forms and documents, including novels, films, and paintings, we will analyze some of the leading conceptual paradigms of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, including visions of the "American Century" and the "vital center" of Cold War liberalism. In addition, we will
explore prevalent modes of race thinking, debates about the effects of mass culture, and the role of gender ideologies in shaping the discourses of the period.

AMST 72A: Eastern Native Americans

Section 1: Michael Green

12:30 TR, 431 Greenlaw

By using culture as a category of analysis, students will be able to gain a fuller understanding of why and how Indian societies changed, how Native people adapted to the European presence, and how the policies of interaction between Indians and non-Indians developed. The course focuses on the region east of the Mississippi River (the Woodlands) and covers the period from pre-Columbus to the end of removal in the 1840s. Content is a mixture of tribal histories, US policy history, and the interactions between them.

AMST80: “Shalom Y’all”: The Jewish Experience in the American South

Section 1: Marcie Cohen Ferris

2 MWF; 204 Murphey

This course explores ethnicity in the South and focuses on the experience of Jewish southerners. Since the arrival of Sephardic Jews in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, southern Jews have blended their regional identity as Jews and as Southerners. This course explores the “braided identity” of Jews in the South---their relationships with white and black Gentile southerners, their loyalty to the South as a region, and their embrace of southern culture through foodways and religious observance. The course traces the history of Jewish southerners from the colonial era to the present, using film, museum exhibits, literature, and material culture as resources. Throughout the course we consider the question of southern Jewish distinctiveness. Is southern Jewish culture distinctive from Jewish culture in other regions of the country, and if so, why? Is region a significant factor in American Jewish identity? Students will explore these issues through class discussion, book and film reviews, and a research paper.

AMST 83: Seeing America: Visual Culture and American Studies
Section 1: Joy Kasson
11 TR; 212 Graham Memorial
This course will explore visual culture throughout American history; that is, it will examine the ways in which visual objects—paintings, photographs, sculpture, architecture, film, advertising images, and other images—communicate the values of American culture and raise questions about American experiences. Topics will include colonial portraits, nineteenth-century sculptures of women, photographic images of New York and the works of major artists including Charles Willson Peale, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock; family photographs; architecture; and (in conjunction with an upcoming exhibition at the Ackland Art Museum) the work of contemporary African-American artist Bettye Saar. Students will write short papers and an individually-designed project.

AMST 94: The Role of the University in American Life

Section 1: Rachel Willis 11-12:15 M; 039 Graham Memorial

Section 601: Kevin FitzGerald 11-12:15 W; 176 Hinton James

Section 602: Lynne Blanchard 11-12:15 W; 144 Craige-North

Section 603: Jerome Lucido 11-12:15 W; 172 Craige-North

This capstone course and field lab is for juniors and seniors and is multifaceted in its inquiry of the role of the University in America. UNC and area colleges and Universities are used as case studies in the course and optional field lab. This course is team-taught by seminar faculty members and plenary guest lecturers with strong interdisciplinary interests that relate broadly to the University and specific expertise, which relates to the role that UNC has played in America in a particular field.

Core lectures on higher education and UNC will be the focus of the plenary sections with guest lectures from key participants in past and current University events, including President Molly Broad, Chancellor James Moeser, President Emeritus William Friday and many others. All students participate jointly in the Monday plenary sessions and then enroll in one of the Wednesday seminar offerings. There are three joint sections of the course offered for the Fall 2005. Each seminar section enrolls a maximum of twenty students and meets on Wednesday with the seminar professor. The three distinct seminar sections are taught by distinguished leaders with expertise in the field of focus.

Section 601: “The Role of the University and the Transformation of the North
Carolina Economy” will be offered by Kevin FitzGerald of the University of North Carolina’s School of Government. The seminar will explore historical and current interactions between the University of North Carolina and the State of North Carolina during periods of significant structural changes in the state and local economy. Currently Special Assistant to the Chancellor for State Government Relations and Director of the Center for Public Technologies, FitzGerald’s Master’s in Public Administration is from the University of North Carolina. He has been responsible for managing significant policy and financing reforms as Director of the North Carolina Division of Social Services.

Section 602 focuses "The Engaged University" and will be offered by
Dr. Lynn Blanchard, the Director of the Carolina Center for Public Service. During this section students will learn about various methods and trends that define an engaged university; explore how institutions help meet the needs of the community through teaching, research, and service; and develop a project that will put what they learn into action. The service learning component will require 30 service hours and count towards the Public Service Scholars requirements. For five years before returning to UNC in January, 2002, she served as Vice Chair of Community Initiatives in the Department of Community Health and Health Studies at Lehigh Valley Hospital and as Associate Professor in the Department of Health Evaluation Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine.

Section 603 will be entitled “College Admission and the Public Interest” and offered by Dr. Jerome Lucido, Vice Provost for Enrollment Management and Director of Undergraduate Admissions. This seminar will examine college admission and financial aid practices and explore their impact on various aspects of American society and culture. Previously in Admissions at the University of Arizona, Lucido has also been responsible for many of the policies and programs affecting the student body at Carolina including the decision to drop early admissions at the University of North Carolina. Additionally, he played a leadership role in the development of the Carolina Covenant, a program to enable eligible students to attend the University and graduate debt-free.

AMST 94L: Field Lab
Section 1; Courtney Thornton
11-3 F
In addition, students can enroll for AMST 094L, the optional field lab, for one unit. Friday labs will be spent touring specific parts of UNC and area campuses. AS 94 is a co-requisite or pre-requisite for AS94L (i.e. you can wait to take the lab in a future year, but you can't take the lab without the course). Courtney Thornton, a doctoral student in education at North Carolina State University, will be in charge of the field lab. Thornton is completing her thesis on “Civic Responsibility and Research Universities: Ideology, Culture and Action” using the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia as case studies.

AMST 150: Poetry and The Muse of History
Section 1: Natasha Trethewey

W 3:00-5:50; 204 Murphey
William Faulkner has said, “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. Similarly, in his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot declared that the “historical sense is indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” These writers are talking about slightly different things—both of which will underscore our concerns in this course: an awareness of history, of past events and their lingering effects on the present, and a knowledge of the literature of the past and its influence. Furthermore, as scholar James Longenbach puts it, “in addition to being many other things, poems are statements about our place in the world, and like every other act of communication, they are historical.” Thus, this workshop will focus on the writing of poems which seek to engage and document local histories—those histories both public and private—that allow us to place the explorations of our own experiences within a larger historical context. In so doing, we will explore the rifts between larger histories (the stuff of cultural or public memory) and smaller, often subjugated or lost histories, and personal histories. We will discuss the ways in which some poets have used history in their work, define some strategies for using information gathered from our research, and begin writing some new poems that engage those histories to which we have some connection.

AMST 260: The James Family

Section 1: Robert Richardson

W 2:00-4:50; 204 Murphey

The James family was an extraordinary collection of talented, troubled, verbally exuberant persons. Taken one by one, they represent some of the high points of American literature and thought. Taken as a group they represent a great deal of America itself from about 1840 to 1920. The Father, Henry James Sr. was a Swedenborgian, a Sandemanian, a Calvinist, a controversialist, and an educator; he was an impossible, lovable man. His eldest son William was first an artist, then a medical student, then a naturalist, then a physiologist, then a psychologist, then a philosopher and a student of religion. Whitehead thought him one of the four persons in history to do essential philosophical assembly. The next son, Henry became a great novelist. The next two boys fought in the Civil War, then fell apart. The youngest sibling was a sister, Alice, an invalid who wrote a great diary and some remarkable letters. In the next generation, William's oldest son, Henry III, wrote a never published life of his mother Alice Howe Gibbens (Mrs. William James). We will read several essays by Henry Sr. probably "Emerson" "Carlyle" and Marriage." We will also read some selections from his books, notably Society the Redeemed Form of Man. After two weeks on Henry Sr., we will spend four or five weeks on Henry Jr., reading an early novel, a middle novel and a sheaf of stories from all periods. Currently planned are The American, The Portrait of a Lady, "Daisy Miller," "The Lesson of the Master," "The Beast in the Jungle," and "The Figure in the Carpet." If most of the participants have already read these we will read others instead. We will spend four or five weeks on William, focusing on his Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe. We will spend two weeks on Alice James and her remarkable life and achievement, then a final week on Henry III's wonderful manuscript life of his mother. Students will be able to present reports and write papers on a vary wide range of topics, some of them with real publishing potential. Our approach will be eclectic; biographical, historical, philosophical, psychological, cultural, and religious perspectives will be central.

AMST 260: The Law and Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Era

Section 2: Sally Greene

T 2:20 – 5:10; 4046 Van Hecke-Wettach

This seminar will introduce students to the law and rhetoric of the civil rights era through contextual analyses of a series of landmark cases. Focusing on the career of Alabama federal district judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and the contentious political context against which it unfolded, we will consider the questions of how judges (and lawyers) endeavor, through language, both to maintain the stability and coherence of the communities in which they find themselves and to bend those communities toward a greater sense of justice.

An important premise will be that judicial law evolves as a series of stories. Working from the interdisciplinary criticism of James Boyd White, Jr., Peter Brooks, Paul Gewirtz and others, we will analyze the narrative and rhetorical framework of each decision. As a means of considering alternative versions of the same civil rights stories, we will study works of literature by African-American writers Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Edgar Wideman, and others. The sequence of readings begins long before Johnson’s time--with Plessy v. Ferguson, whose dissent was for Johnson a formative document. We will also consider a couple of more recent cases (Shelley v. Kraemer, Brown v. Board of Education) before moving on to Johnson’s body of creative and persuasive civil rights decisions, which begin with the Rosa Parks case (Browder v. Gayle). Consistently, the focus will remain on the ways in which the decision, or the related work of literature, becomes “an argumentative reconstruction of its culture”--a culture that is “never fixed, only performed” within a specific, always dynamic context (White). The syllabus is available here: http://sallygreene.org/law_rhetoric.pdf .