Fall 2007

American Studies Course Description

Fall 2007

AMST 53:  The Family & Social Change in America
Section 1:  Robert Allen
2:00 – 4:30 W; 213 Graham Memorial

This course uses changes in the American family over the past century as a way of understanding larger processes of social change.  Through original research, reading, and discussion, we will consider how changes in the family as a social institution reflect and contribute to other social and cultural changes occuring in the U.S. across the 20th century.  We will examine changing notions of romance, marriage and divorce, parenting, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood.

The course is organized as a project-based learning experience.  Each student will engage in a semester-long exploration of the last three generations of his/her family.  Students will use archival resources (census records, marriage and death certificates, estate records, military service records, immigration records), oral history interviews with family members, family letters and photographs, and other materials to learn more about “where they came from” in both a literal and a figurative sense.  They will explore the relationship between the life events of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents and the larger historical contexts of those events (migration, economic upheavals, wars, etc.).

The project will also entail designing and making a “family album” drawn from this research.  The album (which may be a scrapbook, video, multimedia work, set of historical narratives, or other medium) will represent each student’s effort to link his/her family’s history with larger currents in American history of the 20th century.

In addition to the family album, each student will prepare a brief (15 minute) PowerPoint presentation drawn from his/her research.  These will be presented to the class as a whole at the end of the semester, with families invited to attend.

Class reading and discussion will focus on how the institutions of family: marriage, parenthood, maternity, paternity, adoption, divorce, etc.—have changed over the past 200 years or so.

You will document your research project in an electronic journal.  This will also be a place for you to link our reading and class discussion to the particularities of your family’s history.

This seminar welcomes all first-year students.  Because of the availability of archival resources in the area (the North Carolina Collection at UNC, as well as the State Archives in Raleigh), students with family roots in North Carolina might find the course’s project particularly rewarding.  No prior knowledge of family history is required.  Students will be asked to begin work on their projects over the semester break by collecting and copying family records and photographs and interviewing family members.

The course’s project-based structure is particularly well-suited to students with a strong desire to learn more about their family history who are willing to engage in an independent, long-term, unpredictable research undertaking.  The course structure and goals reward self-motivation, resourcefulness, initiative, persistence, and imagination.

This course will meet once each week: Wednesdays 2:00-4:30 p.m.  It is essential that all students have this time period free on their calendars each week of the semester.

AMST 055:  Birth and Death in the United States

Section 1:  Timothy Marr

9:30 TR:  212 Graham Memorial

This course explores birth and death as essential human rites of passage defined by changing American historical and cultural contexts. Birth and death define life in ways that none of us can recall or relate with experiential authority, so examining them provides powerful insights into how culture mediates the construction of bodies and social identities. In contrast to much of America’s history, birth and death in contemporary United States are shrouded behind conventions of privacy and medical confidentiality. This seminar uses active interdisciplinary learning to expose the ways that various Americans have historically defined the meanings of these passages through different processes of cultural power. Readings and assignments are designed to provoke dynamic understandings of birth and death by examining the changing anthropological rituals, medical procedures, scientific technologies, religious meanings, and ethical quandaries surrounding them. We will explore a variety of representations of birth and death in literary expression, film, material culture, and institutional practice.

AMST 110:   Introduction to the Cultures and Histories of Native North America

Section 1:  Theda Perdue

12:00 MW; 201 Chapman Hall

Recitation required.

An interdisciplinary introduction to Native American history and studies. The course uses history, literature, art, and cultural studies to study the Native American experience.

AMST 201:  Approaches to AMST:  Individualizing the Nation

Section 1:  Tol Foster

9 MWF; Murphey 115

Utilizing personal narrative, autobiography, journalism, poetry, and film, this course will consider the idea of the individual in its many forms throughout American history.  The course will focus on the interrelations between individuals and communities, individuals in history, personal narratives as fictional constructions, essays about the larger world as, in part, autobiographical accounts, and experimental notions of the self.  Although the course will draw
widely on numerous texts in the American Studies tradition, including histories, documentaries, and essays, some primary texts will include Ben Franklin's Autobiography, Joe Brainard's I Remember, and Theresa Hak Yung Cha's Dictee, and the film Being John Malkovitch.

AMST 231:  Eastern Native Americans

Section 1:  Michael Green

9:30 TR, Bingham 103

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.

AMST 234: Tribal Studies:  Creek Ethnohistory

Section 1:  Michael Green

2-3:15 TR; Murphey 204

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to current scholarship on the Creeks and to the primary sources that scholars use in writing about them. It also seeks to familiarize students with ethnohistory, an interdisciplinary methodology developed specifically to study the Native American past. The course will help students achieve the following goals:

1. Understand a culture different from their own

2. Identify ways in which that culture changes

3. Appreciate the complexity of culture change

4. Recognize shifts in United States Indian policy

5. Become aware of current issues of importance to Creeks

6. Analyze documents ethnohistorically

AMST290:  Introduction to Native American Literature

Section 1: Tol Foster

1 MWF; Greenlaw 431

This survey course will set out the context of Native American cultural and historical life through the exploration of literature in a variety of genres. Native critical terms and concepts, as well as major historical moments in Native history, will be elucidated through oral literature, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, film, and novels, primarily drawn from the twentieth century, and from tribal groups of the continental United States.  Although minor texts and authors will be included, major writers and texts will include Charles Eastman (Indian Boyhood), Leslie Marmon Silko (Storyteller), Pretty Shield (Pretty Shield), James Welch (Fools Crow), Thomas King (Green Grass, Running Water), and Sherman Alexie’s film The Business of Fancy Dancing.

AMST 256:  Anti-Fifties: Voices of a Counterdecade

Section 1:  Robert Cantwell

9:30 TR; 304 Dey Hall

            We remember the nineteen-fifties as a period of relative tranquility, happiness, optimism and contentment. The decade saw unprecedented prosperity, an expanding middle class, the consolidation of a postwar national security state and the ascendancy of America as a global power, with all that such power implies for culture and popular life. The picture is not altogether mistaken. At the same time the ‘fifties had its sores and blemishes: a passionate social conformity, a crass and overblown consumerism, a fatuous ideology of the family, as well as the usual forms of racism, anti-semitism, homophobia and class resentment which in such eruptions and McCarthyism enjoyed episodes of national assent. But in a general way we continue to regard the period as one of innocence and hope, and tend to treat it as a watershed of value to which we still appeal in order to understand what appears to be the deterioration of the family, the political system, public education and culture in our own time.

             This course will consider a handful of counter-texts: voices from literature, politics, and mass culture of the nineteen-fifties that each for one or another reason found life in the postwar world repressive, empty, frightening, or insane, and predicted the social and cultural revolutions that marked the decade that followed.

AMST 259: Tobacco and America

Section 1:  Timothy Marr

12:30 TR; 307 Dey

This interdisciplinary APPLES course examines a plant of great local importance to focus on changing histories of land use, social style, leisure, marketing, public health, and global capitalism. We will explore different cultures of tobacco in America ranging from traditional Native American ceremony, to the economy of the South, up to recent battles in the courts. The course will consider diverse perspectives from agriculture, epidemiology, literature, popular music and film, folklore, labor and legal history, advertising and material culture.  Please note that the central learning in this course will emerge from an engaged long-term service project with a community institution addressing key tobacco-related issues in North Carolina today.

AMST 292:  Race and Empire in Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History

Section 1:  Jay Garcia

3-5:30 W, Murphey 105 (note:  time may change – check with dept)

This upper-level seminar explores twentieth-century writings on race, empire and colonialism by American intellectuals. In a number of genres and in several different contexts, American writers have examined the history of empire, engaging in dialogues with anti-colonial writers from elsewhere in the world. Through commentaries on race and empire in the modern world, American writers have analyzed a wide range of subjects, including the role of the intellectual in society, the rise of fascism, and the relationships between majorities and minorities both domestically and internationally. In turning their gaze outward on various international scenes, many writers revised available perspectives on American society and culture. Readings include select anti-colonial narratives originating in other parts of the world that proved influential during particular moments in American intellectual life. Readings will include books and essays by W. E B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, Lillian Smith, C. L. R. James, and Frantz Fanon, among others.

AMST 293:  American Life and the Jewish Writer

Section 1:  Robert Cantwell

12:30 TR; Peabody 215

This course will investigate, through literature, film, and song, and the Jewish-American novel in particular, the encounter between first and second-generation Jewish Americans with American culture in the Twentieth Century. We’ll read major novelists such as Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Phillip Roth against backdrops supplied by Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, Issac Bashevis Singer, Arthur Miller, and Woody Allen. Our aim will be to understand immigration, ethnicity, assimilation and cultural membership in light of the Jewish experience.

AMST 378H:  Nation-Building and National Identity in Australia and the United States:  A Comparative Study of Settler Societies

Section 1, Robert Allen

6-8:30 Mondays, Graham Memorial 038

In 1788, as the new nation of the United States of America was emerging from its war with Great Britain, the first convict ships arrived from London in what was to become Sydney, Australia.  Some of the soldiers sent to guard the convicts and help establish a new British colony in Terra Australis had spent time in the American colonies.   In some respects Australia and the United States share a common heritage and cultural development: the establishment of both nations involved the forcible displacement of indigenous peoples; both nations share a common language and British cultural links; both are "settler" societies; the frontier has held a special place in the national imagination of both countries.  In other respects, however, Australian nationhood was shaped by quite different forces from those that conditioned the history of the United States.

 This course asks, "What can we learn by comparing the social and cultural histories of these two nations?  How are the processes of nation-building in each country similar/different?   In addressing these questions, we will examine a range of cultural materials from both countries: novels, films, paintings, first-hand accounts, and historical scholarship among them.  We will also take advantage of current events as they affect and are reported in both countries.

The course will be organized around a set of comparative topics.  Among those investigated in previous offerings of the course are: women on the frontier, captivity narratives, heroes and outlaws, early labor systems, representation of the land, war and remembrance, popular music, and encounters between indigenous peoples and European settlers.

This course is open to students from all majors and is particularly  appropriate for students who are considering studying abroad in Australia.

Please note:    Because this class meets only once each week, regular and timely attendance is crucial.  We will set aside time each week for dinner as a part of our class meetings.

AMST 390:  Home Sweet Home:  American Housing in Critical Perspective

Section 1:  Katherine Roberts

2 MWF; Murphey 204

            This course is designed to attune students to the complexities of human shelter.  We will begin our journey by studying the development of several national and regional housing types in the U.S. and the environmental and socio-political factors that contributed to their formation.  From shotguns to ranches to public housing developments and more, we will learn about how domestic forms in the built environment have contributed to American cultural landscapes—past and present.    In addition, we will explore the social use and meaning of housing and examine the strategies people use to create “homes” out of built forms.  Finally, we consider two case studies that reveal how factors such as race, class and gender affect dwelling patterns in the U.S.  By the end of the course, students should be able to understand the built environment as a form of communication, capable of revealing what we value as individuals and communities and as a nation, and to critically evaluate the ways in which housing mediates power relations in the U.S.

The course will consist of lectures and discussions led by the instructor and by students, several field trips, and a fieldwork project.  The fieldwork project will focus on any aspect of housing in America and must involve engagement with built forms and human beings.

 Course materials will include readings drawn from articles, required texts (TBA), in-class films and data generated during student field projects.

 AMST 483:  Seeing America: Visual Culture and American Studies

Section 1:  Joy Kasson

11:00-12:15 TR; 209 Gardner

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, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Grant Wood; family photographs; architecture; museums; historical sites such as Williamsburg.  Students will write short papers and an individually-designed project.

AMST 499:  Topics in Documentary Studies

Section 1:  David Cecelski, Lehman-Brady Professor of Documentary Studies

3:30 – 6:00 W, Murphey 204

Students in this seminar will explore and document the history, culture, and struggles of the fishing and maritime communities of the American South. While coastal communities from Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico share a maritime heritage, they have also carved out self-reliant and unique local cultures. These cultures are in danger of vanishing amid an increasingly global age and a world-wide ecological crisis in coastal waters.

Special topics will include the struggle for self-determination among the Gullah peoples of the Carolina Low Country; the saga of the last oystermen on Chesapeake Bay; the historic evolution of boatbuilding and other maritime trades along the Outer Banks; and the unsung stories of the oyster shuckers, crabpickers and shrimp peelers who still making a living along the Pamlico Sound of North Carolina. Throughout the seminar, there will be a strong emphasis on the interrelation between the region’s social history and natural history, as well as on an African American and Latino maritime heritage that has often been overlooked.

            The seminar’s fieldwork will focus on the North Carolina coast. With the instructor’s aid, the class will undertake group documentary projects in conjunction with local coastal groups. Students may draw on a variety of documentary techniques, including oral history, photography, and video. Readings will include  Paula Johnson’s Working on the Water, William Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers, Bland Simpson’s The Great Dismal, and David Cecelski’s The Waterman’s Song and A Historian’s Coast, and a local history- and cookbook written by the church women of Harkers Island, North Carolina. The seminar will also involve at least one field trip.

            While bridging the fields of history, folklore and natural history, this class is ultimately about our relationship to place, community, and the past in a modern consumer society and a global economy in which such attachments seem arcane and old-fashioned, quaint at best, an impediment to progress at worst.

AMST 900:  Race, Empire and Cultural Studies

Section 1:  Jay Garcia and Sandy Darity

11:00 – 1:30 W, 526B Greenlaw

This graduate seminar examines the impact of British cultural studies upon contemporary understandings of racialized social formations. Reading will center on the work of Paul Gilroy, whose explorations of racial ideology, multiculturalism, diaspora and post-imperial metropolitan cultures have generated original avenues of research and influenced a number of areas of intellectual inquiry, including scholarship in American Studies and African American Studies. This seminar explores Gilroy's major essays and books in anticipation of a conference on his work scheduled to take place at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in January 2008, for which Gilroy will give the keynote address. The seminar explores key arguments and themes emerging from Gilroy's writings alongside readings in feminist and postcolonial theory, the history of cultural studies and social scientific research on racial formations.  For permission to register for this course email Professor Jay Garcia at jaygar@email.unc.edu.