American Studies Courses, Spring 2005

AMST 6E: Navigating America: Journey, Voices and Transportation
Section 1: Rachel Willis
9:30 TR; Graham Memorial 212 This first year seminar is designed to teach students how to navigate new intellectual terrain and unfamiliar information from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. In this class, which emphasizes discussion, we will analyze some of the major journeys of discovery of America, continue through the American space program and end with the development of the Internet. We will focus on how economic resources (financial, physical, and human) have transformed scholarship and the university. Students will be expected to make a voyage of discovery on the campus or in the surrounding community. The voyage can be either physical or intellectual, but must be chronicled with a documentary journal, and presented to the class in a medium that conveys the individual's perspective, journey and discoveries. The student journeys and presentations can be made individually or in groups. These assignments will enable students to appreciate the views of others as well as integrate learning inside and outside the classroom. Two weeks at the beginning will be spent developing the course focus through introductory overviews and a number of class exercises designed to promote intellectual community and student participation. The next twelve weeks will be spent reading, viewing and discussing the accounts of journeys in America. The remaining class meetings will be devoted to the student presentations of their own journeys. Rachel Willis is an Associate Professor of American Studies and an Adjunct Professor of Economics. She earned her Ph.D. at Northwestern University. (GC Social Science Perspective)

AMST 6E: The Folk Revival: The Singing Left in Mid-Century America
Section 2: Robert Cantwell
2 MWF; 204 Murphey
Enlisting fiction, film, and recorded music, this course will acquaint first-year students with the cultural and historical contexts of as range of American traditional musics, and explore their social, political, and cultural meanings for the folk-song revival.

AMST 6I: The Family and Social Change in America
Section 1: Robert Allen
Wed. 3-5:30; 210 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, film viewing, and discussion, we will consider the complex of changes that, taken together, produced "modern" American society over the 19th and 20th centuries: industrialization and the rise of corporate capitalism, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture and mass media, and the civil rights movements that extended full citizenship beyond white males. We will then consider how changes in the family as a social institution reflect and contribute to these social changes. We will examine changing notions of romance, marriage and divorce, parenting, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood. Our sources will be scholarly histories of the family in America, oral histories of family life in North Carolina, and popular representations of the family in Hollywood cinema.

Participants will research their own family histories, and relate those histories to larger social, economic, cultural, and political forces. This research will entail interviewing family members and discovering and analyzing family papers (birth certificates, marriage certificates, letters, scrapbooks, photographs, home movies, etc.). It may also involve your researching the places your family has been associated with: investigating the history of family homes and home towns.

This seminar welcomes all first-year students, but may be of special interest to North Carolinians. The university's archival resources for studying family histories in North Carolina (The Southern Historical Collection and North Carolina Collection) are particularly rich and deep.

Your research will be collected, presented, and interpreted in a final project. You will also keep a journal in which you will reflect upon the research process and relate our readings and discussion of the history of the family and of social change in America to your own family's history.

This course will meet once each week: Wednesdays 3:00-5:30 p.m. It is essential that all students have this time period free on their calendars each week of the semester.

AMST 10: Introduction to the Cultures and Histories of Native North America
Section 1: Theda Perdue
10:00 MWF; Howell 104
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 020: The Emergence of Modern America
Section 1: Joy Kasson
11 MWF,103 Bingham
This course will trace the changing terms in which Americans have understood themselves and their culture from the Revolution to the present. Literature, film, painters, photography, music, architecture and historical events will all provide a window for the understanding of American culture

AMST 40: Approaches to American Studies
Section 1: Timothy Marr
10 MWF; Dey 404
This core course offers an introduction to interdisciplinary study that surveys the methods and diversity of American cultural analysis. The readings will focus on a select sequence of important historical places and events and approach them using a variety of sources, disciplinary methodologies, and interpretive angles. Among the topics explored this spring will be Salem witches, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, the 1898 Wilmington riot and racial violence, the border with Mexico, and the internationalization of American Studies.

AMST 56: Anti-Fifties: Voices of a Counterdecade
Section 1: Robert Cantwell
11 MWF; Murphey 204
We remember the nineteen-fifties as a period of relative tranquillity, 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 62: Mid-Twentieth Century American Thought and Culture
Section 1: Jay Garcia
9 MWF; Graham Memorial 212
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 62: Cooking Up a Storm: Exploring Food in American Culture and Community
Section 2: Marcie Cohen Ferris
11 TR; Murphey 204
This course will examine the history and meaning of food in American culture, and will explore the ways in which food shapes national, regional, and personal identity. We will investigate how factors such as gender, ethnicity, class, race, religious beliefs, the media, global politics, and corporate America affect the food we eat. We will discuss food as both a source of healing and a source of conflict, and the ways in which it impacts community.

AMST 65/ECON 91/WMST 91: Women and the Economy
Section 1: Rachel A. Willis
11:00 TR, Gardner 308
Women and the Economy, American Studies 65 is cross-listed as Economics 91/Women's Studies 91 and can count toward any of the three majors or as a Social Science Perspective. A survey of time allocation patterns according to gender, the course looks at labor force participation trends, earnings, occupational selection and economic history using a multidisciplinary approach. This will include an investigation of the evidence and social science theories using historical, literary, and media expressions of differences according to gender with the aim of discovering interrelationships among different aspects of American culture related to gender. Spring Semester 2002 there will be a focus on the differences between various immigrant groups and American women as North Carolina has the highest rate of immigrant growth in the nation in the 2000 census.

AMST 72E: Native America in the 20th Century
Section 1: Michael Green
11 MWF, Greenlaw 431
Not only is the 20th century one hundred years of complex and interesting Native American history, it forms a discreet unit in the larger history that begins when Europeans arrived in North America. Beginning with the allotment policy of the 1890s, the 20th century history experience of Native Americas is characterized by the destruction and recreation of tribal societies. Central to this story is the emergence of national Indian spokesmen and women who, as individuals and in organized groups, articulated visions of cultural distinctiveness, tribal sovereignty, economic development, social identity, and survival. At bottom, this history is rooted in the problem of making tribalism viable in the modern world. Its importance lies, in part, in the fact that this history is imbedded in Native America.

AMST 80: Mamas and Matriarchs: A Social History of Jewish Women in America
Section 1; Marcie Cohen Ferris
2:00 TR; Murphey 204
This course will examine the history and culture of Jewish women in America from their arrival in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the present day. We will explore how gender shaped Jewish women's experiences of immigration, assimilation, religious observance, home, work, motherhood, and feminism. The course will also investigate how factors such as region, race, class, country of origin, and religious denomination influenced the lives of Jewish women in America, and in turn, how they have shaped the national expression of American Judaism.

AMST 84: Myth and History in American Memory
Section 1: Timothy Marr
1:00 MWF; Alumni 207
This course examines the contested role of memory in constructing historical meaning and imagining the cultural boundaries of communities. We will examine a variety of symbolic and material expressions that Americans have developed over time to celebrate ethnic, regional, and national difference by exploring popular fictions, films, rituals, artifacts, monuments, landscapes, and performances. Problems we will examine include the invention of tradition; the politics of commemoration; subaltern expression and counter-memory; and the cultural work performed by celebrity figures, sites of memory, national legends, and literary canons. We will approach these problems from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including those of literature, history, anthropology, cultural geography, and media studies. At the end of the semester you will better understand the manifold processes through which the past is made to matter.

AMST 150: Topics in Documentary Studies
Section 1; Allan Gurganus
3-5:50 W
This course is available by permission only from Professor Gurganus. If you're interested in this class you should email a writing sample, fiction or non-fiction, that you feel represents your best work. Writing samples should be sent to: marthae@email.unc.edu.

This course will meet at Duke and at UNC, alternating locations each week. The first class will meet at Duke (Lyndhurst 113, Center for Documentary Studies).

Once upon a time in America, Fact and Fiction lived in different states; these had different accents, food ways, independent capitals. Maybe Fact lived out west and Fiction remained a tin-horn Easterner, who knows. But through a trans-continental cross-pollinating dating service, they met, soon swapped dreams, fluids; they blended as opposites will. West was all about feet and inches and which way the wind blew. East, the fictioneer, went on and on about what might, what should, have been. They interested each other until you couldn't tell them apart. She learned to make up measurement and he could get misty while giving road directions. Confusions set in. Love does that.

Results: Came our age of advertising, came a time when entertainment and propaganda inter-spliced. Came the day when "spin" got called an Art, when "objective truth" was named a Casualty. No bi-focal could any longer separate invention from reality, the real from the boast, the framing from its picture, true history from its costume-rental dress-up re-enactment.

In such a time of blending truths, students of history and life surely need expert literacy in both modes. To be wizard scholars and genius liars, we must take stock of our own essential national faith and personal lies. If we are to explain ourselves to ourselves as informed Americans, we must speak many languages with fluency, wit, grace. The language of the Discoverer, the lingo of the Native greeting party.

Citizens of the late Roman Empire were forced to know geography thanks to the out-reach of empire and then that very empire's implosion. Our own national stance as the planet's sole remaining super-power. that requires an extra vigilance, both outward and internal. We need super-critical perceptions of how our country's ever-more gigantic and imperial standing reflects our own true human aspirations; we must judge and admit the ways in which its professed values sometimes conflict with our private sidestreet familial morality.

At some point in history---maybe when research in munitions outstripped advances in medicine---(perhaps during the American Civil War? possibly in the trenches of the First World War? but surely upon the advent of the Holocaust of the 1930-40's)---some overriding consented-upon third-person version of narrative history fragmented forever. The One True story could no longer be told in a single voice, however Bass-Baritone. As we came to mistrust totalitarian authority, author-ship itself grew suspect. It was merely patriarchal, it was absolute, un-democratic. We---as citizens, as ethical creatures and readers---came to trust most thoroughly the testimony of Surviving Witnesses. Only those seemed to carry the authenticity of sufferings endured, survived. We had outgrown an original faith in some Tolstoian God of Overview, the narrator. We no longer believed a guide who from, on high, explained to us our own histories from fifteen thousand feet. If official history is always written by the winning side, we came to doubt that version, we came to doubt the very news of our own victory. Such suspicion of the men in charge finally made Literature a sort of Witness Protection Program.

This class's ambitious gambit is to find (1) documentary evidence---some fraction of prove-able historical truth---and to then (2) set it alongside a highly subjective registration of similar invented incidents from the period. Attention must be paid to the mores and styles and sentimentalities of the speaker's own historical moment. How does "the 1930's American Dust Bowl" taste in a tale-telling mouth full of airborne grit?

Maybe there was a time when a "creative writer" could shun knowing international news. Your own garden's daily truth, the local weather, colorful inter-marriage among your neighboring families, these formerly constituted fictional subject matter aplenty for your novels or poems. Now, we must admit that those days are gone. Does globalization pertain to narrative? Are we willing to out-source our narrative imagination as so much piece-work sent abroad? Information is power----in fantasy as well as fact. One class requirement will involve students' growing more daily accountable to and for contemporary events. Such currency is simply achieved by reading the front page stories in the "New York Times", (not just watching "The Daily Show" however witty).

As informed artists and citizens, we must anticipate those shifts and cataclysms likeliest to knock us cockeyed on month or two decades ahead. We can approach political life itself as intelligent consumers opting to buy a car, or not. The car has been bought already, in our names. We need to know at what speed our new SUV will tip lethally over.'

We can no longer afford to ignore those innovations and invasions performed in our own names. During this pivotal Election Season, class discussion will assume a student's familiarity with daily national and international events. Class participation and attendance is essential to the communal meaning of the class. Your personal awareness regarding the events of your time should be seen not as a sideline to your fiction-writing. Instead such knowingness constitutes a fueling source of imaginative material, of contradictory fossil fuel. World trouble can be an occasion for daily wit.

Every period of history constitutes a barely-plundered mine of narrative ore. For each student, a different event or period will prove most riveting. Depending on your class, race, region, temperament, eye-color, a certain moment in the evolution of America will touch one student more than another. Our class offers a chance for you to choose from among the countless genres of American stories. Gothick, self-improvement, you name it. Such tales serve as first-person accounts even as they impart a larger piece-quilt national history.

---Examples: "Journals of the European 'Discoverers'"---Columbus's ship's log recounting first encounters with native people. Or "The Captivity Narratives" of early European settlers seized by Indians for purposes of retaliation and ransom. Accounts of the Salem witch trials. From "Presidential Campaign Biographies" to inspirational capitalist self-help works like Horatio Alger's ragged newsboys risen to become Captains of Industry, countless popular forms serve as models for latent fictional exploration.

Such modes of storytelling will be explored both as fiction and non-fiction. An attempt will be made to tell a personally-invented story using the diction and conventions of a given period. There will be assignments designed to be read aloud in class by the whole group. A short supporting paper for each longer story will state the fiction's background, findings of the student's independent historical research. We are especially concerned with those elements touching on the linguistic and narrative strategies used to tell this story, conventions peculiar to the genre as a whole. Three such stories and supporting essays are expected. The term's fourth and final story (and supporting paper) will concentrate on the autobiographical ancestral lore of the student him-her self.

Along with reading a daily paper and being ready to discuss pertinent issues, each student will present five to seven pages a week of prose. This work might be autobiographical, might be sketches for future fiction; it might be poems, attempts at understanding historical forces, tries at imitating contemporary forms from Romance novels to training manuals. This stream of writing will buttress and support work done on the major stories and their supporting essays.

By combining original historical research, fictional invention, the habit of writing frequently, along with a concentrated attention to the events of our day, we open ourselves to a fertile new admixture---a fresh chance for producing deep, pertinent, resounding tales.

AMST 260/HIST 281: Film and History
Section 1: Robert Allen
3:30-6:00 T; Dey 204
Across a range of disciplines, scholars are interested in using the movies as evidence in a wide variety of inquiries into twentieth-century cultural, social, and intellectual history. This course examines how cinematic texts, discourses about movies, and the social experience of moviegoing have been and might be used in historical scholarship. After reviewing the history of cinema in the United States and the fundamentals of textual analysis, we will select a small "sample" of films and ask of each, "How can this filmic text be made historically legible?"

We will then explore the historiographic utility of contextual discourse generated around the production, circulation, and reception of individual films: industry records, trade paper reportage, advertisements, newspaper reviews, etc.

Increasingly, historians are concerned not only with the study of individual films but also with the circumstances under which audiences experienced the movies. We will ask what materials can be used in understanding the history of the social experience of moviegoing in a particular locale and what can that experience tell us about larger social, intellectual, and cultural issues?

Some very productive work is currently being produced at the intersection of social history, oral history, and film history, as scholars explore the ways in which moviegoing and the experience of watching particular films become a part of personal and public memory. We will conduct our own oral history projects to explore the challenges and possibilities of this approach to the cinematic past.

Graduate students from all disciplines are welcome in this course. No previous formal background in film study is required.

AMST 299: Masterpieces of the American Studies Movement
Section 1: Philip Gura
6:00-8:30 p.m.; Gaskin Library
This course is designed to acquaint graduate students with a range of methodological possibilities within the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, particularly as they might contribute to revisionary work in American literary and cultural history. While in no sense a strictly chronological survey of all the texts that have been influential since the founding of the American Studies movement fifty years ago, the course readings allow for discussion of the historical development of the field, particularly of the confluence of historical and literary studies. We will read a book a week, hear contemporary assessments of each book's importance, discuss in depth each author's choice and use of sources, and suggest the continuing value of his or her scholarship and methodology for our own scholarly projects.

Sampling of Texts: R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam, Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, David D. Hall, Cultures of Print, Eric Lott, Love and Theft, Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad

AMST 348: Readings in Native American History
Section 1: Michael Green
6:00-8:30 W; Murphey 220
This is a graduate reading seminar in Native American History. The course meets weekly to discuss readings relating to the theme of the week. All students read an article or two that sets up the theme and each student reads an appropriate book and writes a 2-3 page analytical summary of it. Copies of the summaries go to each student. Discussions at the weekly meetings explore the history and historiography of that week's theme.