Spring 2007

Course Descriptions

Department of American Studies

Spring 2007

AMST 53:  The Family and Social Change in America

Section 1:  Robert Allen

11:00-12:15 TR, Graham Memorial 210

This course uses changes in the American family over the past 150 years as a way of understanding larger processes of social change.  The course will be organized around a semester-long project, through which you will research the history of the last four generations of your own family.  This research will entail interviewing family members, discovering and analyzing family papers (birth and death certificates, marriage certificates, letters, scrapbooks, photographs, home movies, etc.), conducting archival research, and using web-based genealogical resources.  It may also involve your researching the places your family has been associated with: investigating the history of family homes and home towns, as well as investigating immigration routes your family might have taken to get there.   Most of your research will occur outside of the class meetings. 

The aim of this project is not merely genealogical.  In addition to discovering (or confirming) “who” your antecedents were, you’ll also learn more about the social, cultural, and economic contexts within which these generations lived and think about the forces that shaped their lives.  You’ll use your own family history to trace changes in family structure, gender roles, parental duties and expectations, and commonly-held notions of childhood. 

Paralleling your work on your own family history, we will read and discuss current scholarship on the history of the family as a social institution in America.  We’ll take up such topics as the meaning of marriage, romance and intimacy, changing notions of maternity and paternity, the role of divorce and adoption in family structures, and childhood and explore how these features of family life have chanaged since the middle of the 19th century.  White, middle-class European norms of family life will be compared with family life under slavery and Native American family structures.

For this course, it doesn’t matter if you come into the class knowing a great deal about your family’s history or very little.  Your grade will reflect what you learn in your own research, how resourceful you are, and how you use what you learn-- not what you start out the semester knowing.  It doesn’t matter if your family’s history contains illustrious ancestors, or, like mine, people whose lives were largely unchronicled and, to the larger world at least, undistinguished. 

The locally available resources for the study of family history in North Carolina are unsurpassed, and we will take advantage of on-campus resources in Wilson Library as well as public records housed in Raleigh at the N.C. State Archives.  For this reason, this course is especially targeted at students who have families with roots in the state.

AMST 58:  Cultures of Dissent:  Conflict and the Expansion of Rights in the America Since 1876

Section 1:  Tol Foster

12:30 TR; Murphey 204

This course focuses on major issues and groups who have shaped the legal and cultural terrain of 21st century America.  America has changed radically over the past century, from a place where women and minorities were not allowed to vote, where dissidents were not allowed to speak freely, and where power, freedom of religion, and access to justice was reserved for only particular groups and classes of people to a place where individuals have equal access to public resources, a defined and consistent access to the vote, a government actively involved in bettering the lives of its common citizenry, and a great degree of personal freedom and freedom of democratic expression.  These achievements are largely the work of conflict and debate, and it is those debates which we will consider, in the following major categories: the struggle of American Indians and African Americans for full legal and cultural recognition; the socialist vision of working and farming class Americans which led to labor laws, freedom of assembly and speech and consumer protections; the expansion of the federal government, which both facilitated economic prosperity and endangered older notions of property, individualism, and state rights; the emergence of the Civil Rights movement and the American Indian Sovereignty movement, which shifted legal institutions and structures from institutions against minorities to tools for minority rights; intellectual and technological challenges to Western Judeo-Christian standards of public institutions which launched modern feminism, gay rights, the near end of state censorship, and contemporary libertarianism; and finally the critiques of American economic and political procedures and power abroad which have served as the context for international protest and terrorism.  The course will utilize speeches, legal rulings, historical accounts, essays, films, songs, and fiction to trace the various shifts in rights granted to Americans over the long twentieth century (1876-2008).

AMST 101: The Emergence of Modern America

Section 1:  Joy Kasson

11 MWF (and occasional discussion sections)

This course traces major themes in American culture as viewed through history, literature, art, film, music, politics, and popular culture, from the American Revolution to the present.  It is not a comprehensive survey but rather an examination of the ways in which history and the arts interrelate as the present emerges from the past.  Topics include American diversity, the natural environment, the rise of the cities, social criticism, the cultural impact of war.  Readings consist of primary sources: poetry (Walt Whitman), fiction (Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien), and autobiography (Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams).    Each unit will include the work of an artist or photographer, such as Thomas Cole, Matthew Brady, Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange.

Topics include the heritage of the American Revolution; slavery, Civil War, and memory; technology and the environment; writers, film-makers, and artists as social critics.

AMST 201:  Approaches to American Studies

Section 1:  Robert Cantwell

2:00 MWF; Murphey 115

Through literature, pictorial images, film and social analysis, this course will explore social class through the several investigative methods characteristic of American Studies as a discipline. Readings will include Paul Fussell’s Class, the New York Times’ correspondents’ Class Matters, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, David Shipler’s The Working Poor as well as work by Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Philip Roth. 

AMST 233:  Native American History:  The West

Section 1:  Michael Green

9:30 TR; Wilson Hall 107

This is a lecture course on the history of Native American west of the Mississippi River.  The course covers the period from before contact with Europeans to the present.  Main themes include the Spanish invasion of the southwest, the impact of horse and trade on Plains Indians, the American invasion, reservation policy, and 20th century issues of tribal sovereignty, land, political change, and economic development in a context of federal Indian policy and Indian activism.  The goal of the course is to use a wide variety of sources to put Indians in the center of their histories.

AMST 277:  The Nation and National Identity in an Age of Globalization

Section 1:  Robert Allen

6:30 – 7:50 p.m. TR, Saunders 220

This course is designed for students from all undergraduate majors who anticipate studying, living, and/or working outside the United States.  Priority in enrollment will be given to (1) students who plan to participate in a university-sponsored or recognized international study-abroad, research, or exchange program at some point between May 2007 and May 2008, (2) American Studies majors in their 2nd or 3rd year at the university, (3) students who plan to apply to participate in the “Where in the World Are We (WITWAW)” program linking AMST 277 with a special experiential learning opportunity in Asia in May-June 2007 (see below), and (4) international exchange students studying at UNC spring term.  As this offering of the course is a collaborative venture between the Department of American Studies and the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, some places in the class will be reserved for internationally-bound BSBA students. 

Enrollment is by instructor permission only.  Interested students should send a brief email indicating their relationship with the criteria above to Joseph Palis (palis@email.unc.edu).

The course aims to help prepare students to live and learn abroad, regardless of destination or field of study, by exploring the relationship between national and personal identity, particularly as this relationship affects what it means to be and to be perceived as  “an American” in the world today.  We will cover such topics as: the rise of the nation state; the United States as a case instance of the modern nation state; nationalism; colonialism; social modalities of trans-national travel (the tourist, the immigrant, the alien, the refugee, the guest worker, the student/scholar, the multinational employee); the  complex, variable, and dynamic relationship between nation and national identity; contemporary challenges to the nation state (tribalism, transnationalism, regionalism, globalization); changing geographies of place in a globalized world; the influence of American culture abroad; and the roots, expression, and implications of anti-Americanism.   In this offering of the course, we will pay particular attention to Asia.

Students taking this course in spring 07 are invited to apply to participate in “Where in the World Are We?”—a special summer program linking the course with a four-week independent, project-based learning opportunity in Asia and a concluding one-week seminar in Hong Kong.  Up to 8 students will be selected to participate in this scholarship-supported program. More information on WITWAW can be found at:

http://studyabroad.unc.edu/programs.cfm?pk=1893

AMST 292: The South in Black and White: 20th Century Southern History, Culture and Politics

Section 1:Tim Tyson

Tuesdays 7:00-9:30 (meets at Duke)

This course will examine the history and culture of the American South, a region of the heart, the mind, and the United States where democracy has been envisioned and embattled with global consequences.  It will bring together students from NCCU, UNC, and Duke, along with members of the larger community.  This course will furnish a wide front porch on Southern history, where we will join those whom Zora Neale Hurston called “the big picture talkers” and hear their stories.  Each week there will be a lecture, music, poetry, film clips, and opportunities for discussion.  At least once, there will be barbecue.  Visiting activists, scholars, and musicians, among others, will offer oral history presentations, musical and dramatic performances, and guest lectures.  There will be live music, poetry, and stories every day.  Readings will be drawn from literature, history, and social analysis.  The course will meet at the historic Hayti Heritage Center in Durham; all registered students will receive specific instructions by email regarding free transportation to and from Duke and Durham prior to the class's beginning. We will never stop telling stories.

AMST 293:  American Communities: A Photographic Approach

Section 1:  Bill Bamberger

6:00-8:30 p. m.; Thurs., Murphey 204

Theory and practice of documentary photography. Students will complete a documentary photographic study of a community outside the university. Covers the documentary tradition and classic documentary books while emphasizing photographs produced by students in the course.

Instructor permission required.

Students must have Adobe Photoshop CS2 and a 35 mm film or digital camera.

AMST 335:  Defining American

Section 1:  Larry Griffin

2:00 TR; Murphey 204

Defining a culture and its peoples, or, perhaps more accurately, defining unstable unity of many different cultures and peoples--is both difficult and intellectually exciting.  This upper-level honors course explores the continuously changing meaning of America and American identity since the Civil War by examining six major historical periods in which the meanings of the nation and its peoples were challenged, contested, negotiated and renegotiated again:  Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s; the agrarian/populist revolt of the 1880s and 1890s; the Great Depression of the 1930s; the early Cold War years from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s; the Civil Rights era from the mid-1950s to the mid 1960s; and the "war of terror" period since 11 September, 2001.  As we study each of these periods, we will focus on the historically shifting ways in which Americans have dealt with such questions as the foundations of citizenship and cultural exclusion and inclusion; social and economic equality; personal freedom and collective security; and political protest and empowerment.  The instructor is Larry Griffin (Sociology, History and American Studies) who studies the U.S. South, American politics and race/ethnic relations, and collective memory, remembrance and commemoration.

AMST 390:  Contemporary American Indian Poetry (1969 - )

Section 1:  Tol Foster

3:30 TR; Murphey 204

Poetry is the dominant form of cultural practice for American Indian people, and has been  throughout their history and across the continent.  One cannot fully understand the cultural heritage of American Indian people without placing poetry at the center of that understanding, yet most people encounter American Indian culture through films, museum galleries, and prose, most particularly through novels. 

This course restores poetry to its rightful place in the center of American Indian cultural expression, not just in the past, but in the contemporary world.  We will read fantastic poems from American Indian writers well known for their novels such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, and James Welch, but we will also explore the crucial contexts and poetry of poets well known and not such as Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Roberta Hill, Heid Erdrich, Ester Berlin, and Luci Tapahonso.  In the process we will consider different ways to understand contemporary American Indian poetry through engagement with historical events, aestethic trends, traditional genres, and tribal contexts.  Following the lead of the poets we will consider issues of justice, cultural resurgence, feminism, mass culture, and the struggle to become fully human.

Finally, this course is a unique opportunity to engage in dynamic scholarship on American Indian poetry, so we will create critical bibliographies and other materials that will further the understanding and appreciation of American Indian poetry for others.

AMST 390: No Place Like Home:  Material Culture of the American South

Section 2:  Marcie Cohen Ferris

2:00 MWF; Greenlaw 431

Connection:  VP; Approaches:  NA, US

For generations, American Southerners have lived and worked in regionally distinctive homes and commercial buildings, filling these spaces and the landscapes that surround them with tools, furniture, outbuildings, and art inspired by folk, academic, and popular culture.   These worlds evoke another time---a pre-industrial South of “shotgun” houses, barns, cast iron skillets, pottery, dulcimers, quilts, baskets, and home-made biscuits---where the power of place was unmistakable and oral traditions were passed down by families and neighbors.  In the contemporary South, these traditional forms of material culture have simultaneously survived, disappeared, and evolved.  Newer forms of material culture, including double-wide trailers, the “McMansions” of new urbanist communities and suburbs, banking skyscrapers, NASCAR souvenirs, and upscale presentations of shrimp and grits, have become an integral part of South culture. 

This seminar will explore the unique worlds of southern material culture, loved and disdained in low brow and high brow circles alike, but increasingly recognized for its role in shaping an American aesthetic.  And who are the “artisans” of southern material culture?  Today, they are as diverse as Southerners are---men and women, white, black, Hispanic,

AMST 499:  Special Topics in Documentary Studies: Finding the Voice

Section 1:  Karen Michel

3:00-5:30 W; Murphey 204

Explores the spoken, heard, and written voice, both literally and  conceptually. Examines the connection between psychology and physiology in the

production of the spoken word. Studies audiorecording techniques for recording

the voice; examines texts by writers known for their singular voice, and surveys work by audio and visual image-makers that reflect an identifiable "voice." Exploring how the voice reveals the soul of humans is the essence of the course. Vocalizing to find one's own natural style of narration, narrating other people's work to find how that changes the tone, writing, and generally exploring the varied meanings and applications of "voice" in an effort to find one's own. Focuses on applications of voice in documentary work, in all of its manifestations. Production of audio documentaries is central part of the class.

AMST 499:  History of North Carolina Architecture

Section 2:  Catherine W. Bishir

 3:00 – 5:30 M, Murphey 204

The purpose of this course is to acquaint students with broad patterns in North Carolina--and thus American--architecture, including dominant vernacular building types, typological and stylistic trends, and key landmarks of traditional, popular, and high-style architecture. We will examine these chronologically and thematically in the context of a changing physical and social landscape. In order to develop an understanding of broad patterns and engage in thoughtful analysis, students will develop an accurate and solid knowledge of specific buildings, technologies, types, and styles, and their place in time and geography. Students will find this knowledge and approach applicable to the study of architecture and material culture in settings beyond North Carolina.  The seminar will consist of discussions, lectures, and field trips, the latter of which will be researched and led by students.  There is extensive reading on North Carolina and related topics.  Local  field trips during regular class time will permit on-site examination of building types and periods discussed in class. Possibly a Saturday field trip will be scheduled as well.  http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/bishir.HTM

AMST 499: Freedom Stories

Section 3:  Tim Tyson

Wednesday, 3:00-5:30, Graham Memorial 038

This documentary writing course focuses on race and “storytelling” in the South. Looking at both fiction and autobiography in addition to traditional history books, students learn to examine the way Southerners have used historical narratives to find meaning in the past and possibility in the future.  The course will focus especially on the ways that Southerners have tried to transform American politics and culture. Students will read books that are paired with narratives and make narratives using documentary research, interviews, memories, and the raw stuff of life to tell a free story and suck out the marrow of our traditions. Students will obtain a more sophisticated understanding of documents and narratives, strengthen understanding of twentieth-century racial politics, sharpen writing skills, and engage in an ongoing community-based democratic conversation that will provide a foundation for further developments.  The class will meet alternate weeks at UNC and at the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke (accessible via the free Robertson bus and Duke transportation).