LINKS ARE PROVIDED TO EBOOKS AND BOOK CHAPTERS, HOWEVER, JOURNAL ARTICLES MUST BE ACCESSED INDIVIDUALLY THROUGH THE LIBRARY’S E-JOURNALS PAGE.

January 13 – First Meeting and Course Introduction

January 20 – What is American Cultural History?

• James W. Cook and Lawrence B. Glickman, “Twelve Propositions for a History of U.S. Cultural History,” in Cook, Glickman, and Michael O’Malley, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3-57.

• Daniel Wickberg, “What is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New” American Historical Review 112 (June 2007).

• Michael Denning, “The Socioanalysis of Culture: Rethinking the Cultural Turn,” in Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 75-96.

Assignment: Consider the following as two of your five discussion questions, and then come up with three of your own:
1) What approach does each of these readings take to defining American Cultural History?
2) Which approach you agree with the most and why?
Please be prepared to share your ideas in class.

January 27 – Not Archaeology, But Re-telling: Historicizing Identities

• Lawrence Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness

• Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222-37.

• Robin D.G. Kelley, “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Folk'” American Historical Review 97 (Dec. 1992): 1400-1408.

February 3 – Gender and Culture

• Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture

• Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (Dec. 1986): 1053-1075.
• Gail Bederman, “Remaking Manhood Through Race and ‘Civilization,'” chap. 1 of Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).  (E-BOOK, SEE RESERVES PAGE)

February 10 – Constructing and Deconstructing Race

• Barbara Jean Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 1/181 (May-June 1990).

• Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Illusions of Race,” chap. 2 of In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28-46.

• Gail Bederman, “‘The White Man’s Civilization on Trial’: Ida B. Wells’ Antilynching Campaign,” chap. 2 of Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. (E-BOOK, SEE RESERVES PAGE)

• Sander Gilman and Nancy Leys Stepan, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism,“ in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistence, ed. Dominick La Capra (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

February 17 – Whiteness and White Ethnicity

• David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Become White (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

• Eric L. Goldstein, “The Unstable Other: Locating the Jew in Progressive-Era American Racial Discourse,” American Jewish History 89 (2002): 383-409.

• Eric Arneson et al., “Scholarly Controversy: Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001).

February 24- Reading and Print Culture

• Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic.
• Michael Denning, “Reading Dime Novels: The Mechanic Accents of Escapist Fiction,” chap. 5 of Mechanic Accents, 65-84.

March 3 – The Culture of Work and Leisure

• Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements.
• Sean Wilentz, “Artisan Republican Festivals and the Rise of Class Conflict in New York City, 1788-1837” in Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society, ed. Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 37-77.

March 10 – NO CLASS (SPRING BREAK)

March 17- Consumerism and Cultural Hegemony

• Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realiztion: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1930, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 3-38.

• Roland Marchand, “Keeping the Audience in Focus,” in Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 52-87.

• Lizabeth Cohen, “Encountering Mass Culture,” in Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 99-158.

March 24 – Theorizing Popular Culture

• George Lipsitz, Time Passages.
• Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), 442-53.

March 31- Cultural Hierarchy

• Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow.

• Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 3-78. (Note: pdf. has additional material, which you may read if you want, but only pp. 3-78 are required).

April 7 – Reading Landscapes and the Built Environment

• Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 5-114.

• Jonathan Prude, “Engaging Urban Panoramas: City Views of the Antebellum North,” in Common-Place 7 (Apr. 2007).

• William Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness”

April 14 – Religion and Culture

• Robert Orsi, Madonna of 115th Street.

• David Chidester, “The Church of Baseball, The Fetish of Coca-Cola, and the Potlach of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Journal of the American Academy of Religions 64 (Fall 1996): 743-65.

April 21 – Discussion of Term Projects

WE WILL NOT MEET THE WEEK OF APRIL 28, BUT THERE WILL BE OPPORTUNITIES TO MEET WITH PROF. GOLDSTEIN TO DISCUSS YOUR PAPERS.

FINAL PAPERS DUE MAY 6 at MIDNIGHT.