HISTORY
801:
HISTORIOGRAPHY
OF THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1865
Syllabus, Spring
2004
Mark Kornbluh (E-Mail: Mark@mail.matrix.msu.edu)
Time: Tuesdays 3:00-6:00, 300 Auditorium
Office: 310 Auditorium; Office
Hours: Tuesdays, 2:00-3:00, and by appointment (355-9300)
This course is a graduate reading
seminar in modern United States historiography.
Our readings and discussions will focus on interpretive historical works
on the central issues in twentieth-century political, social, and cultural
history.
REQUIRED BOOKS: All of the books have been
ordered through MSU bookstores and are available through Amazon.com. The articles
will all be handed out in class.
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New
South.
Edward Ayers, Promise of the New
South.
Nell Irvin Painter, Standing At Armageddon: The
United States, 1877-1919.
Robert Wiebe,
The Search for Order, 1877-1920.
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow:
The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.
John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney
Island at the Turn of the Century.
William Leuchtenburg,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Lizabeth
Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American
Families in the Cold War Era.
Peter Novick,
The Holocaust in American Life.
COURSE SCHEDULE:
JANUARY 13: INTRODUCTION
Recommended Readings
on Modern American Historiography:
Eric Goldman, Rendezvous
with Destiny.
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform.
Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History.
Louis Galambos, America at Middle Age.
Robert Wiebe, The Segmented
Society.
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream.
January 20: RECONSTRUCTION
READ: Foner, Reconstruction:
America.s Unfinished Revolution.
Recommended Readings
on Reconstruction:
Leon Litwack: Been in the Storm So Long.
Kenneth Stampp, The Era of
Reconstruction.
Michael Perman, Reunion Without
Compromise.
Mark
Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and The Gospel
of Prosperity.
George
Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of
Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction.
January 27: THE NEW SOUTH
GUEST PROFESSOR: Peter Knupfer
READ: Woodward, Origins of the New
South; Ayers, Promise of the New South.
Recommended Readings
on the New South:
Stephen Hahn, Roots
of Southern Populism.
Harold
Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
Roger Ransom and
Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom.
Jonathan Wiener, Social
Origins of the New South.
Nell Painter, The Exodusters.
J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of
Southern Politics.
Michael Hyman, The Anti-Redeemers.
FEBRUARY 3 :
THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA
READ: Painter, Standing
at Armageddon, pp. 1-282, 344-99. Wiebe, The Search for
Order, pp. 1-223 and 286-303.
Recommended Readings
on the Birth of Modern America:
Lewis
Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border.
Samuel Hays, The Response to Industrialism.
Alan Dawley, Struggles
for Justice.
Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920.
FEBRUARY 10: POPULISM and
PROGRESSIVISM
READ: Goodwyn,
The Populist Moment, and Kolko, Triumph of
Conservatism.
Recommended Readings
on Progressivism:
Arthur S. Link
and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism.
Arthur
Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era.
George Mowry, The Era of
Theodore Roosevelt.
John
D. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive
Reform.
Jane Addams, Twenty
Years At Hull‑House.
Michael McGerr, The Decline of
Popular Politics.
David F. Noble, America
By Design.
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State.
John Higham, Strangers in the Land.
FIRST REVIEW DUE FEBRUARY 13
FEBRUARY 17: PROGRESSIVISM II
GUEST PROFESSOR: Maureen Flanagan
READ: Flanagan, Seeing With Their
Hearts; Deborah Gray White, "The Cost of Club Work: the
Price of Black Feminism," in Nancy
Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, Visible Women: New Essays
on American Activism (Urbana, 1993); and chapter 1 of James Connolly's book,
The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900‑1925
(Cambridge, 1998), titled "Politics and Society at the End of the
Nineteenth Century" (p. 15‑38).
FEBRUARY 24: THE TRANSFORMATION IN CULTURE.
READ: Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; and
Kasson, Amusing the Million.
Recommended Readings
on the Intellectual and Cultural Transformation:
Douglas Tallack, Twentieth-Century America.
Morton White, Social
Thought in America.
Jackson Lears, No Place For Grace.
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America.
Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours For What We Will.
Lewis
A. Erenberg, Steppin'
Out.
MARCH 2: THE TWENTIES
READ: Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown; Susman,
"'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth‑Century Culture;"
and "Culture Heroes: Ford, Barton, Ruth."
Recommended
Readings on the Twenties:
Barry
Karl, The Uneasy State.
Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and
the Old Politics.
Malcolm
Cowley, Exiles Return.
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue.
Paula
Fass, The Damned
and the Beautiful.
Loren
Baritz, ed. The Culture of the Twenties.
Ann
Douglas, Terrible Honesty.
MARCH 9: SPRING
BREAK: NO CLASS
MARCH 16: DEPRESSION
AND RESPONSE.
READ: Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal;
Brinkley, The End of Reform.
Recommended
Readings on the Thirties:
Paul
Conkin, The New
Deal.
Peter
Temin, Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great
Depression?
Ellis
W. Hawley, The New Deal and Problem of
Monopoly.
Steve
Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The
Rise and Fall of the New Deal Social Order.
Alan
Brinkley, Voices of Protest.
Susan Ware, Partner and I: Milly Dawson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics.
MARCH 23: LABOR AND
CULTURE
READ: Cohen, Making
a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago.
Recommended
Readings on Labor History:
Christopher Tomlins,
The State and the Unions;
Melvyn
Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker.
David
Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor.
David
Montgomery, Worker's Control in America.
Gary
Gestle, Working Class Americanism.
SECOND REVIEW DUE
MARCH 23
MARCH 30: WOMEN AND
COLD-WAR CULTURE
GUEST PROFESSOR:
Lisa Fine
READ: May, Homeward
Bound; Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace.
Recommended
Readings on the Fifties:
John
Diggins, The Proud
Decades.
Paul
A. Carter, Another Part of the Fifties.
Alonzo
Hamby, Beyond the New Deal.
Fred
I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency.
David
Caute, The Great
Fear.
Richard
Pells, The Liberal
Mind in a Conservative Age.
Paul
Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light.
Stephen
J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War.
Diana
Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde.
April 6: CIVIL
RIGHTS
READ: Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights; and Marable,
Race, Reform, and Rebellion.
Recommended
Readings will be distributed in class.
APRIL 13: VIETNAM.
READ: Neil Sheehan, A Bright and Shining Lie.
Recommended
Readings will be distributed in class.
APRIL 20:
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE I
GUEST PROFESSOR:
Kirsten Fermaglich
READ: Peter Novick, The Holocaust in
American Life
APRIL 27: Gender and
Contemporary America
READ: Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers; Faludi, Backlash.
Recommended
Readings will be distributed in class.
FINAL
REVIEW ESSAY DUE MAY 7.
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COURSE
REQUIREMENTS:
This
class is a graduate readings seminar. Both attendance and participation
at seminar meetings are essential, as is participation on HST801, the
electronic discussion list for this course. Discussions will center around the weekly readings.
In preparation for these discussions, everyone will be asked to post
their responses to the week.s reading on HST801 in advance of the seminar.
The
primary written requirements for this class are three review essays. The first two of these are to be short
critical book reviews on required readings (4-6 pages). For the first, which is due on February 13,
you will have the option to review either Foner,
Ayers, Wiebe, Goodwyn, or Kolko. The second
review will be due on March 31 and will cover Cohen's book. A description of these reviews is attached to
the syllabus. The final review essay is
to be a longer comparative work (10-15 pages) covering three to four books, one
or two of which will come from the required readings. The final review essay is
due on May 7 at 4:00 p.m.
Participation
in class discussion and on HST801 will collectively count for 1/3 of the final
grade. The two short critical book
reviews will count for 1/3 and the longer review essay will count for 1/3 of
the final grade.
===============================================================
HST801 DISCUSSION
LIST:
This course has an
electronic discussion list to facilitate further discussion of the readings and
modern American historiography. All
members of the class are expected to participate in this electronic discussion
list. Before we meet each week, everyone
will be expected to post a response to the week.s readings on HST801. I also expect students to utilize the list to
extend our discussions beyond the classroom after we conclude our in-class
discussion.
The list is unmoderated so that messages submitted by class
participants are immediately distributed to other class members.
This discussion list
is linked to a website to facilitate retrieval of messages
(http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst801/).
The HST801 logs which are stored on this site will allow class
participants to look back over past conversations on the discussion list and
comment upon them. (Discussions from
previous year.s course are also archived on the site, so we can see what how
previous graduate students responded to many of the
books.) The Web site includes a variety of additional information relevant to
HST801 course materials including the course syllabus.
To subscribe
to HST801, send an e‑mail message to listserv@h‑net.msu.edu
with
no subject and only this text:
sub HST801 firstname lastname
Your request should
look something like this:
sub HST801 John
Smith
You will receive a
confirmation that your request has been received.
To unsubscribe,
send this message to LISTSERV@h‑net.msu.edu
unsub HST801
If you have any
questions or experience any difficulties in attempting to subscribe or unsubscribe, please send
a message to me at Mark@hs1.hst.msu.edu
CRITICAL BOOK
REVIEWS:
In
writing a critical book review, you should have two goals in mind. First,
you need to present the author's basic thesis. What was the book
about? What were the primary points that the author was trying to
convey? This part of the essay should be a summary of the book.
However, you cannot restate an entire book in a few pages so you need to
distill out the most important points. You need to boil down a rich and
complex book into its essence. This is, therefore, as much an exercise in
synthesis as it is in summary. Second, I want you to evaluate the
book. What was convincing? Where was the author's argument weak?
You can evaluate the book strictly on internal evidence if you want or you can
bring outside material to bear on the issues at hand. The key here is to
be critical. This does not mean that you have to find fault with the
book, but rather that you need to carefully analyze the book. What were
its strengths and weaknesses? In a short review such as this you should
focus on two or three main points and cover them in depth, rather than try to
discuss every theme in the book. For examples of this type of review,
take a look at Reviews in American History.
Good
writing is especially important in these essays. There is an art to
writing a good critical book review. Your essay should have a clear
thesis, a logical structure with good transitions from paragraph to paragraph,
and a resounding conclusion. It is particularly important to make clear
what are your views and what are the views of the
author. Whether you write your essays in first person or third is a
matter of personal style, but you must clearly identify the author's ideas and
differentiate them from your own views.
GRADING AND PAPER
COMMENTS:
In the body of your papers, a check mark
indicates a good point. Several marks are sometimes used for emphasis as
are the comments, "good, excellent, or yes." Critical comments
on your papers are both substantive and stylistic. Besides factual
comments, substantive comments are used to indicate where you fail to fully
explain a point, give evidence to support your case, or link your ideas
together. Consistency is important and internal contradictions in your
papers are noted. I also indicate where your writing and choice of words
fail to get your ideas across, as well as places where they are awkward.
Spelling, grammatical, and tense errors as well as contractions are
unacceptable in graduate papers.
Critical
Abbreviations include:
AWK Awkward
phrasing or construction.
CW
or WC Choice of word is
poor.
WW Wrong
word. Word does not say what you mean.
Transition Missing a transition.
SP Spelling
error.
GR Grammatical
error.
Contraction Contraction
is used.
Run
On Run on sentence.
Tense Wrong
tense.
Pronoun Pronoun is unclear or wrong.
New paragraph.
??? Point is not
clear.
Meaning What you are trying to say is
not clear.
Writing
Your writing obscures
your ideas.