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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course surveys the enduring importance of class in the United States as well as the enduring myth of American classlessness. We will start with the myths themselves, where they came from and how they were constructed. From there, we will examine theories of social class (in some ways attempts to explain why the myths weren’t true) and efforts to objectively measure poverty, inequality, and the distribution of wealth. At the outset, we will also examine social mobility patterns and how these objective categories of class are related to race, region, sex, and gender. We will then spend time looking at how class is lived and how it is represented in the larger culture. We will explore how social class shapes the daily lives of ordinary Americans in cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural hinterlands through such things as housing, community, work, leisure activities, shopping tastes, dress, diet, language, education, and family. We will examine how class has been represented, reproduced, and contested, in literature, art, music, film, television, and the broader popular culture.
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3.00 Credits
This class is designed as a survey course that looks at the cultural, historical, technological, industrial, artistic, and mythic attributes of American Music, primarily from after the Civil War until the present. The 20th century is highlighted, with special emphasis on the period from the ‘Tin Pan Alley’ era to today. Definitions of ‘American’ music and ‘Popular’ music will be discussed and analyzed. Movie musicals, soundies, concert films, and videos will be studied as well as audio recordings. Attention will be paid to socio-historical ramifications of American popular music as a cultural force and cultural expression.
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3.00 Credits
American society’s reaction to the UFO phenomenon. Analyzes UFOs and the controversy that has surrounded them by studying the attitudes of various groups toward the phenomenon, including the military, the scientific community, the national UFO organizations, the “lunatic fringe,” cult groups, charlatans, the entertainment industry, and the press.
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will examine versions and varieties of American life that have become a part of Japanese society and culture. We have seen a tremendous curiosity for “things American” in Japanese daily life—but how is American culture in Japan? What kinds of transformations, reformulations and re-inventions have taken place? We will review Japanese adoptions and adaptations of language, “American” settings, architecture and design, foods and restaurants, clothing and fashions, popular films, television and advertising, and even holidays. Students will review and critically evaluate such films as: The Japanese Version, Mr. Baseball, Black Rain, The Barbarian and the Geisha, Tokyo Pop, the Colonel Comes to Japan.
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3.00 Credits
This course will provide a survey of the 1950s, a time of deep, widespread, and lasting social change in the United States. Every aspect of the life of the country – government foreign and domestic policy, the workplace, entertainment, sports, the arts, and so forth – underwent some degree of significant alteration in the fifties. Some of this change resulted from the release of energy held in check by the Great Depression and World War II; some resulted from new technologies such as television and new spatial arrangements such as suburbanization; and some resulted from the emergence of new voices and styles (e.g., Abstract Expressionism, Rock and Roll, the Beats, bebop and other jazz forms) and more strenuous demands for freedom and equality by long-oppressed groups. While the course will survey the decade and the postwar era in general, it will also go into some depth by focusing on particular expressions of the major issues of the period.
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3.00 Credits
This distance-learning course is designed to help students examine the United States’ role in the modern, industrial, and then, post-industrial world. At the same time, we will look at how the larger world shaped the United States and individual citizens. We will do this through a topics based approach. Each week, moving in roughly chronological order, we will explore a discreet and revealing interaction between the United States - whether this side of the equation is represented by the government, corporate leaders, or culture brokers - and another part of the world - and this side might be other nations, groups of people, or intellectual concepts. Not only will students encounter a broad range of contacts on a wide front, but they will also be asked to write and think about each of these topics and moments from a broad and wide range of different vantage points.
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3.00 Credits
A study of major issues concerning immigrant experience in the U.S., such as legislation regarding immigration, anti-immigrant social and political movements, immigrant efforts to assimilate (or to resist assimilation, or to accommodate to one degree or another). Students will be provided with basic history of the subject. They will also read accounts of life in the U.S. by immigrants and fiction about immigrant experiences. Most of the course will stress 20th century immigration.
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3.00 Credits
Puerto Ricans constitute the second largest Hispanic group in the country. This course examines the specific community of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia and its relationship with other racial and ethnic groups and the social, political, and economic situation of Puerto Ricans in the city.
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3.00 Credits
Spurred by pressures of colonialism, economic change, nationalism, political repression, and war as well as individual needs and adventurism, Asians have migrated from their homelands to new regions of the world. This course focuses on Asians in U.S. society through comparison with their reception into other societies. In considering Asian diasporas, familiar terms such as Asia, American, Community, and Nation are called into question by the multiplicity of experiences and identities of those who have ventured out from Eastern regions of the globe.
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3.00 Credits
This course introduces and compares the experiences of women in Asia and Asian women in migration to the United States in the modern period, including rural and urban women, and ordinary and elite women in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Topics include women in households, women and work, and women’s activism.
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