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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will introduce students to a broad view of early American social history that foregrounds the gendered aspects of work in early America - defined loosely as the period from colonial settlement to 1820. On one level, this approach allows for the recovery of women and girls' contributions to the formal and informal economies of pre-Industrial early America, including their work activities within the household. This perspective is especially crucial to the examination of white, Indian and African servitude and/or slavery, since gender ideologies dictated the work experiences of large race- and class-defined segments of the population. Yet cultural retention also played a part and this course will invite students to investigate the impact of derivative work practices (for example examining African women's dominance of market activities in the New World through the lens of West African work practices). Further, while the course title emphasizes women's experiences, the class and race implications of male work practices in early America will be similarly illuminated by a gender studies approach. Thus, an overarching purpose of the course will be to highlight the fluid and instable conceptions of work that were applied alternately to masculine as opposed to feminine occupations, just as they were alternately applied to European versus non-European, free versus enslaved, and public versus private spheres. This course fulfills the humanities requirement and the diversity requirement for second majors.
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3.00 Credits
"The Meaning of Things" asks how objects as diverse as a ND class ring, a pair of jeans, a lava lamp or an iPod acquire meaning and value. This seminar will introduce students to a range of practices relating to consumption in American history. We will investigate the gendered aspects of production, marketing, buying and using goods as these impact not only on gender, but also on the construction of a range of identities. This will lay the foundation for students to write substantive individual research papers on a "thing" of their choice.
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3.00 Credits
All her life Edith Wharton sat on the edge of change. All her life she had one foot in the past and one firmly in the present. Her vision looked ahead to America's transnational and cosmopolitan future as much as it found comforts and recognitions in the country's more provincial past. In her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934), Wharton suggested that the "small society into which [she] was born was 'good' in the most prosaic sense of the term, and its only interest, for the generality of readers, lies in the fact of its total extinction, and for the imaginative few, in the recognition of the moral treasures that went with it." A rather ambiguous statement to be sure. Wharton's elegiac lament for the past is always conflicted, both in her fiction and in how she lived her own life - like her friend Henry James and a number of her other acquaintances - Wharton became one of those transnational, cosmopolitan, America expatriates who helped shape twentieth-century America. She sat in the midst of a broad and influential group of cultural and intellectual figures whose works addressed, contested, fomented, resisted, and embraced the sweeping social changes America underwent in the period following the conclusion of the Civil War and leading up to the onset of World War I. Topics for discussion will include the idea of cosmopolitanism; constructions of citizenship, of race, of nation; the notion of home and exile; emerging transnationalism both individual and national; and political imperialism. This is not a course on Edith Wharton, but an investigation that will use Wharton's writings as a medium through which we will examine some of those cultural changes that revolutionized modern America and changed the world.
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3.00 Credits
In speaking of the after-effects of the first World War, the American novelist Henry James said: "The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk." Writers such as Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Phillip Roth, the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, film makers, politicians and intellectuals have all portrayed the post - 9/11 world in language similar to James's post-apocalyptic vision. This course looks at contemporary American culture and society and asks whether or not there is a definable post 9/11 narrative and aesthetic. We will address the ways in which the world has changed since 9/11 and how those changes have impacted daily life, local communities, the national consciousness, and global affairs. Discussion of these changes will be situated in our examination of major, post 9/11 novels, works of art, film and other media, formal governmental publication and policies, and religious writings. This course will have some short writing assignments, class presentation, and a final research paper.
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3.00 Credits
This is the first of a two-semester senior seminar in oral history theory and methods. By surveying the current field, students will learn how oral history is uniquely suited to both contribute to historical knowledge and challenge dominant narratives. The final project will prepare students to engage in collecting oral histories during the spring semester if they register in Oral History 2: Practicum.
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3.00 Credits
This senior seminar will focus on changing understandings of death, dying, and mourning in America. Until recently, the United States was often characterized as a death-denying society, and death itself relegated to the institutional, private, setting of the hospital. Contemporary debates about abortion, euthanasia, gun control, organ transplantation, and stem cell research, as well as popular interests in "good death," the afterlife, bereavement therapy, funeral pre-planning, and cyber memorials suggest new concepts of death and dying. Examining different visual and material cultures--including memorials, roadside shrines, cemeteries, obituaries, TV shows like CSI, online tributes, and death-related rituals--this seminar considers how, and why, death has been "reclaimed" in contemporary America. Field trips and guest lecturers included.
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3.00 Credits
What does it mean to travel or to call oneself a traveler? This and several other deceptively simple questions will frame this senior seminar: What do we want when we travel? What is travel's significance to American cultures, places, and identities? Rather than a traditional history of American travel, this course will challenge students to explore travel's power to transform landscapes, cultures, and practices. We will consider, for example, the invention of Las Vegas in the 1950s and the fact that we can now visit "Paris" in the Nevada desert; similarly, we will explore what it means to visit "Main Street USA" at a giant theme park in suburban Paris. From destinations such as beaches to ski slopes to urban centers, this course will also explore the intimacies between travel and various modes of identity - including race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Students will write short reflection papers and will produce a final research project.
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3.00 Credits
Participants in this seminar will define, design, and carry out a project of field research and will engage in extensive discussions of their work in progress, including ethnographic method, ethical concerns, and the craft of nonfiction
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3.00 Credits
In 1998, New York Times reporter John Tierney coined the word "explornography" to explain the phenomenal increase in demand for adventure literature, outdoor gear sales, Crocodile Hunter and survival-type television shows, and exploration oriented trips and vacations. Explornography, Tierney said, was "the vicarious thrill of exploring when there is nothing left to explore." This course takes Tierney at his word. We'll read a number of modern and classic explorer accounts of successful and failed expeditions. We'll ask what those expeditions meant in their time and what they mean in ours. We'll ask what modern versions of the traditional explorer expedition can mean in a world that is thoroughly mapped, covered by GPS technology, and always accessibly by cell and satellite phone service, and filled with X-Box, Halo, and other video gaming thrills. We'll ask why there's been such and explosion of interest in explorer, adventure and survival experience, and why in a modern, commodity-saturated culture the consumer has turned to explornography for vicarious thrills and adventure. We'll look at how explornography has been commodified, marketed, and sold. We'll distinguish between hard-core and soft-core explornography, between those who watch and those who do, and between experiences which build the self and those that do little more than serve the narcissistic ego. And finally, we'll ask what's next, or whether explornography is indeed the final frontier.
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3.00 Credits
Focusing on the great variety - and great numbers - of memorials erected in recent decades, this seminar explores how cultural memory is created and what it has come to mean in terms of national identity in modern and contemporary America. The definition of "memorial" is purposely broad: from statues and monuments to parks, public squares, cemeteries, public ceremonies, and moments of silence. Memorials can be permanent or temporary - such as roadside shrines. Understandings of "memory" are also broad, ranging from subjects of local and civic memory to those of national and/or collective memory, and including popular interests in autobiography, memoirs, and family genealogy. Understandings of "America" are similarly wide-ranging, often conflicted, and always in flux. Recognizing the broad definitions of the key terms memorial, memory, and America, this seminar considers the following: What does memory mean in America today, and in American memorial culture? What is driving the urgency to "memorialize" and who and what, in fact, is being remembered? Who and what are memorable in American history, and in terms of American national identity? Potential subjects are vast and include war memorials, Holocaust memorials, presidential commemoration, memorials erected at sites of tragedy and trauma (Oklahoma City, World Trade Center, Columbine), ritualistic memorial practices (such as pilgrimage and gift-giving), issues of public response, different styles of memorials and monuments (figurative vs. abstract memorials), and the role of the National Park Service, the nation's primary "keeper" of historical and cultural memory. Course readings will include selections by contemporary historians, art historians, and theorists engaged in issues of memory, history, and material/visual culture, as well as films.
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