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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
From our colonial roots to the present day, from the Puritans' "City Upon a Hill" to the Branch Davidians and the Waco compound, Americans have been trying to create ideal communities based on their particular version of the truth. In this course, we will survey a wide variety of utopian communities; some based on protection from the world, others based on free love and/or perfection of human relations; some now considered cults, and others mainstream religions. We will examine how they were supposed to work versus how they worked in reality, and the dreams and beliefs upon which they were based. We will explore the ways these experiments in living were created by American culture and have, in turn, transformed it.
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3.00 Credits
"To make so much money that you won't, that you don't mind, don't mind anything - that is absolutely, I think, the main American formula." In 1904, after a nearly thirty-year absence, Henry James returned to America to examine the country of his birth. His tour left him with impression of an entire society "dancing, all consciously, on the thin crust of a volcano," and brought him to the above conclusion about money and the American scene. This course tries to contextualize and understand James's remark by placing it within a broader atmosphere of American culture from the Gilded Age to the current Age of Globalization. We'll look at works of literature and biography, of politics and philosophy, and of theology and economics. Throughout, we will keep circling around and back to James's notion of "the main American formula" and asking not only what he meant, but also how other major thinkers past and present have understood or conceived of an "American formula." The course moves over a vast period of American history from the Gilded Age to the present. Contemporary works will shape discussion about how globalization and phenomena like the credit crisis and global financial collapse offer specific challenges to American identity. Students will write a series of short papers, a longer research paper, make class presentations, and take a final exam.
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3.00 Credits
Exploring a wide range of primary and secondary sources from the 1940s and today (e.g., novels, films, ads, posters, poetry, art, museum exhibitions, and memorials), this course will examine the history of America's World War II experience and how this history is remembered and memorialized today. Areas of study will include D-Day and Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the emerging African-American and Mexican-American civil rights movement, the Americanization of European immigrants, Japanese-American internment and redress, and "Rosie the Riveter" and other women's experiences as paid workers.
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3.00 Credits
This interdisciplinary survey of civil rights and social protest movements in the United States examines suffrage inclusion, abolitionism and black civil rights movements, labor organizing, and women's rights in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as several contemporary protest movements. These movements certainly question selected American ideologies, but they also draw on American values and practices. We will use history, film, fiction, journalism, and autobiographies to trace a tradition of protest that both depends on and offers challenges to a democratic society.
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3.00 Credits
What difference does journalism make? This lecture course traces the impact of news on public policy since the start of World War II. In addition to that period, this course studies the impact of coverage on the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, the era of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's crusade against Communism, the war in Vietnam, the investigation of the Watergate scandal and, finally, the impact of media on the local 2006 Congressional election. Taught by the former editor of The Boston Globe.
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3.00 Credits
The course will examine the conditions of extreme poverty and homelessness within the broader context of American culture and society. In order to confront the nature of these conditions, this seminar will draw upon insights from history, literature, documentary film and photography, and the social sciences. We will focus on the degree of permanence and change in our approach to both traditional and modern forms of the social problem.
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3.00 Credits
The purpose of this interdisciplinary course is twofold: to examine the social context and cultural change of the sixties and to explore the various journalistic and aesthetic representations of events, movements, and transformations. We will focus on the manner in which each writer or artist witnessed the sixties and explore fresh styles of writing and cultural expression, such as the new journalism popularized by Tom Wolfe and the music/lyrics performed by Bob Dylan. Major topics for consideration include the counterculture and the movement--a combination of civil rights and anti-war protest.
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3.00 Credits
This course is fashioned more like a workshop. Students will be engaged in fieldwork either on campus or in the surrounding community. By investigating and documenting people, culture, place and setting, students will combine the imaginative work of the writer with the analytical work of the intellectual. Whether conducting journalistic inquiry, in-depth interviewing, oral history, participant observation, or ethnography, students will take the initiative in making contact and building rapport with their respective subjects. Group work based upon ongoing fieldwork (and supplemented by readings) will be the basis for classroom discussion. That is, in addition to considering exemplary readings in various genres on nonfiction, we will focus on students' fieldwork process and results in class. Along with a substantive written account of the fieldwork, an oral presentation is required. (Students wishing to pursue community-based research will be accommodated).
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3.00 Credits
Freedom and the American novel looks at how the concept of "freedom" functions as an aesthetic, cultural, political, and social component in a selection of American novels and other forms of literature which helped create the larger landscape of American fiction from the 19th century until the present. Selected works will address issues of economic freedom, political freedom, religious freedom, freedom and gender, sexuality, race, identity, and death among others. Short papers, presentations, long papers and exams.
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3.00 Credits
This class will focus on how print and broadcast journalists work - how they think and act as well as the dilemmas they face in delivering news, analysis, and commentary. Several sessions will be devoted to presentations by visiting correspondents, editors, and producers, explaining their approaches to specific stories and circumstances. In addition, students will discuss the issues and questions raised in a few books.
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