American Social History

We won’t have class today, the university is closed.

Our Exam will be on Monday in class instead. Enjoy the weekend, and be safe.

WE WILL HAVE CLASS THIS FRIDAY Feb 4th; I will be in town and we will hold "Wednesday’s class" on Friday. That way we still get our two class meetings in. It won’t be a presentation day, instead it will be our discussion on the Like A Family reading.

Thanks for your patience during this blizzard-a-week season! –Prof. Hangen


Snowflake image via mommamia, used by Creative Commons license

Hello all,

I know that many students are impacted by the snowstorm and by the campus’s loss of electrical power. Some students have gone home or are staying with friends and don’t have their usual access to course materials, computers, etc.

This means I am going to be lenient about the deadline for Friday’s response paper. Don’t panic, just write it and get it to me when you can, whether that’s a few hours late or a few days late. Proceed at whatever pace you can given your personal circumstances.

See you tomorrow (I hope!) –Prof. Hangen

Outlet image via Sixth Lie, used by Creative Commons license

Mon 1/24 – Labor and Gender

Begin reading the Brandeis Brief online.
Topics for today’s discussion: Supreme Court cases of Muller v. Oregon (1908) and Lochner v. New York (1905), liberty of contract, Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, the “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence MA in 1912.


Wed 1/26 - Discuss “Brandeis Brief in Muller v. Oregon”

What “extra-legal” data did Brandeis use?
Why did he develop this unusual style of legal brief?
What can we social historians learn (maybe by accident) from his information?
Why has this brief become important in legal practice?
How did Brandeis find and compile his information?
What was the effect of his documentation on the case?
On a recent feminist lawyer’s blog, one lawyer criticized this brief for being full of “paternalistic drivel.” Do you agree?


Fri 1/28 – Presentation Day #1

Everyone is turning in a response paper this week (2-3 pages), discussing the Gutman essay and/or the Brandeis brief.

If this is also your week to present, start at the sites below early in the week, where you will find useful & juicy information on women and work in the Progressive era (1880-1930). If you want you could go in depth with one of the Monday topics (the links to those are in the previous post). As a presenter, you’ll also need to submit a response paper on your research/presentation topic (but I’ll give a couple of extra days for that if you need it).

Discovering American Women’s History Online

Women Working, 1800-1930 – especially the photographs in the Baker Business Library Collection, under “Browse the Collection” –> “By Photographs”

Connecticut Women and Work

Calhoun Industrial School, Alabama Cyanotype Album

Resources on the Gender Wage Gap from Infoplease

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Virtual Exhibit (Kheel Center)

NINES (Web Portal for Scholarship of the 19th Century; keyword searching works very well in this site)

Jane Addams’s Hull House, now a museum

Hypertext of Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) and a well-crafted page of resources (essays, texts, a virtual exhibit) on the novel from the University of Pennsylvania

Check in with me by Wednesday with your topic, just so I know there’s not duplication among the presenters.

Your in-class presentation should be about 5 minutes long (no more than 7!!). It does not have to be a PowerPoint presentation (and in fact, I really discourage the use of those unless you can make your presentation dynamic and not just a recitation of what’s written on the slides). Consider: a game, an activity, a talk (not a “reading” of your paper), a Pecha Kucha, a concept map, a short focused discussion that involves the class, a podcast “radio program,” a video made by you, or a demonstration.

Worcester State is closed today (Friday, 1/21/11) because of the snowstorm. Therefore we won’t be having an in-class discussion about Gutman’s essay on the working class during American industrialization. We’ll discuss that essay briefly in class on Monday, but I don’t want to get too far behind in the syllabus, so we won’t spend the whole class on it.

Instead of our class meeting today, I have designed a worksheet that can be completed at home and uploaded to Digital Dropbox. Click here to download it. Instructions for how to complete and send it back are in the document.

If I receive one back from you, I’ll count you as having attended today even though we are officially closed (i.e. bonus). This assignment is not required, because the university is closed and not everyone may have access to a functional internet connection. However, I do recommend doing it, because it will get you used to the kinds of discussion questions I am likely to ask and the depth to which I want you to delve into our readings. Note that I am looking not only for your understanding of the essay’s CONTENT but also its scholarly APPROACH: evidence, argument, and Gutman’s writerly decisions.

For Monday, here is the list of topics that I’d like you to be familiar with:

• The Lochner v. New York case (1905) – (perhaps begin here at a UMKC Law School site)
• The Muller v. Oregon case (1908) – (a very short overview is here, to get you started. Text of the case can be found at Oyez.org or here at the Cornell Law site)
• The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (there’s an outstanding website on it here designed by Cornell U)
• the concept of “liberty of contract” as it pertains to the 14th Amendment (see the Lochner link, above; also here’s a teacher lesson plan that covers this concept)
• The “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence in 1912 (begin at Mass Moments, then read this article by left labor historian Joyce Kornbluh. You might also be interested in how the city of Lawrence memorializes the event)

For those of you with the Zinn book, he discusses some of these topics in Chapter 13.

I need to make a slight change to the presentation days; I will be out of town on Friday, Feb 4th so we won’t have class that day, so no presentations that week. That means some of you really will need to present next Friday so that we have time for everyone in the class to have a chance (~5 students per presentation day).

I probably should explain a little more about what it means to “present” in any given week. It means that you do a little extra research into one of the Monday topics (or a topic related to them), write a 2-3 page response paper, and design a 5 or 6-minute “something” for Friday’s class. It does not have to be a PowerPoint presentation (and in fact, I really discourage the use of those unless you can make your presentation dynamic and not just a recitation of what’s written on the slides). Consider: a game, an activity, a talk (not a “reading” of your paper), a Pecha Kucha, a concept map, a short focused discussion that involves the class, a podcast “radio program,” a video made by you, or a demonstration.

Possible presentation days are: 1/28 (and since everyone has a response paper due that day, you’d have to either write 2, or turn in one on some other presentation day), 2/11, 3/4, 3/11, 3/25, 4/8, 4/15, 4/29. Email me your preference or sign up on Monday.

“Social History” is a course title that often throws people at first. When I tell people that I teach it, they give me a look of puzzlement. History of parties? History of etiquette? History of friendship? Well, no.

So I have gotten into the habit of saying that “social history is the history of non-famous people.” That’s as good a starting definition as any. The subdiscipline of social history arose, in part, as an explicitly political effort to counteract Great Men histories–which were based on certain kinds of historical sources, often self-consciously created for posterity by literate elites higher on the social class ladder, and usually taking certain narrative tropes as their template (victory, settlement, founding, conquering, subduing – etc). In contrast, social history seeks to recover, reconstitute, or create a past more fully peopled by ALL the folks who lived there – including folks who were not powerful, literate, male, white, wealthy, victorious or settled. While the scholarship of social historians has filtered into textbooks and throughout the field more generally over the last three decades, most people probably still misconstrue US history as a series of presidents, grand “events,” and notable people. Hopefully you will never think of it that way again after taking this course.

Our semester is organized into three large units, each taking a slightly different perspective on the American past. In the first unit, we look at American social history as the history of workers, work, and labor. In the second, we consider American social history as women’s history, and in the third, American social history as the history of a polyglot multicultural nation – usually shorthanded as a “majority” and various “minorities” or cast as a “nation of immigrants,” but actually much more rich and complex than such oversimplifications imply.

I last taught this course in the Spring of 2009, and so the older entries on this website are from that semester; I am leaving them in place as a reference for those students. All the previous term’s material has been tagged “Spr09,” and you can safely ignore it, since I will re-post new information for the Spring 2011 term as we go along.

This website is the “Grand Central Station” for the course. Bookmark it and/or subscribe to its RSS feed (click on the little RSS icon in the sidebar). I’ve also created a public Google calendar for the course and its assignments; if you use Google calendar yourself (and I highly recommend that you do), simply add the course calendar to your own by clicking on the icon in the lower right corner. It can also be viewed on the “Schedule” tab.

In this unit we have explored how immigrants figure prominently in the “founding narrative” of our nation as colonizers, settlers, conquerors, and heroes of freedom. Late 19th-century immigrants, too, especially those from Europe, also people history heroically as seekers of financial betterment and religious freedom (e.g. the “Great American Melting Pot” Schoolhouse Rock video we saw). We have discussed how immigrants’ own accounts (the “Undistinguished Americans”) often didn’t fit the idealized vision of immigrants depicted in the Statue of Liberty’s poem. And contemporary immigrants spark ongoing controversy in America today over resources, border control, and who does or doesn’t “fit” in a pluralist American society. Many of these issues are particularly contentious in schools, which are the front line of educating young newcomers, and where questions of language, history, and identity are especially fraught.

In this assignment, you’ll put yourself in the place of an educator looking to broaden his/her curriculum to be more inclusive of “undistinguished” immigrant Americans. You, the educator, have selected or have been given Pam Munoz Ryan’s novel Esperanza Rising, and must now build a lesson or a series of lessons around it.

First, decide what grade you teach. Is this a late elementary school classroom (4th or 5th grade?)? If so, you might use the novel across both Language Arts and Social Studies. Is this a middle school classroom (6th, 7th or 8th grade)? If so, it is part of a Social Studies and/or Geography curriculum. Is this a high school classroom (9th-12th grade)? The novel may be part of a US History or general Social Studies class.

Next, develop a lesson plan that will realistically fill at least one class session. You’ll need to consider the learning capabilities of the students in your classroom, and will need to engage their interest and find a creative or compelling way to incorporate the novel in your teaching.

Consider these questions in your planning:
What will you want students to learn from this novel?
What goals will your lesson or project accomplish?
How long will it take?
Will they work in groups or individually?
How will you measure your students’ learning?
What other resources or materials might be needed?
What educational standards are addressed? (E.g. You could use the Massachusetts or National History Frameworks, or the actual standards of a school district of your choice)

On Wed 4/29, you’ll turn in a packet containing:

• 1) One lesson plan “grid,” completed (here is a PDF of the form; a type-into Word version is here)
• 2) A “script” or set of instructions so that the lesson(s) can be used over again or shared with other teachers (see the list of examples below for ideas on what that might look like)
• 3) A short (1-page) reflection paper (similar to what you did for the Digital Project) explaining what you learned from this assignment

Your project will be assessed for completeness of those 3 items, creativity of the lesson or project, suitability & appropriateness for the age group in your classroom, whether the project is realistic and do-able, and whether it incorporates the novel successfully.

Here are some examples of lesson plans and ideas from a variety of educator websites that incorporate social history topics using children’s literature or primary sources, to give you some inspiration:

• A sample 10th-grade lesson plan using a film to discuss the Watergate crisis (Jim Skvorc, Summit HS in Colorado)
• A sample 8th or 9th-grade lesson plan about pioneer trail dairies (Robert Mulick, Lowell Scott MS in Idaho)
• Using Children’s Literature about the Great Depression (Carol Hurst)
• Using the children’s book “Letting Swift River Go” in elementary classrooms (Carol Hurst)
• High school lesson plans incorporating letters to Eleanor Roosevelt (New Deal Network)
• Additional enrichment activities about the Depression and the New Deal (New Deal Network)
• Lesson plan ideas for a unit titled “Immigration Builds a Nation” (Education World)

We won’t meet today, so we’ll discuss the Gutman essay on Friday. (Part One is here, Part Two is here). The assignment for the response paper is here and that paper is due in class on Friday.

Looking ahead, next week we will discuss the “Brandeis Brief” in the Muller v. Oregon case (1908). It’s long, so plan ahead how to finish it by Wednesday. You can find it online here.

Enjoy your snow day!

This course explores the history of ordinary Americans, many of whom left little or no written records of their own. Through those case studies and our class discussion we approach the methodological problem of how to write about “non-famous” people through a series of case studies, and students will develop their own research projects to gain insight into how historians work. The course is suitable for history majors, or anyone interested in American history. It is crosslisted with Women’s Studies. Prereq: one previous history class is recommended.

You will need to purchase three books:

Nancy Walker, Women’s Magazines 1940-1960 (Bedford, ISBN 978-0312102012)

Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City 1870-1920 (Cambridge U Press, ISBN 978-0521313971)

Pam Munoz Ryan, Esperanza Rising (Blue Sky Press 2002, ISBN 978-0439120425)

In addition, we will rely on many online materials, including the free US history textbook online at www.digitalhistory.org and the Journal of Social History, available at History Cooperative, or through Academic Search Premier at the WSC library homepage.