American Social History

In our last class on Monday 5/2, we’ll consider whether, as some argue (or wish), America is a “post-racial” society. Is this more true, or less true, since Obama’s election, for instance?

Reading – some links are below: start with the top one, and proceed as time and interest allow, taking note of the core questions and issues in this ongoing cultural discussion in America today:

• “The Myth of Post-Racial America,” June 2010 column in the Washington Post by Steven Levingston
• Commentary on CNN.com, “Post-Racial America Isn’t Here Yet” by Leonard Pitts Jr.
• “Not in my Neighborhood” author Lawrence Bobo also says no – a view from black America, posted on The Root blog
• NPR radio clip (20 minutes) on “Are We Living in a Post-Racial America?“
• “What is Post-Racial America?” – a conservative viewpoint posted on “View From the Right” blog
• “Edging (At Times Clumsily) Toward a Post-Racial America,” Robin Givhan, Washington Post, 16 March 2008
• “Post-Racial America?” by University of California professor John Iceland
• “Post-Racial,” by Michael Crowley, in New Republic, March 2008

Deadlines and Grades

I will be doing project data input to the Digital Worcester website, aiming to get that done before the end of finals period. If anyone would like to help me with the data entry, I will give extra credit for that service. Let me know if you’re interested, I would love to get those all into the database before summer. Since everyone completed the project & submitted all necessary parts, everyone will be receiving the full 20 points for that project.

Your research paper can be submitted anytime from now until May 9th. It needs to be in by the afternoon of May 9th. If you want it returned to you with comments (or electronic markup if it’s submitted in electronic form), let me know. Otherwise I do not plan to write extensive comments–I’ll just give it a grade, since I rarely have students ask for their final papers or exams back.

The exam on the third unit will be Monday, May 9th at 12:30 pm in our regular classroom. You don’t need to bring anything special, just something to write with. It will be similar to the other two exams: essays based on our class discussion and on our course readings. I always get this question at the end of the term, so let me address it now: no, you do not HAVE to take the 3rd exam. Doing so will help you provide closure on the unit and will demonstrate your learning in the course to yourself as well as to me. That in itself is reason enough to take it, in my opinion. However, since the lowest exam is dropped, if you have 2 exam grades that you are happy with, you are not required to take the third one or to show up on that day.

The last assignment is a reflection paper, which is due on or before May 9th. Please respond to these questions in a well-constructed paper of 2-3 pages long:

1) The course objective is:

In this course, we will explore topics in the social history of the United States, through a wide variety of sources including newspapers, periodicals, tracts, photographs, archival records, didactic literature, fiction and oral history. You will gain experience with the work of social history in your readings and assignments. You’ll consider and experiment with ways of writing history that take “the little guy” (and gal) into account.

Discuss how well you’ve achieved this course objective through your participation in class, your written work, and your scholarly research.

2) Provide feedback on the Digital Worcester project. What did you learn from it? How could it be improved?

3) Reflect on your learning in this course. What was your approach to learning social history? How well did it work for you? And if you have specific suggestions on the course’s design (either what worked or what didn’t), I would welcome your feedback.

The reflection paper can be dropped off in my office mailbox (S-327B) along with your research paper if you don’t plan to be there on the 9th.

Thanks for a great semester!

Monday 25th: Discussion/lecture on Asian-American immigration, identity and citizenship. Why are Asians frequently omitted from the national narratives of immigration and from the concept of the melting pot? How does their history and experience differ from, or resonate with, that of other immigrant groups?

Topics: “Golden Door,” Chinese Exclusion Act, “Yellow Peril,” Rock Springs Wyoming riot (1885) and other anti-Asian riots of the same era, Supreme Court case Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) and U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), Chinatowns (when/where), Japanese immigration, Issei/ Nisei, 1924 Oriential Exclusion Law, Executive Order 9066.

Wednesday 27th, our reading is a digital archive website, JARDA (Japanese-American Relocation Digital Archive), found at: http://www.calisphere/universityofcalifornia.edu/jarda/

Questions to consider as you explore this archive:

• What kinds of sources does this repository make available to historians interested in the Japanese-American experience during World War II?
• What can you learn from these sources about the experience of Asian-Americans in the 20th century?
• What customs, cultural practices or worldviews clashed during the internment process?
• Were interned Americans able to maintain their cultural practices?
• What questions do these materials raise for you?

Friday 29th: Our last presentation day. If you are missing a 3rd response paper, please turn one in today on this week’s readings.

Presenter ideas: Presenters this week can focus either on the experience of Mexican-Americans in the American West using resources from last week, or on Asians in the American West using JARDA, or can compare/contrast the two in their presentations. If you need additional ideas:

• Listen to the recent NPR “Morning Edition” 5-part series, by reporter Jason Bobien, traveling the entire US-Mexican border. What is so important about this region? What are some of the current issues, problems, and stories from the border?
• Explore some of the experiences of Vietnamese Boat People. How do their stories intersect with changes in US immigration policy in the 20th century?
• Peruse some of the images, photographs and other resources in the Library of Congress American Memory archive “The Chinese in California, 1850-1925.” How is this website different from JARDA, and what use might social historians make of the items within it?
• Use the online Bracero Archive to understand the bracero program and how it fits into immigration history in the 20th century.

Image: Mrs. Fong Soon, undated photograph, from Library of Congress American Memory Collection, “The Chinese in California”

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2010/05/13/nat.ethnic.study.protest.kgun.html

Divided Families/ Familias Divididas

No class Monday April 18

Wed 4/20 – Hispanic America

Topics for lecture & reading: Mexican-American War, Texicans, Hispanic vs. Latino/a, LULAC, Cesar Chavez, Chicano/a, Bracero Program, Aztlan

Fri 4/22 – Discussion Day, of Pam Munoz Ryan’s youth novel Esperanza Rising (entire) (No presentations this week)

We’ll discuss this award-winning novel for young people.

Some questions for thought and discussion:

• What do you learn from this text about the Mexican-American migrant worker experience?
• How does Esperanza’s experience compare with the “undistinguished Americans” we discussed last week?
• Does the fact that this book is based on the author’s own family story give this work of fiction special authority or power?
• What are some of the themes and symbols explored in this book?
• What makes Esperanza “American”?
• How might (or should?) this book be used in a public school classroom?
• What is the social/political/racial context of this novel’s publication (2000)?

No presentations this week, because our Exam #2 will be on Friday, wrapping up our unit on social history as women’s history.

On Monday and Wednesday we’ll discuss the women’s movement and radical feminism in the 1960s. Here are some terms you may want to define for yourself and some people you should know –

Betty Friedan and her book, the 1963 Feminine Mystique – by the way, it is getting some new press, with a recent book out by Stephanie Coontz about the impact of Friedan 47 years ago (see, for example, Coontz’s interview on NPR Fresh Air in January). For other reflections on Friedan’s book, see this story in the Atlantic Magazine from 1999, or the original New York Times review of the book from 1963.

Gloria Steinem
“Second Wave” feminism (what was the first wave? are we in the third wave?)
Women’s liberation
Feminism
NOW (National Organization for Women)
Roe v. Wade
ERA
Phyllis Schlafly
Angela Davis
Barbara Smith/ Combahee River Collective
(If you have the Zinn book – this is Chapter 19)

The reading for Wednesday‘s discussion is a packet of 8 documents from the women’s movement ranging from 1966 to 1977. It can be found ON THE COURSE BLACKBOARD under the Assignments tab or from the link on the Announcements page. Please read it before class, and either print it (24 pages) or bring your laptops to access it for our class discussion.

If you’re interested in some of these topics for your research paper, try these for primary sources about second wave feminism:

Washington Women’s History Consortium
Notes from the First Year, Radical Women 1968
No More Miss America! (1968) – more on the Miss America protest here and here
How Feminism Works (from HowStuffWorks.com)

Enjoy your spring break!

The week we come back we’ll be jumping a century to the mid-20th century and looking at women’s lives in Cold War America (and think: does that political periodization make sense for a gendered history of that era?).

For Monday 3/21, read Rosenberg, “Cold War Fears, 1945-1961” OR Sara Evans, The Cold War and the Feminine Mystique.” Both provide good background & overview for our discussion/ presentation on Monday about mid-20th century women. If you’re presenting this week, you should read both.

Wednesday 3/23, bring your copy of Nancy Walker, Women’s Magazines, 1940-1960.
Yes, the entire book: it’s short. To prepare for class, read and be prepared to discuss at least 2 or 3 documents from each of the six chapters. We will have an in-class workshop day mining the book’s resources for what we can learn about American women in this era.

Questions to consider:

• What themes and ideas about gender and gender roles are raised by women’s magazines of this period?
• Was there more, or less, diversity in these views than you expected?
• How do these compare with or relate to prescriptive literature of the early 19th century?
• Are women following these gender roles, and how could we know?
• How can historians use these magazines as a source of information about women in this time period?
• What women are left out, defined as “unwomanly” or otherwise stretch/break gendered boundaries?
• What changes and continuities do you see over the 20 year period this book covers?

Friday 3/25 – Presentation Day #5
(Don’t forget: if you’re not presenting this week, it is a perfect opportunity to write a response paper! You can use any of the suggestions below as the basis for the response paper, or respond to any of the documents in Walker’s book or the Evans or Rosenberg readings)

Here are some suggestions and ideas for this week’s presenters:

• Listen to and use the 12/16/08 episode of NPR’s On Point radio show. The guest was Sister Soulja. How does her voice and perspective expand the notion of American women’s experiences in the 20th century?
• Discuss images of women working in factories during WW2, such as the Rosie the Riveter painting (Saturday Evening Post, May 1943) by Norman Rockwell, or the “We Can Do It” government poster. How were such depictions both feminine and patriotic? For more information, steer clear of the Wikipedia article and explore other resources on the web, such as the National Park Service, the Rosie Riveter park in California, or an archived StoryCorps oral history with the daughter of “Dot the Welder.”
• Choose one of the chapters in Walker’s book and analyze the articles by comparing them to each other. In your presentation, give us a “guided tour” of the chapter’s primary sources, providing your expert commentary along the way.
• Explore the website “Levittown: Documents of an Ideal Suburb.” Do a little research into Levittown (actually that should be plural, Levittowns: there were three), and use the photographs and memories recorded in Hale’s affectionate tribute site to explore women’s experiences in the preeminent postwar suburb.
• Black women in 1950s popular culture were frequently portrayed using the derogatory “mammy” stereotype, even when those “mammies” were major characters in film or television, giving some limited exposure to African-American actresses. Explore this as an alternative image for American women. You might use the online Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia (search under “Mammy Caricature”), for example.
• Compare what we’ve learned from Walker with women’s magazine for black women in the 1950s. You could begin here, or by reading this review of Noliwe Rook’s book Ladies Pages.
• Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 – right in the middle of this period of heightened attention to female domesticity, public presence, and women’s work. Explore her story in the context of Walker’s collection about women, work, and femininity. Primary sources about her arrest are at the National Archives website, or at a nice website maintained by the Montgomery Advertiser.
• Explore women’s fashions from 1940 to 1960 – in this case the Wikipedia article is pretty decent, or check out Costume Gallery, Glamour Daze, or 1950s Fashions, or any one of the recent blog posts or periodical articles devoted to the look of the early 1960s-era AMC program Mad Men.

(Image credit: http://getglamorous.blogspot.com/2007/11/past-glam-1953-marilyn-monroe-lustre.html)

20. Mon 3/7 – Separate Spheres and Didactic Literature

Reading: Joan Wolloch Scott, “Gender: An Important Category of Historical Analysis”

21. Wed 3/9 – Separate Spheres and the “Canon” or “Cult” of Domesticity

Reading: Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in 19th Century America” and John S. Abbot, “The Mother At Home” (1833) – focus on Chapter I and II (either read in page image view or as a transcript – pp. 1 through 40).

Discussion questions:

Our reading this week introduces you to feminist analysis of early 19th century prescriptive literature (or “didactic literature”) aimed at women. This genre of literature, including sermons, tracts, instruction manuals, instructed middle-class white women how to behave, how to run their homes, and helps us understand how women’s roles were defined in antebellum America (1800-1860). For more on the genre, see here. The Abbot tract “The Mother at Home” is an example of this kind of literature. Both Smith-Rosenberg’s and Scott’s articles are examples of how late 20th-century feminist historians have approached these kinds of sources as a window into women’s lives in the 19th century.

What ideas about gender were prevalent in antebellum America?
Can you identify some of these ideas in Abbot’s tract?

To whom did these definitions apply? And who was excluded from them? Who was defined as “not woman” or “unwomanly”?

One of the major themes in scholarship on separate spheres is the difference between what women were told to do and what they actually did. How does Smith-Rosenberg go about investigating whether women followed this literature’s prescriptions in their own lives?

Can you think of contemporary examples of prescriptive literature in our own time?

22. Fri 3/11 – Presentation Day #4
(don’t forget: if you’re not presenting this week, it is a perfect opportunity to write a response paper!)

For the presenters this week:

Please read and use the PDF of Barbara Welter’s groundbreaking article “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860” (American Quarterly, 1966). Use it to investigate additional examples of prescriptive literature such as:

• The rest of Abbot’s tract, i.e. Chapters 3-8.
• Catharine Beecher, “Treatise on Domestic Economy” (1856)
• The New England Primer, one of the most popular and widely-used schoolbooks in America. The 1807 edition is online here.
• The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises and Pursuits (this
  1830 work is cited on Welter, p. 152) – full text online at Assumption College’s Women’s History Workshop
• Or choose another tract, besides the Abbot, written prior to 1865 from the Michigan State University digital database “Shaping the Values of Youth: Sunday School Books in 19th Century America” (This database can be searched by category, such as “advice books,” “moral tales,” “immigrants” or “hymnals”). A text with a date of 18–? is okay.

This week, we continue looking at Progressive-Era labor from the workers’ point of view by coming home to Worcester.

(Image: Dining Hall of the Royal Worcester Corset Company; copyright Harvard University)

Mon 2/8 – Workers in Worcester
Reading: Rosenzweig, Eight Hours, Parts I and II (“Context” and “Culture”)

Here’s a chance for us to combine our growing knowledge of urban working class life with a well-written, detailed local history of the city right under our nose. Roy Rosenzweig earned his PhD from Harvard in 1978, and was a professor of history at WPI here in Worcester. After writing Eight Hours, he got interested in the possibilities of digital history. He wrote one of the first electronic textbooks, a CD-ROM documenting ordinary Americans’ contributions to US History, called “Who Built America?” and he founded the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He pioneered digital history both as a way to preserve historical resources, and as a forum for making history more accessible, especially to the ordinary folks who make it. He died in 2007; more about his life and work here.

On Monday we’ll talk about Worcester as an industrial city 1870-1920. What was made here? Who worked here? Where did they come from? Where did they live?

Read Chapter 1 carefully. You can skim Chapter 2, or focus only on its first 10 pages. For Chapter 3, jot some notes about how there were different “ethnic” Fourths of July – it’s okay to give it just a quick read.

Wed 2/10 – Workers in Worcester, Part II
Reading: Rosenzweig, Eight Hours, Parts III and IV (“Conflict” and “Culture, Conflict and Change”)

Read the rest of the book for our Wednesday discussion. If you don’t have time to read the entire rest of the book, do this: Choose one chapter from Part III (either Chapter 4, 5, or 6) to read more closely than the other two. Do the same for Part IV. Class discussion will focus specifically on the following questions:

• How did Rosenzweig use sources to construct a portrait of workers in Worcester?
• What changes over time are documented here? What caused these changes?
• What was it like to live in Worcester at this time period? How do we know?
• What is Rosenzweig’s overall argument?
• How might we go about researching Worcester in the same time period?

Fri 2/12 – Presentation Day #2
Our presenters this week can draw on any of last week’s topics, or come up with a new one that’s Worcester-related.

Some ideas:

Check out the digital database to which we will be adding our projects (http://digitalworcester.org) and find a few items that connect to each other or to Rosenzweig’s book. Make a “virtual exhibit” of them and be the tour guide for us in your presentation.

Read, and then highlight for us, the employee handbook of the Royal Worcester Corset Company, circa 1910. The booklet is owned (and beautifully digitized for our benefit) by the Harvard University Schlesinger Library; it promotes workers’ health, and lauds its own forward-thinking industrial design as a “model factory.” What can you learn from it about the working lives of women employed by Royal Corset–and the women who were its customers?

Discuss a more recent example of Worcester oral history, from the list of interviewees at the Oral History Project of the Worcester Women’s History Project. Give it the sensitive “Like a Family” treatment. What can you learn about work–and about Worcester–from a contemporary oral history?

Profile FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a cabinet-level position in US History. She grew up in Worcester; her home is now a women’s shelter called Friendly House. You can learn more about her starting at the Frances Perkins Center website (in Maine). What does a Secretary of Labor do? What were her responsibilities and legacy during the Great Depression and New Deal, when all eyes were on federal efforts to end unemployment?

Create a public Google map of the Worcester neighborhoods or locations mentioned in Rosenzweig’s book. Map and label important sites, events, conflicts, or addresses from his account. For instructions on how to create a Google map, see the Google Map User Guide.

Mon 1/31 – The New South

Topics for today’s class: the “New South,” the cotton industry, mill life, class in the 19th century South, Lewis Hine, labor and unionization in the Southern textile industry. There is 1 short reading: “Henry Grady Sells the New South,” History Matters online.



Wed 2/2 – Discuss Like A Family Chapter Three, “From the Cradle to the Grave”

Chapter 3: PDF posted in two parts – Part One, and Part Two

This week’s document is a chapter from the collaborative oral history titled Like A Family. It’s a masterful, gigantic, award-winning, multi-year/multi-researcher oral history project to reconstruct life and culture in textile mill towns of the upper South in the 1920s and 1930s. Hall and her colleagues conducted hours and hours of oral history interviews with elderly mill workers about their memories, their working experiences, and their inner lives. We’re reading just one chapter, that discusses how textile company towns “established the contours of daily existence” from birth to marriage to death.

Questions to consider:

• The book’s subtitle is “The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World.” How and why is this a “world”?
• Who peoples this world?
• What is life like?
• How does it differ (or not) from the experience of northern textile labor, e.g. the Lawrence strikers, or the shirtwaist factory workers?
• How did this team of researchers conduct their research?
• How do the voices of ordinary workers come through in this text?
• What do you learn about the Southern Piedmont as a region?
• What skills would you need to survive in their world?

Fri 2/4 – No Class This Week

There is no presentation day this week. However, if you are presenting next Friday you would be welcome to use this week’s topics as the foundation of your presentation. Some suggestions and places to begin -

Photos by Lewis Hine & Essays about his work at American Crossroads

Additional Lewis Hine photographs here, at HistoryPlace

Oral histories in the category “Textile” at Documenting the American South

Introduce us to the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act in 1916, and its connection to child labor in the Southern textile industry. It was invalidated by the Supreme Court after just two years; why?

History of Scott’s Run/ Arthurdale – a pet project town of Eleanor Roosevelt during the Depression

A 4-minute silent film from a 1924 Cotton Mill, showing the textile factory process

A feature film starring Sally Field, Norma Rae, a compelling biopic of a plucky textile union organizer in the same kind of mill towns in which Like a Family‘s informants worked a generation earlier. Field won the Academy Award for her performance in 1979. You could review the film for us and show a brief key scene. I have the film to lend; see me if you’d like to do this option.

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.