“15 Minutes with Levitt of Levittown,” Pageant Magazine, April 1952, 82-87. (Source: OldMagazineArticles.com)
Good Housekeeping Magazine – full issues, focus only on 1945-1950. Source: Cornell University Library.
Billboard Magazine – full issues, focus only on 1945 – 1963. Source: Billboard.
Civil Defense Brochures of the Kennedy Era. (Source: PopCult)
“I have in my hand…”
Anticommunism dominated American politics and culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The name of the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, has since become synonymous with the entire Second Red Scare era, although his own political career peak was only from 1950 to 1954. McCarthyism seemed to many a kind of cultural hysteria, a madness, infecting Congress and Washington, Hollywood, workplaces, and public life. To others, it was a deadly earnest effort to keep America free from subversion and potential nuclear annihilation.
Inspired by the NCAA tournament (March Madness), today’s workshop is a Sweet Sixteen bracket of primary sources relating to Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism. Who will dominate?
Working in groups, you have ten minutes to decide the winner between various sets of primary sources by trying to convince the other team your document is more important/interesting/useful to historians. By 15 past the hour, we will have our champion #1 source of the McCarthy era.
Remember to use your primary source analysis skills as you build your case: Who wrote or made this? When? Why? What does it say? What does it NOT say? What point of view or political ideology does it express? How could historians use it now; what message does it provide about McCarthy or his cultural context?
Some of the documents are in paper form, others you’ll need to access online:
Herblock Cartoons (pick ONE winner in the first round from your assigned group of 3)
Newsman Edward R. Murrow’s closing oratory for his TV show “See it Now” March 9, 1954
1952 Wisconsin Republican Primary Campaign Brochure, “What Has McCarthy Done for Wisconsin?”
Links for listening and discussion:
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (NPR)
“I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” (Bing Crosby)
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (Wizard of Oz, 1939)
WPA Posters (Library of Congress)
Google Doc “1930s Workshop” edited during class on Wednesday – USE this to study for Friday’s exam!
Reminder – please bring the Fernlund book AND your laptop to our workshop on Wednesday March 13th!
Exam #2 will be on Friday during class. Download the study guide here if you didn’t get one in class yet. Remember that the online quiz closes at 9:00 am on Friday morning, so make sure you’ve taken it at least once by then.
Today for our workshop, you’ll work to find a brief (but historically accurate) group answer to your assigned question, and then present your findings to the rest of the class. Within your group you should have enough people to fill at least these roles, although the whole group should work together on the research:
A scribe (completes the worksheet)
A spokesperson (reports to the rest of the class – 1-2 minutes MAX)
A fact-checker (assesses the quality/reliability of the sources your group uses)
Researchers (locating and synthesizing information)
You can use additional resources if you want, but steer clear of Wikipedia, Infoplease, Ask.com, YahooAnswers and similar sites.
Your group should be ready to report at 5 after the hour!
Online Resources
Early Jazz or 1920s Jazz (PBS Culture Shock)
American Jazz Culture in the Early 1920s (University of Minnesota Duluth)
Harlem History – Columbia University
Harlem: A History in Pictures – New York Metro
Harlem Renaissance and the Flowering of Creativity (Library of Congress)
The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Harlem Renaissance (John Carroll University, best view in Internet Explorer)
Digital Harlem (University of Sydney)
The Cotton Club of Harlem (Encyclopedia Britannica)
The Cotton Club (PBS)
Marcus Garvey, UNIA Papers (UCLA)
Marcus Garvey (National Humanities Center)
“After 200 Years, 125th is Still Harlem’s Main Street” (Columbia Spectator)
Harlem 1900-1940 (Schomburg Center)
And from the “Harlem’s Still the Symbolic Heart of American Black Culture” department –
“Long Before the Harlem Shake…” (NPR)
and
“Fader Explains: The Harlem Shake” (Fader)
“The Harlem Shake is Dead, Long Live the Harlem Shake” (Time)
Use these links to navigate to the resource you picked up on the assignment sheet and use today’s class time to study the resource online. If you chose a book, there’s a stack in the front of the room you can select from. Remember to leave about 5-10 minutes at the end to compose a comment to this post sharing your findings and insights from this workshop with the rest of the class. Your submitted comment is my record of your attendance and participation in today’s workshop.
(These are in alphabetical order)
Buffalo Bill Historical Center
Chinese in California, 1850-1925 (Library of Congress American Memory)
Chronicling America Historical Newspapers
Colorado Historical Newspapers Collection
Custer Battlefield Museum
Daniel Freeman’s Homestead Application, 1862
Denver Public Library photographs (Library of Congress American Memory)
Digital Archives of Sioux County Nebraska
Edward Curtis’s North American Indian (Library of Congress American Memory)
Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture
Little Bighorn National Monument
“Mythbusters” from students in HI 207 American West Course, Fall 2009
“No Renters Here” – Homesteading a Sod House
Plains Indian Ledger Art
Rawhide
Stagecoach (directed by John Ford, 1939)
Texas Border Photographs (Library of Congress American Memory)
Texas Ranch House
Texas State Historical Association – Handbook of Texas Online
Utah and Western Migration (Library of Congress American Memory)
Worcester State Library – Articles and Databases
Wyoming Newspaper Project
This week we’re reading and working with the material in Chapter 16 of both the textbook and the reader.
General News: The new correct books are now in stock at the bookstore! To exchange, you’ll need to bring BOTH parts of the bundle you bought there, along with your receipt, and you can get the new set (same reader + 5th edition of the textbook) for a mere $4.51 more. You can’t just bring the textbook and swap it out for the new one, you need to return the entire bundle and get a new bundle in its place.
Also: in class I handed out the updated syllabus page 6, with all the due dates, readings, and topics for the whole semester, based on your votes. I’ve linked to it in the sidebar in case you need another copy at some point during the term. I also handed out a page of advice about the SkillBuilder assignments.
Monday 1/28 – Reading = ACH Ch 16 p. 475 – 484
Wednesday 1/30 – Reading ACH Ch 16 p. 484 – 494. Workshop Day on the “Wild West” – please bring your laptops to class.
Friday 2/1 – SkillBuilder #2 due – if you don’t yet have the reader, please use one of these alternative documents. Reading = ACH Ch 16 p. 494 – 505. Also on this day, an online quiz will open up in Blackboard on Chapter 19 (which we are not covering in class). It will be open until Friday, Feb 8 at 9:00 am and during that time you can take it up to three times. Please remember to take it!
In this last unit of the course, we consider recent history – what matters, who decides, and how best to learn about more recent events. The “lens” is Race, Identity and Immigration, i.e. the “New Face of the USA.” What does America look (and sound, and taste) like in 2012, and why?
Here’s a unit overview. Note there’s also a new tab above for your unit SkillBuilder due on Friday 11/30.
Mon 11/26 – “What Happened to the 1960s?” Reading: Skim Ch 12, especially 12.4 Middle East and Malaise: America in the Late 1970s
Wed 11/30 – Reaganomics and the End of the Cold War. Reading: Chapter 13.1 and 13.2
Fri 11/30 – History Now Workshop Day. Very important that you’re in class on this day, I’ll be handing out the packets for our History Now project (guidelines here). No reading. SkillBuilder #6 is due by the start of class.
Mon 12/3 – Immigration in Your Time. Reading: Ch 13.4 Technology and Globalization
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno _ Citizenship Test by hulu
Wed 12/5 – American Diversity. Reading: Ch 14.3 Diversity in the New America
Fri 12/7 – History Now, Discussion Day. No reading, History Now Project is due in class. No electronic submission on this project and NO LATE WORK ACCEPTED.
The last exam will be Wed 12/12 at 8:30 am in our classroom
In class today, we’ll work in groups of three on some primary and secondary sources to help us understand gender in Victorian America. Some of you will have papers, some will have reproductions of mail-order catalogs, some will have photographs, and some of you will work online using laptops.
Links for today:
Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century
“There Are No Renters Here: Homesteading a Sod House”
I have posted the new syllabus schedule, based on the results of Friday’s voting, in the sidebar links. You can also download it here (2-page PDF). The “lens” for the first unit is gender, so as we look at the period from 1875 to 1900 we will be interested in how men & women were defined and the contexts in which they experienced being male or female. Gender mattered deeply in work, home, citizenship, and opportunity during this period.
Here’s a brief overview of the unit:
Mon 9/10 – Finish talking about Reconstruction – reading is to review Ch 1-3 to get an overview of the time period’s major events
Wed 9/12 – Self-Made Men & Women; Homesteaders; Westerners and Immigrants. Reading: Ch 2.2 Winning & Losing the West AND 2.3 Growth of Industrial America and the New South. BRING LAPTOPS/DEVICES TO CLASS!
Fri 9/14 – Workshop Day on Victorian Masculinity and Femininity. Reading: Davidson, “City Life and City Culture” (PDF – Click here to download). BRING LAPTOPS TO CLASS.
Mon 9/17 – Gilded Age Gender. Reading: Ch 2.4 Challenging the Gilded Age
Wed 9/19 – American “Nadir.” Reading: Ch 3.3 Immigration, Ethnicity and the “Nadir of Race Relations.” The online portion of the exam will open on this day (see below for more information).
Fri 9/21 – The written portion of the exam will be in class. The in-class exam will cover what we’ve talked about in class during this unit, including the assigned portions of the textbook and any other assigned readings. The online portion will cover the following basic concepts and events from the rest of Chapters 1-3:
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