The Nadir of Civil Rights:
Race in the U.S. at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
History and Literature 90c
Fall 2007
Wednesdays 2-4 pm
Prof. Robin Bernstein
rbernst@fas.harvard.edu
Office: Boylston Hall G31
Phone: 5-9634
Office Hours: Noon-2 pm Wednesdays and by appointment
The turn of the twentieth century constituted, in the famous term of historian Rayford
Logan, a “nadir” in the status and civil rights of African Americans. This course
explores, complicates, and expands upon that claim by studying the period’s multiracial
history and literature in an international context. We analyze U.S. racial formation
through textual and historical encounters between the US and China, Great Britain, the
Philippines, the Canadian arctic, the Kingdom of Hawaii, and Puerto Rico before the U.S.
claimed that territory. We consider lynching as a transatlantic concern and immigration
in connection with foreign policy. Throughout, we foreground acts of resistance among
colonized people of color.
The content of this course focuses on race, civil rights, and resistance in the early
twentieth century, but the course simultaneously strives to develop students’ skills in
interdisciplinary analysis. Our primary texts include written materials such as novels,
essays, plays, autobiographies, and children’s literature, but also visual materials
including photographs, book illustrations, museum displays, and films. We triangulate
our studies of written primary texts, visual primary texts, and scholarly secondary texts to
frame and complicate our understanding of race in a specific historical moment. As we
do so, we ask, what modes of analysis enable us to read and understand visual texts in
historical context? How can we, in the twenty-first century, look at century-old visual
artifacts and understand what the objects’ original viewers saw? And what does it mean
to expand study of “history and literature” to that of “history, literature, and images”?
This course fulfills History and Literature requirements in America in the World,
20th Century US History, and 20th Century US Literature
REQUIREMENTS
Brief Argument (3-5 pages, due Friday, October 12). Each student will form an
argument based on analysis of one of the course texts.
Analysis of a Visual Document (3-5 pages, due Friday, November 9). Each student will
select and analyze a relevant primary text from the Houghton Library, Schlesinger
Library, or Peabody Museum.
Discussion Leadership (various dates). Each student will develop oral communication
skills by leading discussion once during the semester. The discussion leader will
open class with a five-minute talk in which she or he will contextualize the
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assigned texts and connect those texts with ones assigned earlier in the semester.
The leader will then guide the conversation.
Final Paper (12-15 pages, due January 14, 2008). Each student will conduct primary
research and create an original argument of relevance to the course. Students are
strongly encouraged to write final papers that engage visual evidence and/or
incorporate an internationalist or transnationalist perspective. In preparation for
writing the final paper, each student will hand in a prospectus on Friday,
November 16.
Grading:
Productive participation, including active listening
Brief Argument
Analysis of a Visual Document
Discussion Leadership
Prospectus
Final Paper
25% of final grade
10% of final grade
15% of final grade
15% of final grade
5% of final grade
30% of final grade
The course assumes no previous knowledge of the historical era. The professor
will provide an overall historical framework through brief weekly lectures.
Students will take collective responsibility for the success of every discussion.
This responsibility involves three components. First, you are required to arrive in class
having read and thought about all the reading. In other words, merely gulping down the
reading is inadequate. You should come to class having chewed and digested the
material thoroughly. You are expected to prepare your own thoughts, opinions, and
questions before every class. Second, you must listen actively to your classmates. Your
contributions to our discussion should productively engage with your colleagues’ ideas.
Third, you must express your thoughts in a respectful manner that advances our
conversation. Practices that disrespect your colleagues (for example, interrupting,
hogging the floor, launching personal attacks, or answering cell phones) will hinder
conversation; such practices, therefore, are unacceptable.
The prospectus is graded full credit/no credit.
All papers are due to the History and Literature office by 3 pm of the due date.
Late papers will be penalized one third of a letter grade for each day overdue. Failure to
complete any assignment can lower your semester grade in excess of the stated
percentage.
Required Texts:
Sourcebook (SB)
Gail S. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914)
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition. 1901; reprint, edited and introduced by
Eric J. Sundquist, New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (1898; reprint Honolulu, HI: Mutual
Publishing, 1990) or online at
<http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/liliuokalani/hawaii/hawaii.html>
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Brook Thomas, ed., Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (New York:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997)
Ida B. Wells (edited and introduced by Jacqueline Jones Royster), Southern Horrors and
Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (Boston
and New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 1997)
Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, et al., The Reason Why the Colored American is Not at
the World’s Columbian Exposition (1892, ed. by Robert W. Rydell, 1999) or
online <http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wells/exposition/exposition.html>
Films:
Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)
Nanook of the North (dir. Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)
COURSE SCHEDULE
September 19. Introduction
 Read and discuss in class: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “The
Forethought” and “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”
 View and discuss in class: Stereographs from the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the
1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and the 1915 Panama Pacific International
Exposition
September 26. The 1893 Columbian Exposition and the Turner Thesis
 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American
History”(1893) <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/chapter1.html>
 Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, et al., The Reason Why the Colored American is
Not at the World’s Columbian Exposition (1892, ed. by Robert W. Rydell, 1999)
<http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wells/exposition/exposition.html>
 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American
International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, IL and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1984), chapter 2, “The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of
1893: ‘And Was Jerusalem Builded Here?’” pp. 38-71 (SB)
October 3. “Vanishing Indians”?
 Zitkala-Sa, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian
Girl, “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” “Side by Side,” 1896-1902. In Zitkala-Sa,
American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, Cathy N. Davidson and Ada
Norris, eds. (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 68-113. (SB and available online
through Hollis)
 Zitkala-Sa, The Sun Dance Opera (1904) from P. Jane Hafen, ed., Dreams and
Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera (Bison Books, 2005) (SB)
 Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2001), chapters 3 and 5, “At the Columbian Exposition, 1893”
(pp. 93-122) and “American Indian Performers in the Wild West” (161-220) (SB)
 Laura Wexler, “Tender Violence: Domestic Photographs, Domestic Fictions, and
Educational Reform.” In Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S.
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Imperialism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 94-126.
(SB)
October 10. The Annexation of Hawaii, 1893-1898
 Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. (online at
<http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/liliuokalani/hawaii/hawaii.html>
 Noenoe K. Silva, “The Antiannexation Struggle” and “The Queen of Hawai’i Raises
Her Solemn Note of Protest,” in Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to
American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 123-203
(SB)
Friday, October 12: Brief Argument due by 3 pm to Prof. Bernstein’s mailbox in the
History and Literature Office
October 17. Transatlantic Resistance to Lynching
 Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings (edited by Jacqueline Jones
Royster)
 Gail S. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and
Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
chapter 2: “‘The White Man’s Civilization on Trial’: Ida B. Wells, Representations of
Lynching, and Northern Middle-Class Manhood” (pp. 45-76)
October 24. The Violence of Segregation
 Selections, Brook Thomas, ed., Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents
(New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997)
 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition. 1901; reprint, edited and introduced
by Eric J. Sundquist, New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
October 31. Theodore Roosevelt and the Spanish-American War
 Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900; online at
<http://www.bartleby.com/58/>)
 Bederman, ch. 5, “Theodore Roosevelt: Manhood, Nation, and ‘Civilization’” (pp.
170-215
 Amy Kaplan, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill” (in Amy Kaplan and Donald E.
Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1993)
 Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New
York City, 1908-1936” (in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of
United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993)
November 7. Occupation and Resistance in the Philippines
 Aurelio Tolentino, Luhang Tagalog (Tagalog Tears). 1902. From Arthur Stanley
Riggs, The Filipino Drama (1905; reprint, Manila: Ministry of Human Settlements
Intramuros Adminstration, 1981), pp. 62-119. (SB)
 View the following photographs from The Book of the Fair, 1904:
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

• The Filipino of Yesterday
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04ww5133a.html>
• The Filipino of Today
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04ww5133b.html>
• Dance of the Igorots
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04ww5135a.html>
• All Is Vanity: An Igorrote Maid
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04bf041.html>
• Moro Chief in Full Dress
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04bf042.html>
• Igorrote Warrior Ready for the Fray
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04bf044.html>
• An Igorrote Chief at the Exposition
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04bf047.html>
• A Native of the Philippines at the World's Fair
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04bf305.html>
• A Filipino Belle
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04bf306.html>
• Moro Chief Posing at the World's Fair
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04bf307.html>
• Two Moro Fashion Plates
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04bf455.html>
• Savage Musicians and Dancers
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/wfe1904/wfe04bf261.html>
Palmer Cox, The Brownies in the Philippines (New York: The Century Company,
1904). “The Brownies on Mindoro,” “The Brownies on Romblon,” “The Brownies on
Luzon,” “The Brownies at Manila Bay,” “The Brownies on Negros,” pp. 1-7, 22-29,
54-60, 85-92, 127-133 (SB)
Vincente L. Rafael, “White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S.
Colonization of the Philippines” (in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures
of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993)
Friday, November 9: Analysis of a visual document due by 3 pm to Prof. Bernstein’s
mailbox in the History and Literature Office
November 14. Immigration and Anti-Immigration
 Sui Sin Far—selections tba
 Arnold Genthe and John Kuo Wei Tchen, Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s
Old Chinatown (Dover, 1984)
 Randolph Bourne, “Transnational America” (1916) Available online at
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Bourne.html
 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign
Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001)
(excerpts in SB)
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
RECOMMENDED: Bederman chapter 4: “‘Not to Sex—But to Race!’ Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Civilized Anglo-Saxon Womanhood, and the Return of the Primitive
Rapist” (pp. 121-169)
Friday, November 16: Prospectus for final paper due to Prof. Bernstein’s mailbox in
History and Literature office by 3 pm
November 21. Founding the NAACP
 W. E. B. Du Bois, excerpts from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) (SB)
 Selections from The Crisis magazine (SB)
 Selections from The Brownies’ Book (SB)
November 28. Gender, Technology, and Conquest
 Film: Nanook of the North (dir. Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)
 Robert J. Flaherty, “How I Filmed ‘Nanook of the North,’” World's Work, October
1922, pp. 632-640 (SB).
 Laura Wexler, “What a Woman Can Do with a Camera.” In Tender Violence:
Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 15-51. (SB)
 REVIEW materials on Theodore Roosevelt
December 5. Spectacles of Death
 Film: Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)
 Angelina Weld Grimké, Rachel (1916). Available online through Hollis at
http://lms01.harvard.edu/F/JA8CSHYF5CGNYTXN9395H6YNHGG1I6BCFDP7L3
3G77A377J1RY-14615?func=full-setset&set_number=734411&set_entry=000002&format=999
 Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature
(Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), chapter 6, “In the
Mind’s Eye,” pp. 282-307 (SB)
 Harry J. Elam, Jr. “Reality ” in Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, eds.,
Critical Theory and Performance, Revised and Enlarged Edition (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 173-190 (SB)
December 12. The King of the Jungle
 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914)
 John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the
Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), chapter 3,
“‘Still a Wild Beast at Heart’: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Dream of Tarzan,” pp.
157-218 (SB).
 Bederman, “Conclusion: Tarzan and After,” pp. 217-239
Monday, January 14, 2008: Final paper due to Prof. Bernstein’s mailbox in the
History and Literature office by 3 pm
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