AMERICAN STUDIES 201
INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN STUDIES
SPRING 2015
Tu/Th 10:30-11:50
Floyd Cheung
x 3619
217 Wright Hall
fcheung@smith.edu
W 3-4, Th 1:45-2:45
and by appointment
Seelye 312
Christen Mucher
x 3737
205 Dewey House
cmucher@smith.edu
Tu/Th 1-2, Tu 4:20-4:50
and by appointment
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
--William Faulkner
“. . . when it comes to creating a multiracial,
multiethnic, multi-religious democratic society, we
are still a developing nation.”
--Vincent Harding
Readings (available at the Grécourt Bookstore)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Graywolf)
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Simon and Schuster)
Brook Thomas, ed. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford)
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Bedford)
Additional readings are available on Moodle, the Internet, and as handouts.
Claudia Rankine talk and reading on 2/23 at 4:00 p.m.
Requirements
4 short (2-page essays)
1 in-class poster presentation
1 final project
in-class low-stakes writing now and then
Evaluation
20% attendance and participation
40% (or 10% each) 2-page essays (x4)
20% poster presentation
20% final project
What to Expect from this Class
Together we will ask and begin to answer to the question “What is American Studies?” Corollary
questions include “What are appropriate objects of study in this field?”, “How do we do American
Studies?”, and “Why do we do American Studies?” Stimulated by common readings and encounters with
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other artifacts, we will have conversations--often messy ones--about these questions. Along the way, we
will try to bring some order to our chaos by creating a common concept map and by giving you the
opportunity to write down and hence provisionally declare the state of your mind on these questions.
Although there are more than forty of you in this class, you should try to speak up several times a week.
If, on occasion, you cannot attend or really don’t feel like talking, don’t worry. We all experience illness
and quiet days every now and then. But know that studies have shown that the “best learning takes place
when learners articulate their own unformed and still developing understanding and continue to articulate
it through the process of learning” (R. Keith Sawyer 12). At the end of the semester, we will ask you to
provide a self-assessment of your participation and attendance.
After an introductory week organized around Citizen by Claudia Rankine, we will proceed through four
units, each of which asks a question about America that seems especially pressing to us now. Of course
there are other questions, and of course we don’t imagine that we will answer any of these questions fully.
The point is to use these questions as a way to practice doing American Studies. Normally, we will begin
a unit by asking you to reflect on what you already know. Then we will engage with a few texts that give
us a sense of the current state of affairs. Next we will look back to primary sources from the past to gain
insight on the present. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Along the way, we
will read examples of how practitioners of American Studies approach the topic at hand. Finally, we will
consider what you have to conribute in terms of additional resources and ideas for intervention. If
Harding is right that “when it comes to creating a multiracial, multiethnic, multi-religious democratic society,
we are still a developing nation,” there’s hope in our involvement in the process. Here’s a slightly more visual
representation of each unit’s structure.
raise awareness
What is going on now?
research primary
sources
How long has this been going on? What are relevant
precedents? How have others addressed this?
apply methods
What AMS approaches can help us understand, analyze, etc.?
get involved
What can we add? How could we begin to intervene?
Universal Access Statement
We strive to provide an environment that is equitable and conducive to the learning of all students. To do
so, we ask that class members be respectful of each another and the diverse backgrounds, abilities, and
opinions that each student brings into the classroom. If there are circumstances affecting your
performance in or access to this class, please let us know so that we can work together to develop
strategies for adapting assignments or assessments to meet both your needs and the requirements of the
course. If you have a documented disability and require specific accommodation, be sure to contact the
Office of Disability Services in College Hall 104 ods@smith.edu. It is your responsibility to see that we
receive all paperwork from ODS.
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Remember that the resources and support provided by the Jacobson Center for Writing, Teaching, and
Learning (Seeyle 307), the Spinelli Center for Quantitative Learning (Second Level, Neilson Library), and
the Libraries are available to all students.
Academic Integrity
Smith College has an Honor Code that is enforced by the Smith Academic Honor Board. Faculty have a
responsibility to report any suspected violations—such as, but not limited to, cases of plagiarism and
cheating—to the Honor Board and relevant Deans. For more information, see the Smith College Libraries
tutorial: “How to Recognize Plagiarism”
Semester Schedule
Th 1/29
1. Martin Luther King, Jr., Speech in London (1964)
Tu 2/3
1. Rankine, Citizen (2014)
Unit 1: No Justice, No Peace!?
Th 2/5
1. Rankine, Citizen
2. James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation (1966)
3. Bao Phi, “8(9)” (2011)
Tu 2/10
1. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid” The Atlantic
(Nov 26, 2014)
2. Nicholas Kristof, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4” New York Times (Nov 14 2014)
3. George Yancy and Judith Butler, “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” New York Times (Jan
12 2015)
Th 2/12
1. Readings from Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents
a. The Civil War Amendments 11-18
b. The Majority Decision 31-34
c. Harlan's Dissent 34-39
d. Plessy v. Ferguson, May 18, 1896, 41-60
e. Press Response: Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), May 20, 1896, 131
f. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Courts and the Negro, ca. 1911, 149-160
g. Conclusion: In the Wake of Plessy 169-176
In class: clips from Birth of a Nation, dir. D. W. Griffith (1915)
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Tu 2/17
1. Revisit Rankine
2. Michelle Alexander, from The New Jim Crow (2010): 1-15, 97-139
In class: clips from documentary The House I Live In, dir., Eugene Jarecki (2012)
Th 2/19
2-page essay due
In-class poster-session #1
M 2/23 Claudia Rankine visits Smith College: reading and talk at 4:00 p.m.
Unit 2: What about the 99%?
Tu 2/24
1. Photographs of Occupy Wall Street (2011)
2. Naomi Klein, “Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Right Now” (2011)
3. Charles Blow, “Occupy Wall Street Legacy” (2013)
4. Default: The Student Loan Documentary (2012) via Kanopy
5. Oxfam 2015 study on world wealth gap
Th 2/26
1. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853)
2. Jonathan Greenberg, “Occupy Wall Street’s Debt to Melville” (2012)
3. Barbara Foley, “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's ‘Bartleby’” American
Literature Vol. 72, No. 1 (March 2000): 87-116
Tu 3/3
1. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth” (1889)
2. Helen Horowitz et al., from Love Across the Color Line (1996): 1-40
In-class: Walking tour of Smith College environs
Th 3/5
1. Nan Enstad, “Fashioning Political Subjectivities: the 1909 Shirtwasit Strike and the ‘Rational Girl
Striker’” from Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure (1999): 84-118
In class: visit Sophia Smith Collection
Employment Collection, “Women at Work: Views and Visions from the Pioneer Valley, 1870-1945”
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Tu 3/10
1. David Palumbo-Liu, “Thinking Big” The Boston Review (2011)
2. George Lipsitz, “In the Midnight Hours” from American Studies in a Moment of Danger (2001):
3-30
Th 3/12
2-page essay due
In-class poster-session #2
Spring Break
Unit 3: Are we really a nation of immigrants?
Tu 3/24
1. “President Obama Announces New Steps to Fix Our Broken Immigration System,” November 20,
2014
2. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New
Imperialism (2006): 11-48, 198-208
3. Dara Lind, “35 Maps that Explain how America is a Nation of Immigrants” Vox (January 12,
2015)
Th 3/26
1. The Invasion of America
2. Phillip Earenfight, “From the Plains to the Coast” from A Kiowa’s Odyssey (2007): 12-29
3. Fort Marion Artists’ drawings (Smithsonian Institution)
4. Mathew Frye Jacobson, “Anglo Saxons and Others, 1840-1924” in Whiteness of a Different Color
(1998) : 39-90
Tu 3/31
1. How the Other Half Lives (1890): 15-18, 59-123
2. Sam Mitrani, “Introduction” to The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict,
1850–1894 (2014): 1-13
Th 4/2
1. How the Other Half Lives (1890): 123-153
2. Mae Ngai, “The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the Reconstruction of Race in Immigration Law”
in Impossible Subjects (2004): 21-55
3. Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist” 49 UCLA Law Review (2002): 1575-1598
Tu 4/7
2-page essay due
In-class poster-session #3
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Unit 4: Why are we obsessed with celebrity and consumption?
Th 4/9
1. New York Times debate on “Renee Zellweger and the Question of Aging”
2. Blue Telusma, “Kim Kardashian doesn’t realize . . .” Grio (12 Nov. 2014)
3. Anne Helen Peterson, “Jennifer Lawrence And The History Of Cool Girls” Buzzfeed (2014)
Tu 4/14
1. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
Th 4/16
1. Dreiser
2. Theodore Veblen, “Economic Theory of Women’s Dress” (1894)
3. Library of Congress exhibition: “The Gibson Girl’s America” (c. 1890)
Tu 4/21
1. Dreiser
2. Emily S. Rosenberg, “Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the ‘American
Century’” Diplomatic History 23.3 (Summer 1999): 479-497
In-class: Museum visit to see photographs by Lauren Greenfield, Girl Culture
Th 4/23
Dreiser reading day (Cheung at conference)
Tu 4/28
1. Dreiser
2. George Lipsitz, “In the Sweet Buy and Buy,” from American Studies in a Moment of Danger
(2001): 235-270
Th 4/30
2-page essay due
In-class poster-session #4
Th 5/7
Final project due
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