AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE
History 4958
2007-2008
Thursday, 9:00-10:50, Wallis 128
Finis Dunaway
Champlain College J11
748-1011 (ext. 7026)
E-mail: finisdunaway@trentu.ca
Office Hours: Wednesday 2:15-3:45 and by appointment
Course Description: This course will examine visual images in relation to broad themes in
modern United States history. Ranging from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, we
will explore a wide array of visual sources: photography, Hollywood film, monuments and
memorials, modern painting, and the mass media. We will connect these images to major
problems in twentieth-century American history, including political reform and the contest over
national identity; the development of feminism, civil rights, and other social movements; and
debates over war, the environment, and public art. Throughout the course, we will consider how
the study of visual images can illuminate the past in new and revealing ways. We will also
examine some of the key methodological issues that arise when historians incorporate visual
sources into their research and analysis.
Requirements: class attendance and informed participation; leading discussion in one seminar; a
research prospectus in the first term; a research essay in the second term; and a presentation on
your research near the end of the school year.
Grading:
Seminar Participation/Leading Discussion
Research Prospectus
Research Presentation
Research Paper
25%
10%
15%
50%
Format: This course will be run as a seminar. Although I will often provide some background
on the different topics, the class meetings will consist primarily of discussion. These meetings
offer us the opportunity to consider different interpretations of the past, to examine topics in
more depth, and to discuss ideas in a constructive, respectful manner. In order for the seminar to
work properly, it is imperative that you complete the readings on the day they are assigned and
come to class prepared to discuss them. During the year, each student will be expected to lead
one class discussion. Your job will be to pose insightful questions to the class and facilitate the
conversation. On the day you lead discussion, you will also be asked to submit a list of questions
to me. The quality of your questions will factor into your participation grade.
Research Prospectus and Paper: The major written assignment for this course is a research
paper. You are free to pursue a topic of your own choice, as long as it focuses on United States
history and incorporates visual images into its analysis. I encourage you to select an issue that
you find particularly intriguing or compelling, something that you want to explore in greater
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depth. Each student will be required to submit a research prospectus, offering some background
on the topic, a brief discussion of key themes and questions, and a preliminary bibliography of
some of the primary and secondary sources (at least 10) you plan to consider. The prospectus
should be typed in 12-point, double-spaced, and about 1200 words (4-5 pages). It is due on
December 6.
The final paper should be typed in 12-point font, double-spaced, and about 6000-7000 words
(about 25-30 pages) in length. It is due on April 7.
Research Presentation: During the final weeks of seminar, students will present their arguments
and research findings to the class. Each student will speak for approximately ten to fifteen
minutes, emphasizing the major themes, problems, and images addressed by the research project.
Following the presentation, members of the seminar will direct questions to the speaker and
make suggestions and comments about the research. These presentations should help foster a
sense of intellectual community among the class and also provide valuable feedback for students
as they write the final versions of their papers.
Required Readings:
History 4958 Course Reader
Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art
Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since
1945
The above readings may be purchased at the Trent Bookstore.
Rules and Reminders:
Academic dishonesty, which includes plagiarism and cheating, is an extremely serious
academic offense and carries penalties varying from failure in an assignment to suspension from
the University. Definitions, penalties, and procedures for dealing with plagiarism and cheating
are set out in Trent University’s Academic Dishonesty Policy which is printed in the University
Calendar.
You are not allowed to submit work to more than one course. You also are not allowed to
borrow or purchase essays from another source.
Access to Instruction
It is Trent University’s intent to create an inclusive learning environment. If a student has a
disability and/or health consideration and feels that he/she may need accommodations to succeed
in this course, the student should contact the Disability Services Office (BL Suite 109, 748-1281,
disabilityservices@trentu.ca) as soon as possible. Complete text can be found under Access to
Instruction in the Academic Calendar.
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Schedule:
September 13
Introduction to the Course
No Reading
September 20
Orientations: Images and History
1. Katharine Martinez, “Imaging the Past: Historians, Visual Images and the Contested
Definition of History,” Visual Resources 11 (1995): 21-45.
2. Louis P. Masur, “‘Pictures Have Now Become a Necessity’: The Use of Images in American
History Textbooks,” Journal of American History 84 (March 1998): 1409-1424.
3. Susan J. Douglas, “Mass Media: From 1945 to the Present,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and
Roy Rosenzweig, eds., A Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell
Publishing, 2002), 78-95.
4. Elspeth H. Brown, “Reading the Visual Record,” in Ardis Cameron, ed., Looking for America:
The Visual Production of Nation and People (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 362370.
AND
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters, 1-35
September 27
Photography and Modernism in the Early Twentieth Century
5. Robert Westbrook, “Lewis Hine and the Ethics of Progressive Camerawork,” Tikkun, 2
(1987): 24-29.
6. Peter Seixas, “Lewis Hine: From ‘Social’ to ‘Interpretive’ Photographer,” American Quarterly
39 (Autumn 1987): 381-409.
7. Miles Orvell, “The Camera and the Verification of Fact,” in his The Real Thing: Imitation and
Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1989), 198-239.
AND
Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, 53-95
October 4
Images and Politics: From the New Deal to the New Frontier
Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, 97-117
AND
8. Sally Stein, “The President’s Two Bodies: Stagings and Restagings of FDR and the New Deal
Body Politic,” American Art 18 (Spring 2004): 32-57.
9. Wendy Kozol, “‘The Kind of People Who Make Good Americans’: Nationalism and Life’s
Family Ideal,” in her Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 51-56, 69-91, 196-197, 199-201.
10. David M. Lubin, “Blue Sky, Red Roses,” in his Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of
Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 105-142, 297-300.
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October 11
Movies: The Silent Era, Citizen Kane, and the Biblical Epics
FILM SCREENING DURING WEEK (Citizen Kane)—Time and Place TBA
11. Steven J. Ross, “Struggles for the Screen: Workers, Radicals, and the Political Uses of Silent
Film,” American Historical Review 96 (April 1991): 333-367.
12. James Naremore, “Introduction,” in James Naremore, ed., Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A
Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3-13.
13. Michael Denning, “The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism,” in
James Naremore, ed., Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 185-216.
AND
McAlister, Epic Encounters, 43-83
October 18
Race and Visual Culture:
From The Birth of a Nation to the Black Panthers
14. Michele Faith Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation: Discourses and
Aesthetics of Jim Crow,” Cinema Journal 43 (Fall 2003): 85-104.
15. Scott A. Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights
Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939-1963,” Journal of American History 80 (June
1993): 135-167.
16. Erika Doss, “Visualizing Black America: Gordon Parks at Life, 1948-1971,” in Erika Doss,
ed., Looking at Life Magazine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 221-241.
17. Erika Doss, “Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and Masculinity, 1960s1990s,” Prospects 23 (1998): 483-516.
READING BREAK
November 1
Feminism and the Mass Media
Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, 3-60, 99-191,
221-307
November 8
No Class Meeting—begin preliminary research
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November 15
Picturing War: From Vietnam to Abu Ghraib
18. Patrick Hagopian, “America’s Offspring: Infanticide and the Iconography of Race and
Gender in Commemorative Statuary of the Vietnam War,” Prospects 26 (2001): 537-574.
19. Pat Aufderheide, “Vietnam: Good Soldiers,” in Mark Crispin Miller, ed., Seeing Through
Movies (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 81-111 and 251-255.
AND
17. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 198-307.
November 22
Framing the Environment:
From the Atomic Bomb to the Whole Earth
20. Scott Kirsch, “Watching the Bombs Go Off: Photography, Nuclear Landscapes, and
Spectator Democracy,” Antipode 29:3 (1997): 227-255.
21. Jonathan Spaulding, “The Natural Scene and the Social Good: The Artistic Education of
Ansel Adams,” Pacific Historical Review 60 (1991): 15-42.
22. Gregg Mitman, “Disney’s True-Life Adventures,” in his Reel Nature: America’s Romance
with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 109-131, figures 1618, 233-239.
23. Denis Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space
Photographs,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84 (June 1994): 270-294.
November 29
No Class Meeting—work on research prospectus
December 6
No Class Meeting—RESEARCH PROSPECTUS DUE
January 10
Modern Art
Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, 119-201 and 215-223.
January 17
Public Art and Other Controversies in the 1980s
24. Casey Nelson Blake, “An Atmosphere of Effrontery: Richard Serra, Titled Arc, and the Crisis
of Public Art,” in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture:
Critical Essays in American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 247-289.
25. Steven C. Dubin, Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 12-25 and 96-124.
26. Erika Doss, “Public Art in Little Tokyo: Part One,” and “Public Art in Little Tokyo: Part
Two,” in her Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American
Communities (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 1-11, 237-249, 251-252,
273-274.
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The seminar will not meet for a few weeks to give you time to work on research and writing.
February 28
Research Presentations
March 6
Research Presentations
March 13
Research Presentations (?)
March 20
Research Presentations
March 27
Research Presentations
April 3
No class meeting—work on final papers
April 7
FINAL PAPER DUE