Assessment:  70% coursework, 30% exam

Note: You can only pass a course if you complete all the assessment tasks.  If you do not, regardless of your mark, you will fail.

TUTORIAL PARTICIPATION

Each tutorial in this unit focuses on a different kind of primary source.  They are intended to introduce you to the variety of texts from which historians derive evidence, and to the strengths and weaknesses, biases and distortions, of particular kinds of sources.  The topic of each tutorial is related to one of the previous week’s lectures, usually focusing on a question that was not explored in detail in the lecture.

The assignment of a grade for tutorial participation reflects the central place of tutorials in this unit of study.  Tutorial participation begins, obviously, with attendance, but it requires more than attendance.  You need to come to tutorials prepared to exchange ideas about the documents or texts assigned for that meeting and the topics they raise, to raise questions and to speculate. Your grade for this part of the unit of study does not depend on providing the ‘right answers’ in tutorials; it will reflect what you contribute to our discussions.  That does not mean that you can get a good grade solely by having something to say in class, regardless of what you say. You will earn marks by making thoughtful contributions that reflect careful reading and consideration of the questions raised by what you have read.

ATTENDANCE: The Department of History requires satisfactory class attendance as part of participation in a unit of study.  Attendance below 80% of the tutorials without written evidence of illness or misadventure will be penalized with loss of marks; attendance at less than 50% of the tutorials, regardless of the reasons for the absences, will result in the student being deemed not to have participated in the unit of study.

TUTORIAL PAPER

This assignment is a short analysis of a single primary source, an autobiography. You will read and discuss other autobiographies in tutorials before you write the paper. The assignment is intended to focus your attention on evidence rather than secondary sources as the basis for historical analysis and writing, and to provide feedback prior to writing the major essay.

Due Date:  4.00 p.m., Thursday, April 2nd 

Length:  500 words

Returned: In tutorials, beginning April 21st

Question: Choose one of the following autobiographies (you cannot write on one of the autobiographies that we discuss in tutorials):

• “The Life Story of a Lithuanian”
• “The Life Story of an Italian Bootblack”
• “The Life Story of a Swedish Farmer”
• “The Life Story of a German Nurse Girl”
• “The Life Story of a Syrian”

(All found at the back of the course reader)

To what extent is the immigrant that you have chosen ‘Americanized?’

Note:

• Americanization is not adapting to life in the United States; it is adopting American values and identities.Look for what the author of the autobiography identifies as areas in which they have Americanized their values and identities – i.e. look for their perspective of what is ‘American’ rather than relying on your own perspective
• You must make reference to specific passages from the autobiography to support your answer.  Do not simply quote passages; explain what you think the passage means, why you think it should be understood in that way, and how it relates to your answer to the question. 
• When you quote from the autobiography, your footnote should refer to the page on which the passage appears in the course reader.  You do not need to provide a bibliography for this paper.

ESSAY

The essay builds on the tutorial paper, asking you again to focus on a single primary source, but this time to analyze it looking for what it reveals about a particular historical question. 

To help you make sense of the source, to provide context and information that helps you identify what the source means and what is significant about it, approximately half a dozen secondary sources are provided for each question.  The assigned secondary readings are the most important texts on the topic, and you should look at all of them (read only the sections relevant to your question).  You do not need to do any additional secondary reading. Do not base your answer on the secondary sources; all the questions are about what you can find in the primary source.  This assignment is about your interpretation of the evidence, not that of the author of a secondary source.  Make sure you refer to the feedback on your tutorial paper when you write your essay.

Questions:

1. What do photographs of lynchings reveal about white attitudes towards blacks in the Jim Crow South?

Primary Sources:

James Allen et al, Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America (on Special Reserve & online)

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940
• Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930
• W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930
• Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching
• Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow
• Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South since Emancipation
• C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow
• J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia

2. What do cartoons about the 1896 election reveal about why Populism was defeated?

Primary Sources:

1896: The Presidential Campaign

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve): 

• Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics
• Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise:  The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America
• Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917.
• Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890
• David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925
• Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History

3. What do the responses to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” reveal about why some Americans opposed the United States becoming an imperial power?

Primary Sources:

The White Man’s Burden and Its Critics

Secondary Sources:

• Richard E. Welch, Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902
• Thomas G. Paterson and Stephen G. Rabe eds, Imperial Surge: The United States Abroad, the 1890s—early 1900s
• Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880-1910,” Journal of American History, 88 (March 2002), 1315-53
• Walter LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913(The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, v.2)
• Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars
• Louis A. Pérez, Jr, The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography

4. What do the writings of reformers reveal about why, at the turn of the century, middle-class Americans saw the city as a problem?

Primary Sources:

“On the Lower East Side: Observations of Life in Lower Manhattan at the Turn of the Century”

Secondary Sources:

• Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920
• Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum
• James B. Lane, Jacob A. Riis and the American City
• Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930
• Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism & Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890-1919
• Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930
• Nell Irvin Painter, Standing At Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919

5. What does The Social Evil in Chicago reveal about how Progressive reformers understood and responded to the changes taking place in the early twentieth century United States?

Primary Sources: 

Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago (1911) (on Special Reserve)

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era
• Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918
• Elizabeth Clement, Love for Sale: Courting, Treating and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945
• John D. Buenker, John C. Burnham, Robert M. Crunden, Progressivism
• Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era
• Glenda Gilmore, Who were the Progressives?
• Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920
• Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution

6. What do cartoons about the debate over joining the League of Nations reveal about how Americans understood their role in the world?

Primary Sources:

Cartoons from Literary Digest (scroll down page) - or download as a pdf file

Cartoons

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve)

• John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations
• Lloyd Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American diplomatic tradition: the treaty fight in perspective
• Thomas Knock, To end all wars: Woodrow Wilson and the quest for a new world order
• Elizabeth McKillen, “Ethnicity, Class, and Wilsonian Internationalism Reconsidered: The Mexican-American and Irish-American Immigrant Left and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1914-1922,” Diplomatic History 25, 4 (2001): 553-87.
• Amy Kaplan, “Left Alone with America,” in Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism
• Akira Iriye, The Globalizing of America, 1913-1945 (The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, v.3)

7. What do songs and cartoons about the Scopes trial reveal about why some Americans rejected evolution in the 1920s?

Primary Sources:

Songs

Cartoons:

• Monkey Trial : gallery
• Images from the Scopes Trial
• The Scopes Trial: Cartoons & Diagrams

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods:  The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion
• Jeffrey Moran, “Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science, and Fundamentalism,”Journal of American History (December 2003): 912-34
• Ronald Numbers, Darwinism in America
• Constance Areson Clark, “Evolution for John Doe: Pictures, and the Scopes Trial Debate “ Journal of American History, 87 (March 2001), 1275-1301.
• Stanley Coben, Rebellion against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America
• Nancy Maclean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
• George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925
• Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s

8. What do the letters from African-American migrants reveal about race relations in the 1910s and 1920s?

Primary Sources:

Emmett J Scott (ed), “Letters of Negro migrants of 1916-1918,” Journal of Negro History 4 (1919): 290-340

Emmett J Scott (ed), “Additional Letters of Negro migrants of 1916-1918,” Journal of Negro History 4 (1919): 412-65

Note: These links are to the JSTOR database and will only work off campus if you follow the Library's procedures for remote access

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• James Grossman, Land of Hope:  Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration
• Marcy Sacks, Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City Before World War One
• Alferdteen Harrison (ed), Black Exodus:  The Great Migration from the American South
• Joe Trotter (ed), The Great Migration in Historical Perspective
• Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration and Black Urban Life
• Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society
• Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s

9. What do advertisements for Beauty and Hygiene products from the 1920s reveal about why early-twentieth-century Americans purchased consumer goods?

Primary Sources:

Advertisements from the 1920s

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• T.J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America
• Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture.
• Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture.
• Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940
• Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising
• Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar:  The Making of America’s Beauty Culture
• Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940

10. What do James Weldon Johnston and Ernest Gruening’s investigations of conditions in American-occupied Haiti reveal about the role of the United States in the world in the interwar period?

Primary Sources:

James Weldon Johnson, ‘Self-Determining Haiti I-IV,’

Ernest Gruening, ‘Haiti and Santo Domingo I-II,’ and ‘Haiti Under American Occupation,”

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve)

• Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940
• Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934
• Brenda Gayle Plummer, “The Afro-American Response to the Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934,” Phylon 43, 2 (Summer 1982): 125-43
• Akira Iriye, The Globalizing of America, 1913-1945 (The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, v.3)
• Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945
• William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
• Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution
• Warren I. Cohen, Empire Without Tears: America’s Foreign Relations, 1921-1933

11. What do letters to Franklin Roosevelt reveal about how ordinary Americans responded to the New Deal?

Primary Sources:

Robert S. McElvaine, Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) (on Special Reserve)

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve): 

• Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
• Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980
• Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression
• Barry Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945
• Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue
• T. H. Watkins, The Hungry Years:  A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America
• David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

12. What do the oral histories of autoworkers involved in the strike in Flint reveal about how American workers responded to the Great Depression?

Primary Sources: 

University of Michigan-Flint Labor History Project Oral Histories (scroll down to Boxes 3-5)

Secondary Sources:

• Sidney Fine, Sit-down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937
• Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
• Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945
• Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor
• Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s
• David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

13. What do the "Man-on-the-Street" interviews conducted by the Archive of American Folk Song on December 8-10, 1941 reveal about Americans’ attitude toward involvement in World War Two?

Primary Sources:

After the Day of Infamy: “Man-on-the-Street” Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• Emily Rosenberg, A date which will live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory
• Lawrence Levine and Cornelia Levine, The People and the President: America’s Conversation with FDR, 269-408
• Wayne Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-45
• Akira Iriye, The Globalizing of America, 1913-1945 (The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, v.3)
• Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II
• John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race And Power In The Pacific War
• David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

14. Choose one or two oral histories from the collection at Rutgers University.  What does it/do they reveal about the meaning of the World War Two for Americans?

Primary Source:

The Rutgers Oral History Archive of World War Two

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• Gerald Linderman, The World Within War
• Peter Schrijvers, The Crash of Ruin
• Peter Schrijvers, The G.I. War Against Japan
• Peter Kindsvatter, American Soldiers
• Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II
• Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (eds), The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II
• David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
• John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race And Power In The Pacific War

15. What does NSC-68 reveal about why the United States became involved in the Cold War?

Primary Source:

NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950)

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• Ralph B. Levering et al, Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives
• Warren I. Cohen, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991
• Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1996
• Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War
• John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947.
• Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter (eds), Origins of the Cold War: An International History
• John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
• Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954

16. What does The Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government reveal about the impact of the Cold War on American society?

Primary Source:

U.S. Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Department, The Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government (1950)

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• David Johnson,The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
• Richard M. Fried, Nightmare In Red: The McCarthy Era In Perspective
• Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
• M.J. Heale , McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935-1965
• Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, And American Culture.
• Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Re-examining The Life And Legacy Of America’s Most Hated Senator.
• Elaine Tyler May. Homeward Bound:  American Families in the Cold War Era
• James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

17. Choose any one oral history from the collection at the University of Mississippi.  What does it reveal about the origins and tactics of the civil rights movement?

Primary Sources:

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive Oral Histories

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
• Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s
• David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
• Hugh Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972
• Fred Powledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It
• Jo Ann Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started it: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson
• J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma

18. What do Bob Dylan’s albums,The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Bringing It All Back Home reveal about changes taking place in American culture in the 1960s?

Primary Sources:

Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) [at Con Music library] and Bringing It All Back Home (1965) [Music AV]

• Snippets of music and liner notes for all albums

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival
• Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music
• Neil Rosenberg (ed.), Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined
• Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s
• David Chalmers, And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s
• Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (eds.), Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960’s and 70’s
• David Farber and Beth Bailey, The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s
• Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
• Mark Marqusee, Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art
• Bob Dylan, Chronicles

19. What does Our Bodies, Ourselves reveal about the concerns and tactics of post-war feminists?

Primary Sources:

Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies Ourselves (1973 – do not use a later edition) (on Special Reserve)

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve): 

• Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders
• Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America
• Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women
• Alice Echols, Daring To Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975
• Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil RightsMovement and the New Left
• Leslie Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime
• Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement
• Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second-wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982
• Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique:   The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism

20. What does the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968) reveal about why Americans rioted in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

Primary Sources:

Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968) (on Special Reserve)

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve)

• Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: the Cavanagh administration, race relations, and the Detroit riot of 1967
• Kevin Mumford, Newark: a history of race, rights and riots in America
• Marilynn Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City
• Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity
• Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
• Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s
• Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don't Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods

21. What does the Strategic Hamlet Program reveal about why the United States lost the war in Vietnam?

Primary Sources:

The Pentagon Papers (Gravel Edition), vol. 2, chapter 2, “The Strategic Hamlet Program, 1961-63” [Summary by Department of Defence]

• Source Documents for The Pentagon Papers
  • Memorandum and cover letter from Robert G.K. Thompson to Ngo Dinh Diem proposing "strategic hamlets" for the Mekong Delta (November 1961)
  • Talking Paper for the Chairman, JCS, for meeting with the President of the United States 9 January 1962,     "Current US Military Actions in South Vietnam"
  • "Progress Report on South Vietnam," INR Research Memorandum RFE-27, June 18, 1962
  • Special National Intelligence Estimate 53-2-63, "The Situation in South Vietnam," 10 July 1963

Declassified CIA Documents of the Vietnam War: Analysis of the Strategic Hamlets' Program and of the Montagnard situation in South Vietnam (1962)

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975
• Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-65
• Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure
• Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam
• Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars
• Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American social science and ‘nation-building’ in the Kennedy Era  [chapter on strategic hamlet program]

22. What do the newspaper reports and photos of the Hard Hat Riots reveal about conservatism in the United States after the 1960s?

Primary Sources:

The Hard Hat Riots: An Online Oral History Project

“Why the construction workers holler, 'U.S.A., all the way!'; Joe Kelly Has Reached His Boiling Point,” New York Times Magazine 28 June 1970: Access full text through Proquest Historical Newspapers: New York Times [Fisher Library Databases]

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the Silent Majority,” in Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order
• David Farber, “The Silent Majority and Talk About Revolution,” in David Farber, (ed.), The Sixties: From Memory to History
• Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: the Origins of the New American Right
• Jonathan Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of American Conservatism
• Matt Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South
• Michael Schaller and George Rising, The Republican Ascendancy: American Politics, 1968-2001

23. Choose one of the following films: Born on the 4th ofJuly, Good Morning Vietnam, Platoon.  What does the film reveal about what the Vietnam war has come to mean in American culture?

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War
• John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam
• Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film
• Gilbert Adair, Hollywood’s Vietnam.
• Albert Auster & Leonard Quart, How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood & Vietnam
• Michael Anderegg, Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television
• Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering.
• Keith Beattie, The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War

 

24. What do television ads from the 1992 and 1996 elections reveal about why Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party were able to take control of the White House from the Republican Party?

Primary Sources:

The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2004

• “1992 Clinton vs. Bush vs. Perot”
• “1996 Clinton vs Dole”

Secondary Sources: (on Special Reserve):

• William C. Berman, America's Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton
• Michael Schaller and George Rising, The Republican Ascendancy: American Politics, 1968-2001
• Bryan D. Jones, ed., The New American Politics: Reflections on Political Change and the Clinton Administration
• Haynes Johnson, The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years
• Geoffrey Hodgson, More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century
• Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008
• Bill Clinton, My Life

 

GROUP TUTORIAL PRESENTATION

The presentation builds on the work that you have done in tutorials by putting you in a different relationship to historical evidence – it asks you to step inside the sources rather than analyze them from the outside, to adopt a 1st person rather than a 3rd person perspective.  Presenting the material helps extend your oral communication skills; doing so in a group develops teamwork and organization.

Due Date:  Tutorials on June 2nd and 3rd

Length:  5-10 minutes (and participation in discussion)

Format: For this assignment your tutorial will be divided into four groups; each group will research and represent a different movement that protested against American society, culture and/or politics in the 1960s.  In the tutorial, each group will present a 5-10 minute statement of its movement’s agenda and methods. 

• You must use their words, the words found in the documents. 
• You are free to structure and present those words in any way you want:  use your imagination.  This is a presentation; you need to engage the audience as well as accurately capture the ideas of the movement you represent.  Consider using props – pamphlets, placards and the like. 
• After the presentations, each group will be asked to identify who among the other groups their movement could work with, who they could not work with, and the reasons for those determinations.

EXAM

The exam requires you to take a broad perspective on topics covered in the unit, to consolidate your knowledge and understanding, to reflect on what you have written earlier and to gather and express your thoughts.

Date:  Check exam timetable

Length:  TWO essays in TWO hours

Format:  Answer one question from each of the two sections.

• The first section of the exam covers the essay topics.  There is a question related to each topic.  You must answer the question related to the topic of your essay.  The exam questions ask you to reflect on how the sources and issues that you explored in your essay relate to one of the themes of the course (see Description).

• The second section of the exam covers the topics dealt with in the lectures and tutorials that were not also the subject of essay questions.  The questions focus on the issues and debates discussed in the lectures and tutorials.  There are ten questions in this section of the exam, from which you have to choose one to answer. Download Exam Information

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