Reading:

• Birth of a Nation, film summary

• Full film online (you don’t have to watch all 3 hours)

Questions:

• What sort of nation did D. W. Griffith seek to create in the film Birth of a Nation? 
• How did that vision of the American nation transform the events and meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction discussed in the lectures?

Reading:

• Ida B. Wells, United States Atrocities (1892)
• Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address” (1895)
• Henry McNeal Turner, “The American Negro and His Fatherland” (1895)
• W. E. B. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth” (1903)
• W. E. B. DuBois, Niagra Address (1906)
• Table:  Intercensal Migration of Negro Population by Region, 1870-1920

Questions:

Carefully read the biographical information about each of the four spokespeople provided in the Method section of the reading and bear that information in mind when you read the pamphlet and speeches

• What different strategies did Wells, Washington, Turner and Du Bois offer African-Americans in the South in the years after Reconstruction? 
• Which alternative do you think was the best one for African-Americans at the turn of the century?

Reading:

• Anonymous, “Life Story of a Pushcart Peddler,” (1906)
• Sadie Frowne, “The Story of a Sweatshop Girl,” (1902)
• Lee Chew, “The Biography of a Chinaman,” (1903)

The readings for this tutorial consist of three autobiographies from a series of approximately 75 published in The Independent, a weekly magazine, between 1902 and 1906. When you analyze these sources, consider the strengths and weaknesses of such published, personal, first person accounts as evidence of the immigrant experience.

Questions:

• What made each of these immigrants American and what made them different? 
• How do culture and gender make these life stories different from one another?
• What conditions made these immigrants contented and/or discontented with their new lives?
• Are these immigrants ‘uprooted’ or ‘transplanted’ – or neither?

Reading:

• Short Stories by Zitkala-Sa:
  • “Why I Am a Pagan,” Atlantic Monthly 90 (1902)
  • “The Warrior’s Daughter,” Everybody’s Magazine 4, 4 (1902)
  • “The Trial Path,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (1901)
  • “The Soft-Hearted Sioux,” Harper’s Monthly (1901)
• Biography of Zitkala-Sa

Questions:

• In what ways do the short stories of Zitkala-Sa work to preserve Native American traditions?
• In what ways is Zitkala-Sa creating a new expression of Native Americans culture?  How does she combine traditional elements and elements from white America were? 
• What do Zitkala-Sa’s short stories suggest about the nature of the Native American identity that takes shape in the twentieth century?  Is that identity a surrender to white, modern America, an adaptation to white, modern America or a hold-out against white, modern America?

Reading:

• “Forms Used for the Writing of Motion Picture Autobiographies”
• Autobiography of a high school girl “American born and of Scottish descent”
• Autobiography of a “Jewish college student, a boy aged 20”
• Autobiography of a “girl, age 21, of native white parentage – a senior in a university”
• Autobiography of a “Negro male student in high school,”

[from Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York, Macmillan, 1933), 203-207, 217-237, 254-257]

These autobiographies were collected in the late 1920s and early 1930s by University of Chicago sociologist Herbert Blumer for a series of studies of the influence of movies on young people. 

Questions:

Carefully read the guidelines given to the students and consider how those guidelines might have influenced or even distorted what the students wrote.

• What place did movies occupy in the lives and activities of these young people?  What influence did movies have on young people’s behavior and fantasy life?
• In what ways did the movies incite consumption or help shape a culture centred on consumption? 
• What was the relationship between movies and other influences on a child’s cultural attitudes, such as family, peers, school, neighborhood, work, religion?  What evidence do the autobiographies offer that movies contributed to a ‘mass culture’ that dissolved differences between Americans?

Reading:

• The Write Site:
• Module 2, Unit 4
• All of Module 3

 

Questions:

Make sure you have signed up for an essay before this tutorial and have looked at the primary source that is the focus of your essay

Reading:

• Lawrence Levine, “The Historian and the Icon:  Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s,” in The Unpredictable Past (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993), 256-290.

The photographs discussed by Levine are online

Questions:

• What picture of 1930s America did the FSA photographers offer in their images?
• What is Levine’s view of the 1930s? Do you think that the photographs support that view? Considering the evidence and arguments discussed in this week’s lecture and in the readings, do you agree with Levine’s view of the 1930s?

Reading:

• The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder, 1960)
  • Available at Fisher Library [Fisher AV Reserve 791.4372 1664]
  • Screenings TBA
  • Available on DVD

Questions:

• What does the film tell us about the place of work in the lives of men? In the lives of women?
• What does the film tell us about the place of sexuality in 1950s culture?
• What does the film tell us about the place of consumption in 1950s America?
• Does the film support the argument that the culture of the 1950s was ‘the culture of containment?’

Reading:

• Map of Quang Ngai province
• Map of My Lai
• Aerial photos of My Lai: 1 + 2
• Photos by Ronald Haeberle:
  • helicopters:
  • soldier burning village
  • corpses: 1 + 2
• Ron Ridenhour's story (1994)
• Ridenhour’s letter (1969)
• Calley’s testimony

Questions:

What does the massacre and its causes tell us about

• the nature of the war in Vietnam
• the experience of ordinary soldiers
• the gap between official accounts and those experiences
• the impact of revelations that discredited the official view on Americans’ attitudes toward the war

Questions:

For this tutorial you 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.

• Prepare a 5-10 minute presentation of the agenda and methods of your group using their words.
• (After listening to the presentations) Which of the other groups could your group make common cause with?  What concerns and approaches does your group have in common with the other groups?
• Why did the protest movements of the 1960s not create more revolutionary change in the United States?