Class notes
Required reading:
Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel (Prologue, Chapter 3, Chapter 18)
Required viewing:
New World Encounters, English Settlement
Written assessment:
None.
Written assignment due:
None.
01 October 2008
Week 2 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Declaration of Independence
Limerick, "Empire of Innocence"
Required viewing:
Growth and Empire, The Coming of Independence
Written assessment:
Quiz 1
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web response prompt:
[Adapted from Bartholomae and Petrosky, Ways of Reading]
One of the readings for this week, the opening chapter of Limerick’s book The Legacy of Conquest (1987), offers a view of history as both an area of research, and something written, an account of past events. In it, Limerick offers criticism and advice, an account of the problems of constructing a history of the American West. As you reread, mark passages that define the problems and the possible solutions for historians.
Post a short (about 150 words) response to the reading on the course website, in which you briefly describe, in your own words, some of the problems and possible solutions that Limerick describes. It may be helpful to refer by page number to specific passages in the chapter. Your response should take into consideration the responses (if any) already posted by your classmates.
Required reading:
Declaration of Independence
Limerick, "Empire of Innocence"
Required viewing:
Growth and Empire, The Coming of Independence
Written assessment:
Quiz 1
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web response prompt:
[Adapted from Bartholomae and Petrosky, Ways of Reading]
One of the readings for this week, the opening chapter of Limerick’s book The Legacy of Conquest (1987), offers a view of history as both an area of research, and something written, an account of past events. In it, Limerick offers criticism and advice, an account of the problems of constructing a history of the American West. As you reread, mark passages that define the problems and the possible solutions for historians.
Post a short (about 150 words) response to the reading on the course website, in which you briefly describe, in your own words, some of the problems and possible solutions that Limerick describes. It may be helpful to refer by page number to specific passages in the chapter. Your response should take into consideration the responses (if any) already posted by your classmates.
Week 3 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Whitman, Song of Myself
Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey
Required viewing:
A New System of Government, Westward Expansion, The Rise of Capitalism
Written assessment:
Quiz 2
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web response prompt:
Briefly (about 150 - 200 words) compare and contrast Schivelbusch’s ways of working with the methods of Diamond and Limerick. You should take into account previous responses (if any) of your classmates.
Required reading:
Whitman, Song of Myself
Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey
Required viewing:
A New System of Government, Westward Expansion, The Rise of Capitalism
Written assessment:
Quiz 2
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web response prompt:
Briefly (about 150 - 200 words) compare and contrast Schivelbusch’s ways of working with the methods of Diamond and Limerick. You should take into account previous responses (if any) of your classmates.
Week 4 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies
Required viewing:
The Reform Impulse, Slavery, The Coming of the Civil War
Written assessment:
Quiz 3
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web response prompt
Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a type of document called a "slave narrative" - a story told by ex-slaves about their life as slaves, often to advance the cause of abolishing slavery as a system.
What can we learn about slavery from her story? What generalizations can we make about slavery as a system based on Incidents?
Write a short paragraph (about 150 words) outlining ways that we can read Incidents as a historical document. Remember to use specific examples, and refer to page numbers in the text.
Required reading:
Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies
Required viewing:
The Reform Impulse, Slavery, The Coming of the Civil War
Written assessment:
Quiz 3
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web response prompt
Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a type of document called a "slave narrative" - a story told by ex-slaves about their life as slaves, often to advance the cause of abolishing slavery as a system.
What can we learn about slavery from her story? What generalizations can we make about slavery as a system based on Incidents?
Write a short paragraph (about 150 words) outlining ways that we can read Incidents as a historical document. Remember to use specific examples, and refer to page numbers in the text.
Week 5 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Tompkins, "'Indians'"
Required viewing:
The Civil War, Reconstruction
Written assessment:
Quiz 4
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Essay 1
Web response prompt
Tompkins' essay is difficult. It requires some work on the part of us, her readers, to make sense of what she is saying and doing in this essay - to make connections between the pieces of the essay.
She begins by telling a story from her childhood - a story that "stands for the relationship most non-Indians have to the people who first populated this continent." She goes on to state that "The present essay ... doesn't have much to do with actual Indians, though its subject matter is the histories of European-Indian relations in seventeeth-century New England. In a sense, my encounter with Indians as an adult doing 'research' replicates the childhood one, for while I started out to learn more about Indians, I ended up preoccupied with a problem of my own."
As a way to start the work of making sense of Tompkins' essay, reread the essay paying attention to how her "encounter with Indians as an adult doing 'research'" could be said to "replicate" her childhood encounter.
Write a short paragraph (about 150 words) describing some of the connections you can make between her childhood story and the work of her essay. Remember to refer to specific examples with page numbers from the text.
Required reading:
Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Tompkins, "'Indians'"
Required viewing:
The Civil War, Reconstruction
Written assessment:
Quiz 4
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Essay 1
Web response prompt
Tompkins' essay is difficult. It requires some work on the part of us, her readers, to make sense of what she is saying and doing in this essay - to make connections between the pieces of the essay.
She begins by telling a story from her childhood - a story that "stands for the relationship most non-Indians have to the people who first populated this continent." She goes on to state that "The present essay ... doesn't have much to do with actual Indians, though its subject matter is the histories of European-Indian relations in seventeeth-century New England. In a sense, my encounter with Indians as an adult doing 'research' replicates the childhood one, for while I started out to learn more about Indians, I ended up preoccupied with a problem of my own."
As a way to start the work of making sense of Tompkins' essay, reread the essay paying attention to how her "encounter with Indians as an adult doing 'research'" could be said to "replicate" her childhood encounter.
Write a short paragraph (about 150 words) describing some of the connections you can make between her childhood story and the work of her essay. Remember to refer to specific examples with page numbers from the text.
Week 7 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Alger, Ragged Dick
Kasson, Amusing the Millions
Required Viewing:
America at the Centennial, Industrial Supremacy
Written assessment:
Quiz 5
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph (cancelled for this week)
Required reading:
Alger, Ragged Dick
Kasson, Amusing the Millions
Required Viewing:
America at the Centennial, Industrial Supremacy
Written assessment:
Quiz 5
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph (cancelled for this week)
Week 8 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Riis, How the Other Half Lives
Peiss, Cheap Amusements
Required viewing:
The New City, The West
Written assessment:
Quiz 6
Please remember to make use of the recommendations for writing effective quiz answers that the student groups created in class earlier this semester.
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph - K. Peiss, Cheap Amusements:
How does leisure activity (such as dancing in dance halls) "offer a window into social practices often obscured in other areas of human experience"? And what does examining dance halls let Peiss say about "the cultural handling of gender among working-class people"?
Please remember to make use of the recommendations for writing effective response paragraphs that the student groups created in class earlier this semester.
Required reading:
Riis, How the Other Half Lives
Peiss, Cheap Amusements
Required viewing:
The New City, The West
Written assessment:
Quiz 6
Please remember to make use of the recommendations for writing effective quiz answers that the student groups created in class earlier this semester.
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph - K. Peiss, Cheap Amusements:
How does leisure activity (such as dancing in dance halls) "offer a window into social practices often obscured in other areas of human experience"? And what does examining dance halls let Peiss say about "the cultural handling of gender among working-class people"?
Please remember to make use of the recommendations for writing effective response paragraphs that the student groups created in class earlier this semester.
Week 10 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management
Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
Required viewing:
Capital and Labor, TR and Wilson
Written assessment:
Quiz 7
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Essay 2
Web response prompt
Both the primary and secondary readings for this week (Taylor and Gould) describe themselves as "scientific." What makes them both scientific? What differences do you see in the meaning of "science" for both writers?
Required reading:
Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management
Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
Required viewing:
Capital and Labor, TR and Wilson
Written assessment:
Quiz 7
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Essay 2
Web response prompt
Both the primary and secondary readings for this week (Taylor and Gould) describe themselves as "scientific." What makes them both scientific? What differences do you see in the meaning of "science" for both writers?
Week 11 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Kern, Culture of Time and Space
Required viewing:
Sherlock, Jr. (dir. Keaton) - viewing Wed. 3 December 2008, 18:00, Classroom A
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 on YouTube
A Vital Progressivism, The Twenties
Written assessment:
Quiz 8
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web response prompt:
How can we use movies as historical documents? For example, what can Sherlock, Jr. tell us about the culture and society of the U.S. in the 1920s?
Required reading:
Kern, Culture of Time and Space
Required viewing:
Sherlock, Jr. (dir. Keaton) - viewing Wed. 3 December 2008, 18:00, Classroom A
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 on YouTube
A Vital Progressivism, The Twenties
Written assessment:
Quiz 8
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web response prompt:
How can we use movies as historical documents? For example, what can Sherlock, Jr. tell us about the culture and society of the U.S. in the 1920s?
Week 12 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Hersey, Hiroshima
Required viewing:
FDR and The Depression, World War II
Written assessment:
Quiz 9
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web paragraph prompt:
Hersey tells the stories of six people affected by the first military use of the atomic bomb, on Hiroshima in August 1945. His story, published in August 1946, was for many Americans the first detailed account of the effects of the atom bomb explosion from the point of view of the inhabitants of Hiroshima.
Hersey tells his story in a relatively objective (or at least non-sensational) style - he records facts and incidents, and describes scenes, but he does not typically use exaggerated language in doing so. He also does not "preach" - he does not tell his readers what to think about the decision to use an atomic bomb.
Why might Hersey have chosen to tell this story, in this way? How might you expect his readers in 1946 to react to his story?
Required reading:
Hersey, Hiroshima
Required viewing:
FDR and The Depression, World War II
Written assessment:
Quiz 9
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Web paragraph prompt:
Hersey tells the stories of six people affected by the first military use of the atomic bomb, on Hiroshima in August 1945. His story, published in August 1946, was for many Americans the first detailed account of the effects of the atom bomb explosion from the point of view of the inhabitants of Hiroshima.
Hersey tells his story in a relatively objective (or at least non-sensational) style - he records facts and incidents, and describes scenes, but he does not typically use exaggerated language in doing so. He also does not "preach" - he does not tell his readers what to think about the decision to use an atomic bomb.
Why might Hersey have chosen to tell this story, in this way? How might you expect his readers in 1946 to react to his story?
Week 13 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Required viewing:
The Fog of War (dir. Morris) - viewing Wed. 7 January 2009, 18:00, Classroom A
The Fifties, The Sixties
Written assessment:
Quiz 10
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Response paragraph prompt:
In The Fog of War, Robert McNamara discusses at length two historical issues that we've also seen in the video series, A Biography of America: The development and use of bombers in fire-bombing campaigns during World War II, and America's military involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s.
Pick one of these two issues and compare the understanding and interpretation of history given by the video series and by Mr. McNamara.
Required reading:
Required viewing:
The Fog of War (dir. Morris) - viewing Wed. 7 January 2009, 18:00, Classroom A
The Fifties, The Sixties
Written assessment:
Quiz 10
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Response paragraph prompt:
In The Fog of War, Robert McNamara discusses at length two historical issues that we've also seen in the video series, A Biography of America: The development and use of bombers in fire-bombing campaigns during World War II, and America's military involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s.
Pick one of these two issues and compare the understanding and interpretation of history given by the video series and by Mr. McNamara.
Week 14 OVERVIEW
Class notes
Required reading:
Required viewing:
Smoke Signals (dir. Eyre) - viewing Wed. 14 January 2009, 18:00, Classroom A
Contemporary History, The Redemptive Imagination
Written assessment:
Quiz 11
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Response paragraph prompt:
The movie Smoke Signals (1998) is primarily a personal story, told as a way to make sense of the meaning of family and loss. But throughout the movie, various themes appear that we've seen before in this course:
- Culture and cultural identity as created and transmitted by mass media (see the clip about "how to be an Indian");
- The influence of the past on the present - and the ways that, as William Faulkner described it, the "past is never dead. It is not even past";
- The use of stories and story-telling as a way to make sense of the past.
Compare the use of "story" as a way to make sense of history and culture in Smoke Signals and the secondary readings we've worked with this semester. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of each?
Week 1: Class notes
"T-O" map of the world by Isadore of Seville (600-636); first printed map in Europe (1472) 
The 2004 US Presidential election results
Over the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods for the city—first in Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, then several decades later in Paris and the Ruhr Valley. Throughout the nineteenth century it captured the cities of Europe one after the other. It settled in Vienna and Prague around 1900, and journeyed eastward to Budapest, Belgrade, and Istanbul.
Globally, the blackbird’s invasion of the human world is beyond a doubt more important than the Spaniards’ invasion of South America or the resettlement of Palestine by the Jews. A change in the relationship of one species to another (fish, birds, people, plants) is a change of a higher order than a change in the relationship of one or another group within the species. The earth does not particularly care whether Celts or Slavs inhabited Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians occupy Bessarabia. If, however, the blackbird goes against nature and follows man to his artificial, anti-natural world, something has changed in the planetary order of things.
And yet nobody dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the blackbird’s invasion of the city of man. We are all prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important, while what we suppose to be unimportant wages guerrilla warfare behind our backs, transforming the world without our knowledge and eventually mounting a surprise attack on us.
Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (1979)
Le Livre du Rire et de l’Oubli
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera (1929 - ), Czech author
Cover of the paper edition of The New York Times, 3 October 2008
Cover of paper edition of Mladá Fronta Dnes, 3 October 2008
STEVENS Yet you invented the coincidence.
TEMPLE Mrs. Gowan Stevens did.
STEVENS Temple Drake did. Mrs. Gowan Stevens is not even fighting in this class. This is Temple Drake’s.
TEMPLE Temple Drake is dead.
STEVENS The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Requiem for a Nun (1951)
William Faulkner (1897 - 1962), American author
STEVENS Yet you invented the coincidence.
TEMPLE Mrs. Gowan Stevens did.
STEVENS Temple Drake did. Mrs. Gowan Stevens is not even fighting in this class. This is Temple Drake’s.
TEMPLE Temple Drake is dead.
STEVENS The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Requiem for a Nun (1951)
William Faulkner (1897 - 1962), American author
Excerpts from Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
Yali’s Question
14: Yali’s question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
16: “Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern and my book’s subject.”
25: “These results are completely lopsided: it was not the case that 51 percent of the Americas, Australia, and Africa was conquered by Europeans, while 49 percent of Europe was conquered by Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, or Africans. The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes. Hence they must have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few thousand years ago.”
25: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves.”
Chapter 3 - Collision at Cajamarca
68: “Thus, Atahuallpa’s capture interests us specifically as marking the decisive moment in the greatest collision of modern history. But it is also of more general interest, because the factors that resulted in Pizarro’s seizing Atahuallpa were essentially the same ones that determined the outcome of many similar collisions between colonizers and native peoples elsewhere in the modern world.”
74: “Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples.”
75: “Time and again, accounts of Pizarro’s subsequent battles with the Incas, Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs, and other early European campaigns against Native Americans describe encounters in which a few dozen European horsemen routed thousands of Indians with great slaughter.”
76: “Such examples [Charlie Savage in the Fiji Islands] of the power of guns against native peoples lacking guns could be multiplied indefinitely.”
79: “Atahuallpa was not alone in these fatal miscalculations. ...Francisco Pizarro’s brother Hernando Pizarro deceived Atahuallpa’s leading general, Chalcuchima.... The Aztec emperor Montezuma miscalculated even more grossly when he took Cortés for a returning god and admitted him and his tiny army into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.”
Chapter 18 - Hemispheres Colliding
356: “...enormous set of differences between Eurasian and Native American societies - due largely to the Late Pleistocene extinction (extermination?) of most of North and South America’s former big wild mammal species. If it had not been for those extinctions, modern history might have taken a different course. When Cortés and his bedraggled adventurers landed on the Mexican coast in 1519, they might have been driven into the sea by thousands of Aztec cavalry mounted on domesticated native American horses. Instead of the Aztecs’ dying of smallpox, the Spaniards might have been wiped out by American germs transmitted by disease-resistant Aztecs. American civilizations resting on animal power might have been sending their own conquistadors to ravage Europe. But those hypothetical outcomes were foreclosed by mammal extinctions thousands of years earlier.”
Week 2 Class notes
Excerpts from Limerick, “Empire of Innocence”
Section I.
417:
When academic territories were parceled out in the early twentieth century, anthropology got the tellers of tales and history got the keepers of written records. As anthropology, and history diverged, human differences that hinged on literacy assumed an undeserved significance. Working with oral, preindustrial, prestate societies, anthropologists acknowledged the power of culture and of a received worldview; they knew that the folk conception of the world was not narrowly tied to proof and evidence. But with the disciplinary boundary overdrawn, it was easy for historians to assume that literacy, the modern state, and the commercial world had produced a different sort of creature entirely - humans less inclined to put myth over reality, more inclined to measure their beliefs by the standard of accuracy and practicality.
When anthropology and history moved closer together, so did their subjects of inquiry. Tribal people or nationalists, tellers of stories or keepers of account books, humans live in a world in which mental reality does not have to submit to narrow tests of accuracy.
To analyze how white Americans thought about the West, it helps to think anthropologically. One lesson of anthropology is the extraordinary power of cultural persistence; with American Indians, for instance, beliefs and values will persist even when the supporting economic and political structures have vanished. What holds for Indians holds as well for white Americans; the values they attached to westward expansion persist, in cheerful defiance of contrary evidence.
Among those persistent values, few have more power than the idea of innocence. The dominant motive for moving West was improvement and opportunity, not injury to others. Few white Americans went West intending to ruin the natives and despoil the continent. Even when they were trespassers, westering Americans were hardly, in their own eyes, criminals; rather, they were pioneers. The ends abundantly justified the means; personal interest in the acquisition of property coincided with national interest in the acquisition of territory, and those interests overlapped in turn with the mission to extend the domain of Christian civilization. Innocence of intention placed the course of events in a bright and positive light; only over time would the shadows compete for our attention.
418:
The idea of the innocent victim retains extraordinary power, and no situation made a stronger symbolic statement of this than that of the white woman murdered by Indians. Here was surely a clear case of victimization, villainy, and betrayed innocence. But few deaths of this kind occurred in American history with such purity; they were instead embedded in the complex dynamics of race relations, in which neither concept - villain or victim - did much to illuminate history.
419:
One skill essential to the writing of Western American history is the capacity to deal with multiple points of view. It is as if one were a lawyer at a trial designed on the principle of the Mad Hatter’s tea party - as soon as one begins to understand and empathize with the plaintiff’s case, it is time to move over and empathize with the defendant. Seldom are there only two parties or only two points of view.”
Section I.
417:
When academic territories were parceled out in the early twentieth century, anthropology got the tellers of tales and history got the keepers of written records. As anthropology, and history diverged, human differences that hinged on literacy assumed an undeserved significance. Working with oral, preindustrial, prestate societies, anthropologists acknowledged the power of culture and of a received worldview; they knew that the folk conception of the world was not narrowly tied to proof and evidence. But with the disciplinary boundary overdrawn, it was easy for historians to assume that literacy, the modern state, and the commercial world had produced a different sort of creature entirely - humans less inclined to put myth over reality, more inclined to measure their beliefs by the standard of accuracy and practicality.
When anthropology and history moved closer together, so did their subjects of inquiry. Tribal people or nationalists, tellers of stories or keepers of account books, humans live in a world in which mental reality does not have to submit to narrow tests of accuracy.
To analyze how white Americans thought about the West, it helps to think anthropologically. One lesson of anthropology is the extraordinary power of cultural persistence; with American Indians, for instance, beliefs and values will persist even when the supporting economic and political structures have vanished. What holds for Indians holds as well for white Americans; the values they attached to westward expansion persist, in cheerful defiance of contrary evidence.
Among those persistent values, few have more power than the idea of innocence. The dominant motive for moving West was improvement and opportunity, not injury to others. Few white Americans went West intending to ruin the natives and despoil the continent. Even when they were trespassers, westering Americans were hardly, in their own eyes, criminals; rather, they were pioneers. The ends abundantly justified the means; personal interest in the acquisition of property coincided with national interest in the acquisition of territory, and those interests overlapped in turn with the mission to extend the domain of Christian civilization. Innocence of intention placed the course of events in a bright and positive light; only over time would the shadows compete for our attention.
418:
The idea of the innocent victim retains extraordinary power, and no situation made a stronger symbolic statement of this than that of the white woman murdered by Indians. Here was surely a clear case of victimization, villainy, and betrayed innocence. But few deaths of this kind occurred in American history with such purity; they were instead embedded in the complex dynamics of race relations, in which neither concept - villain or victim - did much to illuminate history.
419:
One skill essential to the writing of Western American history is the capacity to deal with multiple points of view. It is as if one were a lawyer at a trial designed on the principle of the Mad Hatter’s tea party - as soon as one begins to understand and empathize with the plaintiff’s case, it is time to move over and empathize with the defendant. Seldom are there only two parties or only two points of view.”
A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.”
“Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice.
“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”
“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning. “I’m getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.”
. . .
“I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.”
He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved into the Dormouse’s place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change; and Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just upset the milk-jug into his plate.
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
421: “The Cayuses were, in other words, acting in and responding to currents of history of which Narcissa Whitman was not a primary determinant.”
Section II.
422:
If one pursues a valuable item and finds a crowd already assembled, one’s complicity in the situation is obvious. The crowd has, after all, resulted from a number of individual choices very much like one’s own. But frustration cuts off reflection on this irony; in resource rushes in which the sum of the participant’s activities created the dilemma, each individual could still feel himself the innocent victim of constricting opportunity.
[Yogi Berra, on why he no longer went to a popular St. Louis restaurant: "Nobody goes there no more, it's too crowded!"]
425:
Reciting the catalog of their injuries, sufferings, and deprivations at the hands of federal officials, the rebels at least convinced Western historians of the relevance of their expertise. It was a most familiar song; the Western historian could recognize every note. Decades of expansion left this motif of victimization entrenched in Western thinking. It was second nature to see misfortune as the doings of an outside force, preying on innocence and vulnerability, refusing to play by the rules of fairness. By assigning responsibility elsewhere, one eliminated the need to consider one’s own participation in courting misfortune.
426:
Occasionally, continuities in American history almost bowl one over. [...] but for a moment, if one looks from Revolutionary leaders, who held black slaves as well as the conviction that they were themselves enslaved by Great Britain, to Governor Richard Lamm, proclaiming himself and his people to be the new Indians, American history appears to be composed of one, continuous fabric, a fabric in which the figure of the innocent victim is the dominant motif.
Section III.
426-27:
Of all the possible candidates, the long-suffering white female pioneer seemed to be the closest thing to an authentic innocent victim. [...]
But what relation did these sufferers bear to the actual white women in the West? Did their experiences genuinely support the image? Where in Western history did women fit? By the 1970s, it was commonly recognized that Turner-style history simply left women out. How, then, to address the oversight? Was it the sort of error that one could easily correct - revise the shopping list, retrace one’s steps, put the forgotten item in the grocery cart, and then proceed with one’s usual route? Or was the inclusion of women a more consequential process of revision that would make it impossible to resume old habits and routines?
428-29: “In the broad sweep of Western history, it may look as if a united social unit called ‘white people’ swept Indians off their lands; that group, as the history of prostitution shows, was not a monolith at all but a complex swirl of people as adept at preying on each other as at preying on Indians.”
429:
...the history of prostitution restores the participants of Western history to a gritty, recognizable physical reality. [...] Acknowledge the human reality of Western prostitutes, and you have taken a major step toward removing Western history from the domain of myth and symbol and restoring it to actuality. Exclude women from Western history, and unreality sets in. Restore them, and the Western drama gains a fully human cast of characters - males and females whose urges, needs, failings, and conflicts we can recognize and even share.
It appears to be an insult and a disservice to place the murdered Narcissa Whitman and the murdered Julia Bulette in the same chapter. But women who in their own times would have fled each other’s company turn out to teach similar historical lessons. It is the odd obligation of the historian to reunited women who would have refused to occupy the same room. Examine the actual experiences of white women in the West, at any level of respectability, and the stereotypes are left in tatters.
430:
In the record of their words and actions, the women of Western history have made a clear statement that they do not deserve or need special handling by historians. There is no more point in downgrading them as vulnerable victims than in elevating them as saintly civilizers. The same woman could be both inspirational in her loyalty to her family’s welfare and disheartening in her hatred of Indians. Those two attributes were not contradictory; they were two sides to the same coin. We cannot emphasize one side at the expense of the other, without fracturing a whole, living person into disconnected abstractions.
Our inability to categorize the murdered Narcissa Whitman, or the murdered Julia Bulette, teaches us a vital lesson about Western history. Prostitutes were not consistently and exclusively sinners, nor were wives and mothers consistently and exclusively saints. Male or female, white Westerners were both sinned against and sinning. One person’s reward often meant another person’s loss; white opportunity meant Indian dispossession. Real Westerners, contrary to the old divisions between good guys and bad guys, combined the roles of victim and villain.
Acknowledging the moral complexity of Western history does not require us to surrender the mythic power traditionally associated with the region’s story. On the contrary, moral complexity provides the base for parables and tales of greater and deeper meaning. Myths resting on tragedy and on unforeseen consequences, the ancient Greeks certainly knew, have far more power than stories of simple triumphs and victories. In movies and novels, as well as in histories, the stories of men and women who both entered and created a moral wilderness have begun to replace the simple contests of savagery and civilization, cowboys and Indians, white hats and black hats. By questioning the Westerner’s traditional stance as innocent victim, we do not debunk Western history but enrich it.
Week 3 Class notes
Excerpts from Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey
Chapter 3: Railroad Space and Railroad Time
36-37: “Transport technology is the ... material base of the traveler’s space-time perception. If an essential element of a given sociocultural space-time continuum undergoes change, this will affect the entire structure; our perception of space-time will also lose its accustomed orientation. Sorokin, following Durkheim, distinguishes between sociocultural and physico-mathematical notions of space-time, and has described the hypothetical effects of a sudden replacement of customary sociocultural time measures with purely mathematical ones: ‘If we try to replace sociocultural time by a purely quantitative time, time becomes devitalized. It loses its reality, and we find ourselves in an exceedingly difficult position in our efforts to orient ourselves in the time process, to find out “where we are” and where are the other social phenomena on “the bridge of time.”’ (Italics in original.)”
37
Thus, the idea that the railroad annihilated space and time must be seen as the reaction of perceptive powers that, formed by a certain transport technology, find suddenly that technology has been replaced by an entirely new one.
Chapter 6: The American Railroad
91: “The mechanized transportation system became, as it were, a producer of territories, in the same way that mechanized agriculture became a producer of goods.”
92:
In nineteenth-century American thought, the machine appeared to be closely linked to nature and simultaneously, the American landscape was seen as closely linked to the machine. The material foundations for those perceptions lay in the peculiarity of American economic life in the nineteenth century; Habakkuk has formulated this as the “substitution of natural resources for capital.” The shortage of capital and labor in the United States led to new forms of raw material production, to an uninhibited exploitation of seemingly inexhaustible natural resources; the lack of restraint was merely a form and expression of the low investment of capital and shortage of labor. The application of the same principle to transportation led to entirely different results: here, there was no unrestrained exploitation of nature, but a practically mimetic utilization of the existing natural routes, i.e., the waterways. [...] In both cases, however, nature was experienced at a closer range and with greater immediacy than in Europe. The history of American transportation in general and of its railroads in particular can only be understood in terms of an immediate relationship to nature which is not aesthetic but economic.
93-94: “We can still note to what extent water traffic has shaped the American consciousness of transportation in the common American usage of the verb ‘to ship’ for all forms of transport, whether on dry land or across water.”
95-96:
The American railroad continued what the river steamboat began. This applies, as we shall see, even to the design of its carriages and, in equal degree, to the design of the railroad lines themselves. In England such a line was built to be as straight as possible, partly because railroad technology favored this, partly for economic reasons. Labor was cheap and land expensive. Thus it paid to construct tunnels, embankments and cuttings in order to make the rails proceed in a straight line, at a minimum of land cost. The diametrically opposed American conditions produced opposite results. Labor was expensive, land practically worthless. In accordance with the principle of “substitution of natural resources for capital,” the American railroad did not proceed in a straight line through natural obstacles, but ran around them like a river.
102-03:
The explanation for the American railroad car’s particular interior form is not as uncomplicated as the compartment’s derivation from the coach chamber. There is, in fact, a whole series of explanations, all of which apply. We have mentioned the invention of the undercarriage (bogie, truck) that permitted the construction of virtually endless cars. The American car can also be described as the simplest and cheapest type of passenger car: just as the lack of capital in the United States during the early- and mid-nineteenth century had led to the cheapest mode of railroad construction, it also resulted in the least expensive kind of passenger car. That purely economic state of affairs was, however, closely related to the indigenous American democracy of the nineteenth century as described by Tocqueville and Chevalier. The classless open car was economically, politically, psychologically and culturally the appropriate travel container for a democratic pioneer society, while the compartment car, on the other hand, expressed the social conditions prevailing in Europe.
These general explanations are not entirely satisfactory.
[...]
The steamship, mentioned by Couch as a convenient analogy, does indeed upon closer scrutiny yield many clues to the rise of a certain type of car on American railroads.
104-05: “...the riverboat became for the American railroad train what the stagecoach had been for the European: a means and form of travel that was representative of the period before the introduction of the railroads, and thus one upon which the railroad modeled itself.”
107:
The characteristics of the American transport situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century were under-developed traffic by land, but highly developed traffic on the inland waterways. In American travel, the river steamer was a far more important factor than the stagecoach. [...]
Being the second mechanized means of transportation, the railroad became closely linked with the steamer in American transportation development and consciousness. These links were reinforced, on the one hand by the American notion of steam power as the force that joined the parts of the country into a living nation and, on the other, by the reality of an under-developed highway system; highway building continued to be neglected after the arrival of the railroads, until the beginning of the twentieth century and the arrival of the automobile.
Chapter 3: Railroad Space and Railroad Time
36-37: “Transport technology is the ... material base of the traveler’s space-time perception. If an essential element of a given sociocultural space-time continuum undergoes change, this will affect the entire structure; our perception of space-time will also lose its accustomed orientation. Sorokin, following Durkheim, distinguishes between sociocultural and physico-mathematical notions of space-time, and has described the hypothetical effects of a sudden replacement of customary sociocultural time measures with purely mathematical ones: ‘If we try to replace sociocultural time by a purely quantitative time, time becomes devitalized. It loses its reality, and we find ourselves in an exceedingly difficult position in our efforts to orient ourselves in the time process, to find out “where we are” and where are the other social phenomena on “the bridge of time.”’ (Italics in original.)”
37
Thus, the idea that the railroad annihilated space and time must be seen as the reaction of perceptive powers that, formed by a certain transport technology, find suddenly that technology has been replaced by an entirely new one.
Chapter 6: The American Railroad
91: “The mechanized transportation system became, as it were, a producer of territories, in the same way that mechanized agriculture became a producer of goods.”
92:
In nineteenth-century American thought, the machine appeared to be closely linked to nature and simultaneously, the American landscape was seen as closely linked to the machine. The material foundations for those perceptions lay in the peculiarity of American economic life in the nineteenth century; Habakkuk has formulated this as the “substitution of natural resources for capital.” The shortage of capital and labor in the United States led to new forms of raw material production, to an uninhibited exploitation of seemingly inexhaustible natural resources; the lack of restraint was merely a form and expression of the low investment of capital and shortage of labor. The application of the same principle to transportation led to entirely different results: here, there was no unrestrained exploitation of nature, but a practically mimetic utilization of the existing natural routes, i.e., the waterways. [...] In both cases, however, nature was experienced at a closer range and with greater immediacy than in Europe. The history of American transportation in general and of its railroads in particular can only be understood in terms of an immediate relationship to nature which is not aesthetic but economic.
93-94: “We can still note to what extent water traffic has shaped the American consciousness of transportation in the common American usage of the verb ‘to ship’ for all forms of transport, whether on dry land or across water.”
95-96:
The American railroad continued what the river steamboat began. This applies, as we shall see, even to the design of its carriages and, in equal degree, to the design of the railroad lines themselves. In England such a line was built to be as straight as possible, partly because railroad technology favored this, partly for economic reasons. Labor was cheap and land expensive. Thus it paid to construct tunnels, embankments and cuttings in order to make the rails proceed in a straight line, at a minimum of land cost. The diametrically opposed American conditions produced opposite results. Labor was expensive, land practically worthless. In accordance with the principle of “substitution of natural resources for capital,” the American railroad did not proceed in a straight line through natural obstacles, but ran around them like a river.
102-03:
The explanation for the American railroad car’s particular interior form is not as uncomplicated as the compartment’s derivation from the coach chamber. There is, in fact, a whole series of explanations, all of which apply. We have mentioned the invention of the undercarriage (bogie, truck) that permitted the construction of virtually endless cars. The American car can also be described as the simplest and cheapest type of passenger car: just as the lack of capital in the United States during the early- and mid-nineteenth century had led to the cheapest mode of railroad construction, it also resulted in the least expensive kind of passenger car. That purely economic state of affairs was, however, closely related to the indigenous American democracy of the nineteenth century as described by Tocqueville and Chevalier. The classless open car was economically, politically, psychologically and culturally the appropriate travel container for a democratic pioneer society, while the compartment car, on the other hand, expressed the social conditions prevailing in Europe.
These general explanations are not entirely satisfactory.
[...]
The steamship, mentioned by Couch as a convenient analogy, does indeed upon closer scrutiny yield many clues to the rise of a certain type of car on American railroads.
104-05: “...the riverboat became for the American railroad train what the stagecoach had been for the European: a means and form of travel that was representative of the period before the introduction of the railroads, and thus one upon which the railroad modeled itself.”
107:
The characteristics of the American transport situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century were under-developed traffic by land, but highly developed traffic on the inland waterways. In American travel, the river steamer was a far more important factor than the stagecoach. [...]
Being the second mechanized means of transportation, the railroad became closely linked with the steamer in American transportation development and consciousness. These links were reinforced, on the one hand by the American notion of steam power as the force that joined the parts of the country into a living nation and, on the other, by the reality of an under-developed highway system; highway building continued to be neglected after the arrival of the railroads, until the beginning of the twentieth century and the arrival of the automobile.
Week 4 Class notes
Excerpts from Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies
xvii:
Americans could not have imagined the war they brought on themselves. [...] No one could have known that the most powerful slave society of the modern world, generations in the making, would be destroyed in a matter of years. [...]
Today, of course, we do know these things. Looking back to tell the story to ourselves, we search for opposites and contrasts to explain this overwhelming war, to set abolitionists against secessionists, industry against plantations, future against past. We look for impending crises and turning points, for the reassuring patterns that lead to the end of the story we already know.
This book tells a different kind of story. It offers a history of the Civil War told from the viewpoints of everyday people who could glimpse only parts of the drama they were living, who did not control the history that shaped their lives, who made decisions based on what they could know from local newspapers and from one another. It emphasizes the flux of emotion and belief, the intertwining of reason and feeling, the constant revision of history as people lived within history. It sets aside our knowledge of the war’s outcome, starting before the war could be envisioned and ending with everything in uncertainty.
xviii:
Because the Civil War was such a vast and complex event, historians often approach it in the familiar and manageable forms of broad surveys, battle histories, and biographies of generals and presidents. In these accounts, the experiences of the majority of people, soldiers as well as civilians, tend to blur into generalizations, categories, and scattered quotes. It is easy to lose sight of the way the war continually changed its meaning and implications for most Americans.
In pursuit of a more inclusive and more intimate history, this book tells the story of two communities, one Northern and one Southern. Holding a tight focus across the complicated landscape of the Civil War, this book follows the people of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, from peace into the maelstrom of the war. It intertwines the stories of North and South, sometimes using sections in italics, like voice-overs in a film, to comment on the twin narratives.
xx:
The brute operations of economy and government continually interacted with the more subtle but no less potent power of culture and ideology. Sometimes people acted from personal or local motivations while at other times distant events drove their actions. A history of the Civil War must comprehend all of these facts of life as they connected in the flow of time.
An interpretation that focuses on deep contingency cuts against the grain of many Americans’ understanding of the Civil War. We usually look closer to the surface, seeing the North as a modern society in obvious conflict with an archaic South, the future in conflict with the doomed past. Such a view seems like common sense, for it embodies an understandable and useful desire to see American history as a path, albeit strewn with challenges, to the realization of our best selves.
97-98:
In January 1861 white Virginians thought and acted in non sequiturs. They declared their love for the Union and threatened to leave it. They declared their faith in peace yet imagined the worst conceivable kind of war. Old beliefs and loyalties were forced into new combinations, twisted and torqued, distorted and deformed to fit unimaginable circumstances.
114:
J. McD. Sharpe, 29-year-old attorney from Chambersburg, writing in the newspaper Spirit:
Even if the North could muster the force necessary to conquer such a vast and well-fortified land, what then? “Commerce destroyed, cities burned to the ground, fields uncultivated, the people debauched, the arts of peace banished, and the fruits of industry relinquished for the more easily acquired spoils of robbery.” Moreover, “what would we do with the South, after we had conquered her. Could we hold her in the Union by force? The idea is preposterous.”
141:
Had pro-Confederate sympathizers attempted to stage a coup against the Virginia Convention, as some dreamed and advocated, the upper boundary of the Confederacy might have been drawn to the south of Virginia or even North Carolina. Ideals and emotions might have gone to the Unionist side, as they did in Kentucky and Maryland when pro-Confederates pushed too hard.
147-48:
The Civil War did not approach the border like a slowly building storm. It came like an earthquake, with uneven and unpredictable periods of quiet between abrupt seismic shifts that shook the entire landscape. It came by sudden realignments, its tremors giving no indication of the scale of the violence that would soon follow. People changed their minds overnight, reversing what they had said and done for years.
[...]
Indeed, the inconsistencies were striking. The North went to war to keep people in a Union based on the consent of the governed, to maintain connection with a slaveholding society it despised. Northern leaders expressed barely a word of concern for the millions of people currently enslaved. The South, for its part, went to war under the flag of freedom to maintain a massive and growing human slavery. The South risked war and the disintegration of a nation it had dominated to maintain rights that remained unchallenged in any concrete way.
151: “Union proved an ideal whose form could change, whose boundaries could be redrawn without changing the ideas to which that Union devoted itself.”
153-54:
The final popular vote on secession in Virginia arrived on May 23, weeks after the state had seceded in deed. The tortured and hopeful language of compromise had been replaced by simplistic and superheated rhetoric. “Is it not the threatened policy of the North to invade our State and take from us by brute force, our lands, our houses, and all that we possess, and divide it among themselves?” asked a former Augusta Unionist. “Their cry is ‘booty and beauty,’ which means, in plain English, as I understand it, to steal our lands from us, and ravish our females. Any one that doubts can get the newspapers and read for themselves.” Northern newspapers said nothing like this, but Virginians felt certain they did.
xvii:
Americans could not have imagined the war they brought on themselves. [...] No one could have known that the most powerful slave society of the modern world, generations in the making, would be destroyed in a matter of years. [...]
Today, of course, we do know these things. Looking back to tell the story to ourselves, we search for opposites and contrasts to explain this overwhelming war, to set abolitionists against secessionists, industry against plantations, future against past. We look for impending crises and turning points, for the reassuring patterns that lead to the end of the story we already know.
This book tells a different kind of story. It offers a history of the Civil War told from the viewpoints of everyday people who could glimpse only parts of the drama they were living, who did not control the history that shaped their lives, who made decisions based on what they could know from local newspapers and from one another. It emphasizes the flux of emotion and belief, the intertwining of reason and feeling, the constant revision of history as people lived within history. It sets aside our knowledge of the war’s outcome, starting before the war could be envisioned and ending with everything in uncertainty.
xviii:
Because the Civil War was such a vast and complex event, historians often approach it in the familiar and manageable forms of broad surveys, battle histories, and biographies of generals and presidents. In these accounts, the experiences of the majority of people, soldiers as well as civilians, tend to blur into generalizations, categories, and scattered quotes. It is easy to lose sight of the way the war continually changed its meaning and implications for most Americans.
In pursuit of a more inclusive and more intimate history, this book tells the story of two communities, one Northern and one Southern. Holding a tight focus across the complicated landscape of the Civil War, this book follows the people of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, from peace into the maelstrom of the war. It intertwines the stories of North and South, sometimes using sections in italics, like voice-overs in a film, to comment on the twin narratives.
xx:
The brute operations of economy and government continually interacted with the more subtle but no less potent power of culture and ideology. Sometimes people acted from personal or local motivations while at other times distant events drove their actions. A history of the Civil War must comprehend all of these facts of life as they connected in the flow of time.
An interpretation that focuses on deep contingency cuts against the grain of many Americans’ understanding of the Civil War. We usually look closer to the surface, seeing the North as a modern society in obvious conflict with an archaic South, the future in conflict with the doomed past. Such a view seems like common sense, for it embodies an understandable and useful desire to see American history as a path, albeit strewn with challenges, to the realization of our best selves.
97-98:
In January 1861 white Virginians thought and acted in non sequiturs. They declared their love for the Union and threatened to leave it. They declared their faith in peace yet imagined the worst conceivable kind of war. Old beliefs and loyalties were forced into new combinations, twisted and torqued, distorted and deformed to fit unimaginable circumstances.
114:
J. McD. Sharpe, 29-year-old attorney from Chambersburg, writing in the newspaper Spirit:
Even if the North could muster the force necessary to conquer such a vast and well-fortified land, what then? “Commerce destroyed, cities burned to the ground, fields uncultivated, the people debauched, the arts of peace banished, and the fruits of industry relinquished for the more easily acquired spoils of robbery.” Moreover, “what would we do with the South, after we had conquered her. Could we hold her in the Union by force? The idea is preposterous.”
141:
Had pro-Confederate sympathizers attempted to stage a coup against the Virginia Convention, as some dreamed and advocated, the upper boundary of the Confederacy might have been drawn to the south of Virginia or even North Carolina. Ideals and emotions might have gone to the Unionist side, as they did in Kentucky and Maryland when pro-Confederates pushed too hard.
147-48:
The Civil War did not approach the border like a slowly building storm. It came like an earthquake, with uneven and unpredictable periods of quiet between abrupt seismic shifts that shook the entire landscape. It came by sudden realignments, its tremors giving no indication of the scale of the violence that would soon follow. People changed their minds overnight, reversing what they had said and done for years.
[...]
Indeed, the inconsistencies were striking. The North went to war to keep people in a Union based on the consent of the governed, to maintain connection with a slaveholding society it despised. Northern leaders expressed barely a word of concern for the millions of people currently enslaved. The South, for its part, went to war under the flag of freedom to maintain a massive and growing human slavery. The South risked war and the disintegration of a nation it had dominated to maintain rights that remained unchallenged in any concrete way.
151: “Union proved an ideal whose form could change, whose boundaries could be redrawn without changing the ideas to which that Union devoted itself.”
153-54:
The final popular vote on secession in Virginia arrived on May 23, weeks after the state had seceded in deed. The tortured and hopeful language of compromise had been replaced by simplistic and superheated rhetoric. “Is it not the threatened policy of the North to invade our State and take from us by brute force, our lands, our houses, and all that we possess, and divide it among themselves?” asked a former Augusta Unionist. “Their cry is ‘booty and beauty,’ which means, in plain English, as I understand it, to steal our lands from us, and ravish our females. Any one that doubts can get the newspapers and read for themselves.” Northern newspapers said nothing like this, but Virginians felt certain they did.
Week 5 Class notes
Excerpts from Tompkins, "'Indians'"
When I was growing up in New York City, my parents used to take me to an event in Inwood Park at which Indians - real American Indians dressed in feathers and blankets - could be seen and touched by children like me. This event was always a disappointment. It was more fun to imagine that you were an Indian in one of the caves in Inwood Park than to shake the hand of an old man in a headdress who was not overwhelmed at the opportunity of meeting you. [...] My Indians, like my princesses, were creatures totally of the imagination, and I did not care to have any real exemplars interfering with what I already knew.
[...]
My story stands for the relationship most non-Indians have to the people who first populated this continent, a relationship characterized by narcissistic fantasies of freedom and adventure, of a life lived closer to nature and to spirit than the life we lead now. [...] The present essay, like these fantasies, doesn’t have much to do with actual Indians, though its subject matter is the histories of European-Indian relations in seventeenth-century New England. In a sense, my encounter with Indians as an adult doing “research” replicates the childhood one, for while I started our to learn more about Indians, I ended up preoccupied with a problem of my own.
This essay enacts a particular instance of the challenge poststructuralism poses to the study of history. In simpler language, it concerns the difference that point of view makes when people are giving accounts of events, whether at first or second hand. The problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observer’s frame of reference, then one will never know, in any given case, what really happened.
At first, it was a question of deciding which of these authors to believe, for it quickly became apparent that there was no unanimity on the subject. As I read on, however, I discovered that the problem was more complicated than deciding whose version of events was correct. Some of conflicting accounts were not simply contradictory, they were completely incommensurable, in that their assumptions about what counted as a valid approach to the subject, and what the subject itself was, diverged in fundamental ways. Faced with an array of mutually irreconcilable points of view, points of view which determined what was being discussed as well as the terms of the discussion, I decided to turn to primary sources for clarification, only to discover that the primary sources reproduced the problem all over again. I found myself, in other words, in an epistemological quandary, not only unable to decide among conflicting versions of events but also unable to believe that any such decision could, in principle, be made. It was a moral quandary as well. Knowledge of what really happened when the Europeans and the Indians first met seemed particularly important, since the result of that encounter was virtual genocide. This was the kind of past “mistake” which, presumably, we studied history in order to avoid repeating. If studying history couldn’t put us in touch with actual events and their causes, then what was to prevent such atrocities from happening again?
...it suggests that what is invisible to the historian in his own historical moment remains invisible when he turns his gaze to the past. It isn’t that Miller didn’t “see” the black men, in a literal sense, any more than it’s the case that when he looked back he didn’t “see” the Indians, in the sense of not realizing they were there. Rather, it’s that neither the Indians nor the blacks counted for him, in a fundamental way. The way in which Indians can be seen but not counted in illustrated by an entry in Governor John Winthrop’s journal, three hundred years before, when he recorded that there has been a great storm with high winds “yet through God’s great mercy it did no hurt, but only killed one Indian with the fall of a tree.” The juxtaposition suggests that Miller shared with Winthrop a certain colonial point of view, a point of view from which Indians, though present, do not finally matter.
It may well seem to you at this point that, given the tremendous variation among the historical accounts, I had no choice but to end in relativism. [...] The historian can never escape the limitations of his or her own position in history and so inevitably gives an account that is an extension of the circumstances from which it springs. But its seems to me that when one is confronted with this particular succession of stories, cultural and historical relativism is not a position that one can comfortably assume. The phenomena to which these histories testify - conquest, massacre, and genocide, on the one hand; torture, slavery, and murder on the other - cry out for judgment.
This doesn’t mean that you have to accept just anybody’s facts. You can show that what someone else asserts to be a fact is false. But it does not mean that you can’t argue that someone else’s facts are not facts because they are only the product of a perspective, since this will be true of the facts you perceive as well. What this means then is that arguments about “what happened” have to proceed much as they did before poststructuralism broke in with all its talk about language-based reality and culturally produced knowledge. Reasons must be given, evidence adduced, authorities cited, analogies drawn. Being aware that all facts are motivated, believing that people are always operating inside some particular interpretive framework or other is a pertinent argument when what is under discussion is the way beliefs are grounded. But it doesn’t give one any leverage on the facts of a particular case.
What this means for the problems I’ve been addressing is that I must piece together the story of European-Indian relations as best I can, believing this version up to a point, that version not at all, another almost entirely, according to what seems reasonable and plausible, given everything else that I know. And this, as I’ve shown, is what I was already doing in the back of my mind without realizing it, because there was nothing else I could do. If the accounts don’t fit together neatly, that is not a reason for rejecting them all in favor of a metadiscourse about epistemology; on the contrary, one encounters contradictory facts and divergent points of view in practically every phase of life, from deciding whom to marry to choosing the right brand of cat food, and one does as best one can given the evidence available. It is only the nature of the academic situation which makes it appear that one can linger on the threshold of decision in the name of an epistemological principle. What has really happened in such a case is that the subject of debate has changed from the question of what happened in a particular instance to the question of how knowledge is arrived at. The absence of pressure to decide what happened creates the possibility for this change of venue.
The change of venue, however, is itself an action taken. In diverting attention from the original problem and placing it where Miller did, on “the mind of man,” it once again ignores what happened and still is happening to American Indians. The moral problem that confronts me now is not that I can never have any facts to go on, but that the work I do is not directed toward solving the kinds of problems that studying the history of European-Indian relations has awakened me to.
When I was growing up in New York City, my parents used to take me to an event in Inwood Park at which Indians - real American Indians dressed in feathers and blankets - could be seen and touched by children like me. This event was always a disappointment. It was more fun to imagine that you were an Indian in one of the caves in Inwood Park than to shake the hand of an old man in a headdress who was not overwhelmed at the opportunity of meeting you. [...] My Indians, like my princesses, were creatures totally of the imagination, and I did not care to have any real exemplars interfering with what I already knew.
[...]
My story stands for the relationship most non-Indians have to the people who first populated this continent, a relationship characterized by narcissistic fantasies of freedom and adventure, of a life lived closer to nature and to spirit than the life we lead now. [...] The present essay, like these fantasies, doesn’t have much to do with actual Indians, though its subject matter is the histories of European-Indian relations in seventeenth-century New England. In a sense, my encounter with Indians as an adult doing “research” replicates the childhood one, for while I started our to learn more about Indians, I ended up preoccupied with a problem of my own.
This essay enacts a particular instance of the challenge poststructuralism poses to the study of history. In simpler language, it concerns the difference that point of view makes when people are giving accounts of events, whether at first or second hand. The problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observer’s frame of reference, then one will never know, in any given case, what really happened.
At first, it was a question of deciding which of these authors to believe, for it quickly became apparent that there was no unanimity on the subject. As I read on, however, I discovered that the problem was more complicated than deciding whose version of events was correct. Some of conflicting accounts were not simply contradictory, they were completely incommensurable, in that their assumptions about what counted as a valid approach to the subject, and what the subject itself was, diverged in fundamental ways. Faced with an array of mutually irreconcilable points of view, points of view which determined what was being discussed as well as the terms of the discussion, I decided to turn to primary sources for clarification, only to discover that the primary sources reproduced the problem all over again. I found myself, in other words, in an epistemological quandary, not only unable to decide among conflicting versions of events but also unable to believe that any such decision could, in principle, be made. It was a moral quandary as well. Knowledge of what really happened when the Europeans and the Indians first met seemed particularly important, since the result of that encounter was virtual genocide. This was the kind of past “mistake” which, presumably, we studied history in order to avoid repeating. If studying history couldn’t put us in touch with actual events and their causes, then what was to prevent such atrocities from happening again?
...it suggests that what is invisible to the historian in his own historical moment remains invisible when he turns his gaze to the past. It isn’t that Miller didn’t “see” the black men, in a literal sense, any more than it’s the case that when he looked back he didn’t “see” the Indians, in the sense of not realizing they were there. Rather, it’s that neither the Indians nor the blacks counted for him, in a fundamental way. The way in which Indians can be seen but not counted in illustrated by an entry in Governor John Winthrop’s journal, three hundred years before, when he recorded that there has been a great storm with high winds “yet through God’s great mercy it did no hurt, but only killed one Indian with the fall of a tree.” The juxtaposition suggests that Miller shared with Winthrop a certain colonial point of view, a point of view from which Indians, though present, do not finally matter.
It may well seem to you at this point that, given the tremendous variation among the historical accounts, I had no choice but to end in relativism. [...] The historian can never escape the limitations of his or her own position in history and so inevitably gives an account that is an extension of the circumstances from which it springs. But its seems to me that when one is confronted with this particular succession of stories, cultural and historical relativism is not a position that one can comfortably assume. The phenomena to which these histories testify - conquest, massacre, and genocide, on the one hand; torture, slavery, and murder on the other - cry out for judgment.
This doesn’t mean that you have to accept just anybody’s facts. You can show that what someone else asserts to be a fact is false. But it does not mean that you can’t argue that someone else’s facts are not facts because they are only the product of a perspective, since this will be true of the facts you perceive as well. What this means then is that arguments about “what happened” have to proceed much as they did before poststructuralism broke in with all its talk about language-based reality and culturally produced knowledge. Reasons must be given, evidence adduced, authorities cited, analogies drawn. Being aware that all facts are motivated, believing that people are always operating inside some particular interpretive framework or other is a pertinent argument when what is under discussion is the way beliefs are grounded. But it doesn’t give one any leverage on the facts of a particular case.
What this means for the problems I’ve been addressing is that I must piece together the story of European-Indian relations as best I can, believing this version up to a point, that version not at all, another almost entirely, according to what seems reasonable and plausible, given everything else that I know. And this, as I’ve shown, is what I was already doing in the back of my mind without realizing it, because there was nothing else I could do. If the accounts don’t fit together neatly, that is not a reason for rejecting them all in favor of a metadiscourse about epistemology; on the contrary, one encounters contradictory facts and divergent points of view in practically every phase of life, from deciding whom to marry to choosing the right brand of cat food, and one does as best one can given the evidence available. It is only the nature of the academic situation which makes it appear that one can linger on the threshold of decision in the name of an epistemological principle. What has really happened in such a case is that the subject of debate has changed from the question of what happened in a particular instance to the question of how knowledge is arrived at. The absence of pressure to decide what happened creates the possibility for this change of venue.
The change of venue, however, is itself an action taken. In diverting attention from the original problem and placing it where Miller did, on “the mind of man,” it once again ignores what happened and still is happening to American Indians. The moral problem that confronts me now is not that I can never have any facts to go on, but that the work I do is not directed toward solving the kinds of problems that studying the history of European-Indian relations has awakened me to.
Week 10 Class notes
Woodman spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough;
In youth it shelterd me,
And I’ll protect it now;
‘Twas my fore father’s hand
That placed it near his cot,
There woodman let it stand,
Thy axe shall harm it not!
That old familiar tree,
Whose glory and renown
Are spread o’er land and sea,
And wouldst thou hack it down.
Woodman, forbear thy stroke!
Cut not its earth bound ties;
Oh! spare that aged oak,
Now towering to the skies!
When but an idle boy
I sought its grateful shade;
In all their gushing joy
Here, too, my sisters played.
My mother kiss’d me here;
My father press’d my hand
Forgive this foolish tear,
But let that old oak stand.
My heart strings round thee cling,
Close as thy bark, old friend!
Here shall the wild bird sing,
And still thy branches bend.
Old tree! the storm still brave!
And, woodman, leave the spot;
While I’ve a hand to save,
Thy axe shall harm it not.
Week 11 Class notes
1. Buster Keaton (1895 - 1966)
Male silent film stars of the 1920s: Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon...
Charlie Chaplin as "The Little Tramp"
.jpg)
Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923)
Buster Keaton, the "Great Stone Face," with porkpie hat
_02.jpg)
Buster Keaton in The General (1927)
Male silent film stars of the 1920s: Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon...
Charlie Chaplin as "The Little Tramp"
.jpg)
Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923)
Buster Keaton, the "Great Stone Face," with porkpie hat
_02.jpg)
Buster Keaton in The General (1927)
Family background in vaudeville
A contemporary "vaudeville" troupe, the New York based Vaudeville Nouveau
2. Formal analysis - Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
* visual aspects
framing, composition, mise en scène ("placing on stage," the arrangement of objects and figures within a unified space)
shots: long shot, medium shot, close up
* narrative aspects
from daguerreotype / photograph to motion picture
Lumière: L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895)
* context: theaters and audiences
problem of cinema's availability to an "ethnically diverse, socially unruly, and sexually mixed audience" (M. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 1994)
3. Film as historical document
Selections from student response paragraphs:
While watching Sherlock, Jr. you can see the steady development of film and the creativity brought out by the director and the beginning of special effects in movies. This also shows how entertainment in the 1920’s is progressing and what they found funny, romantic, thrilling, and controversial at that time compared to the present. This film also gives you a feeling of the industrial improvement of that time. Trains, cars, and other equipment shown in the film can lead you to the conclusion of how advanced the 1920’s were.
Movie and action is going on, but on the background, you can find images of single days in early 1900s. This is like documentary, where someone records the life of his period, but literally you get images of how people dressed, how their culture was, their demeanors and values, or for instance when Sherlock, Jr gets on the roof of the building you have opportunity to see how the one single day of a busy city life; how the people and transport moved in the street, how the infrastructure looked like, or the railway and train itself, or the cars, houses and architecture and design
the background of movie was also a theater, which shows how Americans spend their leisure time at that time. leisure time would symbolize how one country was developed and in some extent, gives cultural accounts by what people were doing with what kind of tool. therefore, movie can be used as a cultural and social account of specific countries by showing how people were thinking and how the country was developed.
Another advantage was that people from different countries can equally perceive such kind of film. There is no any language used and for student from different countries it is very easy to understand.
In this movie we saw what people in 1920s found funny. This movie tells us that people laugh when someone makes a fool of himself especially by accidents. For example tripping over anything, or cliche scene with the banana. Also it reflects the relationship between women and men and how they are able to show love, they are shy to express it.
Mass culture and its audiences
Historical "anxieties"
The movie business
artistic influence
surrealists, literary modernists
* Samuel Beckett - En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot (1953); BK in Film (1964)
"film-within-a-film" / entering the screen trope
* early film: Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edison, 1902; dir. Edwin S. Porter), a remake of a 1901 British film by Robert Paul, The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures
* French nouvelle vague filmmakers: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985; dir. Woody Allen)
The Matrix (1999; dirs. L. Wachowski, A. Wachowski)
Adaptation (2002; dir. Spike Jonze; wri. Charlie Kaufmann)
stunts, action films, chase scenes
Jackie Chan (陳港生)
Selections from S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918:
An accurate reconstruction of events up to July 25 requires a temporal precision accurate to the day; after that the hour, sometimes even the minute, becomes crucial. (p. 264)
The telegrams exchanged between the Tsar and the Kaiser constituted a small fraction of the hundreds sent during the negotiations. Because they took place between the two monarchs of rival powers, they highlighted the strength and the weakness of telegraphic communication. The telegraph was unquestionably speedy. As war seemed imminent, both men, within forty-five minutes of one another, independently decided to reach across the vast distances to make a direct and personal appeal to the family ties, the traditions, and the shared values of the two monarchies in order to try and save the peace. And the telegraph made it possible. But the mechanical impersonality of this exchange excluded the expression of human sentiments that could have emerged in a face-to-face meeting. Proust had a vision of death when he first spoke to his grandmother over the telephone; perhaps the Kaiser and the Tsar heard a death rattle of diplomacy in the clicking of the telegraph key. This telegraphic exchange at the highest level dramatized the spectacular failure of diplomacy, to which telegraphy contributed with crossed messages, delays, sudden surprises, and the unpredictable timing. Throughout the crisis there was not just one new faster speed for everyone to adjust to, but a series of new and variable paces that supercharged the masses, confused the diplomats, and unnerved the generals. (p. 268)
Quote on p. 275 from Sir Ernest Satow, author of A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, 1917:
The moral qualities - prudence, foresight, intelligence, penetration, wisdom - of statesmen and nations have not kept pace with the development of the means of action at their disposal: armies, ships, guns, explosives, land transport, but, more than all that, of rapidity of communication by telegraph and telephone. These latter leave no time for reflection or consultation, and demand an immediate and often hasty decision on matters of vital importance.
The compacting of events in time was best suited for the one new art form of the period - the cinema - that was able to suggest the multiplicity of occurrences in many distant places in a single moment. (p. 279)
The ability to experience many distant events at the same time, made possible by the wireless and dramatized by the sinking of the Titanic, was part of a major change in the experience of the present. (pp. 67-68)
As cinematic montage combines distant scenes to create a unified whole, so have I drawn together pieces of the cultural record using the principle of conceptual distance and an expository technique of juxtaposition. My method involves the presentation of diverse sources that are far enough apart to justify broad generalizations about the age without being too far apart to exceed the limits of plausibility. Thus, a parallel presentation of the response to two sinking ships would not tell us much as an identification of the thematic similarity between the reaction to a sinking ship and the musings of a philosopher. It is a long way, conceptually, from the Titanic to Nietzsche, and that is precisely what makes the identification of a common denominator so fruitful. It would be outrageous to link the Titanic and Nietzsche directly, but by following the shorter, intermediate links we see a coherent matrix of thought emerging. The juxtapositions from the Titanic to the wireless and telephone, to simultaneity and the spatially expanded present, to the temporally thickened "specious present," and finally to the positive evaluation of the present in Nietzsche and others outline the distinctive experience of the present in this period. The individual "shots" come from various sources relating to the two focal issues and conclude with a picture of Nietzsche's overman overjoyed at the prospect of eternal recurrence, happily affirming his fate in the here-and-now. (pp. 87 - 88)
Week 12 Class notes
The New Yorker, 31 August 1946
“Looking back, I find that in most of my story telling, in both journalism and fiction, I have been obsessed, as any serious writer in violent times could not help being, by one overriding question, the existential question: What is it that, by a narrow margin, keeps us going, in the face of our crimes, our follies, our passions, our sorrow, our panics, our hideous drives to kill?”
- John Hersey, quoted in M. Yavenditti, “John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of Hiroshima” (1974)
Hiroshima minimized “the atom bomb by treating it as though it belonged to the familiar order of catastrophes – fire, flood, earthquake – which we have always had with us and which offer to the journalist…an unparalleled wealth of human interest stories, examples of the marvelous, and true-life narratives of incredible escapes.”
- Mary McCarthy, writer, quoted in Yavenditti, “John Hersey”
As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house. (Hiroshima, pp. 12 – 13)
Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books. (Hiroshima, p. 23)
Those victims who were able to worry at all about what had happened thought of it and discussed it in more primitive, childish terms – gasoline sprinkled from an airplane, maybe, or some combustible gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries, or the work of parachutists; but, even if they had known the truth, most of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power, which (as the voices on the short-wave shouted) no country except the United States, with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an important wartime gamble, could possibly have developed. (Hiroshima, pp. 65-66)
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.
Gerherd Scholem,
‘Gruss vom Angelus’
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, from "Theses on the Philosophy of History"
“Looking back, I find that in most of my story telling, in both journalism and fiction, I have been obsessed, as any serious writer in violent times could not help being, by one overriding question, the existential question: What is it that, by a narrow margin, keeps us going, in the face of our crimes, our follies, our passions, our sorrow, our panics, our hideous drives to kill?”
- John Hersey, quoted in M. Yavenditti, “John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of Hiroshima” (1974)
Hiroshima minimized “the atom bomb by treating it as though it belonged to the familiar order of catastrophes – fire, flood, earthquake – which we have always had with us and which offer to the journalist…an unparalleled wealth of human interest stories, examples of the marvelous, and true-life narratives of incredible escapes.”
- Mary McCarthy, writer, quoted in Yavenditti, “John Hersey”
As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house. (Hiroshima, pp. 12 – 13)
Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books. (Hiroshima, p. 23)
Those victims who were able to worry at all about what had happened thought of it and discussed it in more primitive, childish terms – gasoline sprinkled from an airplane, maybe, or some combustible gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries, or the work of parachutists; but, even if they had known the truth, most of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power, which (as the voices on the short-wave shouted) no country except the United States, with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an important wartime gamble, could possibly have developed. (Hiroshima, pp. 65-66)
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.
Gerherd Scholem,
‘Gruss vom Angelus’
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, from "Theses on the Philosophy of History"
Week 13 Class notes
Clips from The Fog of War:
World War II - "Proportionality" - LeMay's decision to fire-bomb Tokyp, 1945:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er2xCn3_QcQ
Cuban missile crisis - 1962 - "Empathize with your enemy"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOoOcIFhaoA
Committing ground troops in Vietnam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5j0r4QyZeo
World War II - "Proportionality" - LeMay's decision to fire-bomb Tokyp, 1945:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er2xCn3_QcQ
Cuban missile crisis - 1962 - "Empathize with your enemy"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOoOcIFhaoA
Committing ground troops in Vietnam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5j0r4QyZeo
Week 14 Class notes
Clips from Smoke Signals (1998)
Arnold Joseph protests the Vietnam War
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAWYRa8d2Eo
How to be an Indian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvsrAGXU6nE
Victor and the Jesuits play basketball
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-huBixdxj0Y
Arlene's frybread magic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKifZHSoRFY
Closing shots
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8MNkLD3C40
Arnold Joseph protests the Vietnam War
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAWYRa8d2Eo
How to be an Indian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvsrAGXU6nE
Victor and the Jesuits play basketball
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-huBixdxj0Y
Arlene's frybread magic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKifZHSoRFY
Closing shots
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8MNkLD3C40
Essay 1 Assignment
This assignment introduces students to the practice of historical scholarship. Using a pre-selected sample of primary source materials, students develop a coherent narrative of a particular event in American history from the colonial period to the Civil War. The completed essays form the basis for later in-class discussion.
Assignment:
Complete one of the following assignments developed by Roland Marchand, Ph.D. (1933-1997) of the University of California, Davis.
Bacon’s Rebellion
The Trial of John Brown
Lincoln and the Outbreak of War, 1861
“New Harmony”: An Experimental, Cooperative Community
The Antinomian Controversy
The Removal of the Cherokee Nation
Paper requirements: As described in the Course Outline.
Format: Electronic (Microsoft Word, but not .docx)
The assignment is due by email to wbarnard@unyp.cz by Friday 31 October 2008.
The assignment meets or partially meets these course objectives:
* understand the requirements and characteristics of scholarly work;
* critically interpret and evaluate competing historical and cultural interpretations;
* develop coherent, sustained arguments in writing, supported with appropriate examples and placed in the context of scholarly discussions;
* articulate ideas, and respond respectfully to the ideas of others, in the context of a group discussions;
* manage self and time to successfully meet course requirements, including preparation (homework), attendance, active participation, and the timely submission assignments.
Grading criteria
An “A” Paper:
This paper is exceptional. It takes some intellectual risks, and carries out its project with an impressive sophistication of thought and style. The main idea or thesis is clearly communicated. While significant and worthy of being developed, it is also limited enough to be manageable. The paper shows an awareness of some complexity in the thesis: it may discuss possible contradictions or qualifications of the thesis and their implications. The paper’s terms and keywords are clearly defined and all sources are critically examined. The structure of the paper is clear, whether it is a “logical” structure or a more “associational” organization. The paper is generally free from grammatical and spelling errors.
A “B” Paper:
This paper does more than fulfill the assignment. It carries out its project with a noticeable degree of skill and competence. It has a clearly stated thesis and organization. It touches on the complexity of the thesis and shows careful reading of the sources. All relevant terms are defined. The paragraphs are unified and relate to the thesis. It has not major distracting errors in usage or mechanics (grammar and spelling), and no major lapses in diction or organization.
A “C” Paper:
This paper acceptably fulfills the assignment, though in a routine way. There is a thesis, though it may be rather general. The complexity of the thesis may be touched upon but is not really addressed. The paper’s terms and keywords tend to show a similar generality. The paper’s concepts and thesis are clear enough, but their generality is often a way for the writer to avoid engaging the issues in any real depth. The paper may use sources and cite counter-arguments, but does not critically engage them. The paper has a structure that the reader can discern, though it may be interrupted at times by random or unclear paragraphs and sentences. There may be errors in usage or mechanics.
A “D” Paper:
This paper does not have a clearly defined and meaningful thesis, or shows a lack of engagement on the part of the writer. The paper may lack a meaningful purpose: that purpose could be so vague that the reader is unsure why the writer is writing the essay, or the purpose could be so specific that the reader is uncertain why he or she is reading the essay. The paper does not have a coherent structure, uses few or inappropriate transitions and lacks coherent paragraph structure. Specific and relevant evidence is often missing to support the paper’s assertions. There are enough mechanical errors to make it difficult for the reader to understand the writer’s point clearly and quickly. Typically, this paper will have problems such as vague diction, ambiguous phrasings, awkward sentences, undefined terms, unexamined sources, or no sources at all.
An “F” Paper:
This paper does not respond to the assignment, or has no main idea or thesis and uses no sources. There is no clearly discernable organization or structure to the paper. There is no relevant supporting evidence. The amount of mechanical errors makes it difficult to follow the sequence of ideas. A stylistically adequate paper that does not respond to the assignment is an “F” paper, as is a paper that is not turned in on time.
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