ENAM 802:
American Studies Colloquium I

• Summer Reading:
  • John Crunden,A Brief History of American Culture.
  • James Hunter, Culture Wars.
  • Neill Howe and Bill Strauss,13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
  • Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.
  • John Berger, Ways of Seeing.
  • Neil Postman, Technopoly.
  • Raymond Williams, Keywords
  • HTML for Dummies (quick reference edition)
• Additional Texts:
  • Note: All texts are on reserve in Clemons.
  • Stephen J. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves.
  • Miles Orvell, The Real Thing.
  • Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America; Transformations of Everyday Life.
  • Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
  • Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America.

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• Subscribe toH-AMSTDY, and two other listserves in related fields of interest to you fromH-NET
• For Friday, choose the book from the summer reading you liked best. Identify an idea in the book that seems interesting, powerful, useful-- or all three. Write a brief but complete description of the idea as if you were explaining it to an intelligent peer who has not read the book and who has a appointment he/she needs to leave for.
  Also,read the entry for two of the following in Williams, Keywords: Culture, Democracy History, or Nature. At the end of each of these definitions is a series of pointers to related terms; read those as well.

• John Crunden,A Brief History of American Culture.
• James Hunter, Culture Wars.
• Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.

• Neil Postman, Technopoly.
• Neill Howe and Bill Strauss,13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing

• Hans Holbein the Younger,Map of the World (1515)
• William Bradford, Selection from Of Plymouth Plantation
• Captain John Smith,Selection from The History of Virginia.
• Cotton Mather,A General IntroductionandNehemius AmercanafromThe Magnalia Christi Americana.
• Ben Franklin, from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,pp.5-29, pp. 81-92 and Poor Richard Improved, 1758pp. 1295-1304.
• Thomas Jefferson, Draft of The Declaration of Independence. and Query 4pp. 142-149 and Query 19pp. 290-291, from Notes on the State of Virginia.
• James Madison, The Federalist #10
• George Washington, Farewell Address.
• Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Letter III: What is an American?, Letter IX: Description of Charles-Town, and Letter XII: Distresses of a Frontier Man from Letters from an American Farmer

• Sacvan Bercovitch,The Puritan Origins of the American Self.
• Daniel Boorstin,The Americans: The Colonial Experience.
• Oscar Handlin,The Uprooted.
• Howard Mumford Jones,O Strange New World
• Michael Kammen,The Machine that Would Run by Itself: The Constitution in American Culture.
• Perry Miller,Errand into the Wilderness.
• David Potter,People of Plenty.
• Ernest Lee Tuveson,Redeemer Nation.
• Gary Wills,Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence
ASLAB

• Alexis deTocqueville, from Democracy in America 
   
  • * Origin of the Anglo-Americans and the Importance of their Origins in Relation to Their Future Condition, 
  • * The Necessity of Examining the Condition of the States Before That of the Union at Large, 
  • The Federal Constitution,
  • Liberty of the Press in the United States, 
  • * Government of Democracy in the United States
  • Main Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States,
  • The Present and Probably Future condition of the Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States, 
    Influence of Democracy on the Action of Intellect in The United States, 
  • Philosophical Method of The Americans
  • Of the Principal Source of Belief Among Democratic Nations
  • Why the Americans Show More General Aptitude and Taste for General Ideas than their Forefathers, The English,
  • Why the Americans have never been so Eager as the French for General Ideas in Political Affairs,
  • How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man,
  • In What Spirit the Americans Cultivate the Arts,
  • Literary Characteristics of Democratic Times, 
  • How American Democracy has Modified the English Language, 
  • * Why Democratic Nations show a More Ardent and Enduring Love for Equality than Liberty, 
  • * Of Individualism in Democratic Countries, 
  • * Of the Uses which Americans make of Public Associations, 
  • Of the Taste for Physical Well-being in America
  • What Causes Almost All Americans to Follow an Industrial Calling, 
  • * How an Aristocracy may be Created by Manufacures, 
  • How Customs are Softened as Social Conditions become more Equal, 
  • Influence of Democracy on the Family,
  • How Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes, 
  • Of Honour in the United States and in Democratic Communities, 
  • Why Democratic Nations Naturally Desire Peace and Democratic Armies War,
  • Why the Idea of Democratic Peoples about Government Naturally Favors the Concentration of Political Power,
  • * What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations have to Fear, 
  • General Survey of the Subject. 

• * Edgar Allen Poe,The Man of the Crowd,
• 8 Ralph Waldo Emerson,The American Scholar
• Nathaniel Hawthorne,The Maypole of Merrymount
• Nathaniel Hawthorne,Roger Malvin's Burial
• * Nathaniel Hawthorne,My Kinsman, Major Molineaux
• * Abraham Lincoln,The Gettysburg Address.
• Abraham Lincoln,Second Inaugural Address.
• Walt Whitman, fromDemocratic Vistas.
• Walt Whitman,The Eighteenth Presidency
• Jacob Riis,IntroductionandGenesis of the Tenementfrom How the Other Half Lives.
• * William Graham Sumner,SelectionfromWhat the Social Classes Owe Each Other
• * Frederick Jackson Turner,The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
• * Thorstein Veblen,Industrial Exemption and ConservatismfromThe Theory of the Leisure Classes
• * Andrew Carnegie,Wealth
• George Santayana,Materialism and Idealism in American LifefromCharacter and Opinion in the United States.
• * Henry Adams, Chicago and The Dynamo and the Virgin, fromThe Education of Henry Adams.
•  V.L. Parrington, The Chief Stewards of Theocracy and The Contributions of Independency fromMain Currents in American ThoughtVol. I(C)
•  William Carlos Williams, Voyage of the Mayflower and The May-Pole at Maerry Mount fromIn the American Grain
• * Constance Rourke,Corncobs Twist Your Hairand The Gamecock of the WildernessfromAmerican Humor
• John Crowe Ransom,A Statement of Principles
• Lionel Trilling,Reality in America
• Reinhold Niebuhr,* Where Have We Been? Where are We Going?

• Daniel Boorstin,The Americans: The National Experience.
• F.O. Matthiessen,American Renaissance
• Arthur M. Schlesinger,The Age of Jackson
• Gary Wills,The Gettysburg Address

ASLAB

• Geneology
  • * T. V. Reed,, Theory and Method in American/Cultural Studies: A Bibliographical Essay
  • * Gene Wise,"Paradigm Dramas" in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.
  • Gene Wise,From 'American Studies' to 'American Culture Studies.'
  • Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.,A New Context for a New American Studies?
  • Allen F. Davis,The Politics of American Studies.
  • Gerald Graff, * The Promise of American Literature Studies
  • Henry Giroux, David Shumway, Paul Smith, and James Sosnoski,The Need for Cultural Studies: Resisting Intellectuals and Oppositional Public Spheres
  • Sacvan Berkovitch, The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History
  • * Linda Kerber,Diversity and the Transformation of American Studies.
  • * Philip Fisher,The New American Studies: From Myths to Rhetorics
  • George Lipsitz,Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies
  • Elaine Tyler May,"The Radical Roots of American Studies"

• Not Everybody's Myth and Symbol: 
  • * Henry Nash Smith,Can American Studies Develop a Method?
  • * Leo Marx,American Studies A Defense of an Unscientific Method.
  • * Frederick Lewis Dekker,Disassembling the Machine in the Garden.
  • * Bruce Kucklich,Myth and Symbol in American Studies
  • Donald Pease,Visionary Compacts and the Cold War Consensus.
  • Brian Atteberry,American Studies: A Not So Unscientific Method"
  • * Paul Lauter, The Literatures of America: A Comparative Discipline
  • * Jay Mechling, An American Culture Grid, With Texts
  • Ian Finseth,Prefaceto the Hypertext Edition of Virgin Land.
    ASLAB

ASLAB

• Virgin Land 
• Virgin Land Hypertextual Extensions 

(MA96-98) 
• Federal Statutes: The Public Lands 
• Photogr aphy and Virgin Land 
• Bloody Kansas 
• Hamlin Garland, The Lion's Paw 
• Slavery in Virgin Land 
• Buffalo Bill 
• Walt Whitman's Virgin Land 
• Daniel Boone 
• Kit Carson 
• The West in Silent Films.
• The Domestic Frontier: The West in Women's Personal Narratives 
• West to the Garden: Early Versions of the Myth of the American Garden 
• Comic Anti-Heroes in Southwestern Humor 
• The Yeoman and the Cracker 
• Romancing the Indian: Sentimentalizing and Demonizing in Cooper and Twain 
• Mormonism in the Garden.
• Utopian Communities in America.
• Caribean Slave Empire
• The Scalp Hunters
• Leatherstocking: Symbol and Myth
• The Mountain Men
• Frederick Law Olmsted in the Yosemite Valley
Suggested: 
• Robert Berkhofer,The White Mans' Indian.
• Frank Prucha,Americanizing the American Indian.
• Richard Slotkin,Regeneration Through Violence.
• Tompkins, Jane P.West of Everything : The Inner Life of Westerns.

• Hypertexts extensions

• Miles Orvell, The Real Thing

Suggested: 
• Lawrence H. Levine,William Shakespeare in America,fromShakespeare in America. 
• Tom Gunning,Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinemain Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (C)
• Ben Singer,Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,in Charney and Schwartz. (C)
• Erika D. Rappaport,'A New Era of Shopping;' The Promotion of Women's Pleasure in London's West End, 1909-1914in Charney and Schwartz. (C)
• Alexandra Keller,Disseminations of Modernity: Representation and Consumer Desire in Early Mail-Order Catalogsin Charney and Schwartz. (C)
• Miriam Bratu Hansen,America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity,in Charney and Schwartz. (C)

• Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
• Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America.
• Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. 
• T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance : A Cultural History of Advertising in America. 
• Susan Sonntag, On Photography. 
• Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market
• Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Symbol and Fact.
• Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs.

• Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves

Suggested:

• The World's Columbian Exposition. 
• John Cawelti,America on Display: The Worlds' Fairs of 1876, 1893, 1933,in F. Jaher, ed.,The Age of Industrialism in America.
• Sigfried Gideon,Mechanization Takes Command.
• John Higham,Strangers in the Land.
• Oscar Handlin,The Uprooted.
• Howard Mumford Jones,The Age of Engergy.
• Neil Harris,Grand Illusions : Chicago's World's Fair of 1893
• T.J. Jackson Lears and Richard W. Fox, eds.,The Culture of Consumption.
• David Noble,America by Design.
• Alan Trachtenberg,Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol.
• Sam Bass Warner,The Urban Wilderness.
• Mike Wallace,Mickey Mouse History

• Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: 1876-1915

Note: Classes end 12/05; Exams: 12/08-12/15

Vacation Reading: TBA.