ENAM 803: The 1930s

Last updated: 03/01/99

Texts:

Terry A. Cooney, Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the1930s.
Stephen J. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves
Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory.
Robert S. McElwaine, The Great Depression.

Objectives

Calendar of Meetings:

1/14: Preliminaries:

1/20: Organization and Introduction

NOTE: No class Friday, Jan. 22.

1/25: Public Memory

Reading:

Recommended:

2/1: Corporate Memory.

Reading:

2/8: The Great Depression

Reading:

  • Recommended:
    Warren Sussman, Ideology as Culture in Culture as History, pp. 52-97.
    Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s.
    Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties in America.
    Daniel Aaron, The Strenuous Decade.
    Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas.
    Malcolm Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountain: Remembering the 1930s.
    Arthur Ekirch, Jr., Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought.
    Harvey Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life.
    Frederick Hoffman, The 1920s.
    Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.
    W. F. Leuchtenberg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.
    R.S. and H. Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts.
    Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence.
    Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr., The Coming of the New Deal.
    David A. Shannon, ed., The Great Depression.
    Howard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergance of Civil Rights as a National Issue.
    Studs Terkel, Hard Times.
    Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s.
    Robert Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 1929-1985.

    Suggested:
    America Lost and Found
    Robert Bendiner, Just Around the Corner: A Highly Selective History of the Thirties.
    The New Deal #1
    The New Deal #2
    Yahoo:

    2/15: Thirties Culture I:


    Reading:
    Terry Cooney, Balancing Acts.

    2/22: Thirties Culture II:

    Reading:
    Warren Sussman, History as Culture.

    Recommended:
    Daniel Aaron and Robert Bendiner, eds., The Strenuous Decade: A Social and Intellectual Record of the 1930s.
    Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford.
    Arthur Asa Berger, The Comic Stripped American.
    Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money.
    Alan Jenkins, The Thirties.
    Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940.
    Richard Pell, Radical Visions and American Dreams.
    Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts.
    Daniel Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Moderninst Thought in the South, 1919-1945..
    Harold Stearns, ed., America Now: An Inquiry into Civilization in the United States.
    Harold Stearns, Rediscovering America.
    Warren Susman, Culture as History.
    Warren Susman, ed., Culture as Commitment.

    Suggested:
    Huey P. Long, Every Man a King.
    Brown, Modernism
    Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.
    Voices from the Dustbowl
    Soda Fountain

    ALSO:

    Popular Fiction:
    James D. Hart, The Popular Book.
    Hervey Allen, Anthony Adverse.
    Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth.
    Ellen Glasgow, Vein of Iron.
    James Hilton, Lost Horizon.
    Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind.
    Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling.
    Kenneth Roberts, Northwest Passage.
    John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men.
    John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.
    Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River.
    Stark Young, So Red the Rose.

    Popular Nonfiction:
    Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday.
    James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America.
    Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization.
    Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England.
    Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
    Stuart Chase, Mexico: A Study of Two Cultures.
    Charles Hearn, The American Dream in the Great Depression.
    Douglas Southall Freeman, R.E.Lee.
    John Gunther, Inside Europe.
    Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin.

    Film:
    Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films
    Robert Sklar, Movie Made America: A Social History of American Movies.
    Melvin Ely, The Adventures of Amos and Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon.
    Its a Wonderful Life
    The Wizard of Oz
    Modern Times
    The Maltese Falcon
    Gone With the Wind
    Song of the South
    Stagecoach
    Sullivan's Travels
    It Happened One Night
    Green Pastures

    Radio:
    Eric Barnouw, A Tower and Babel.
    Eric Barnouw, The Golden Web.
    Marilyn Boemer, The Children's Hour.
    Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression.
    Frank Buxton, The Big Broadcast: 1920-1950.
    John Dunning, Tune in Yesterday.
    Melvin Ely, The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon.
    Jim Harmon, The Great Radio Heroes.
    Amy Henderson, On the Air.
    Library of Congress, Radio Broadcasts in the Library of Congress, 1920-1941.
    J. Fred MacDonald, Don't Touch That Dial.
    Smithsonian Old Time Radio Series (Comedy, Science Fiction, History, Showbiz Teams, Detectives, Childrens' Radio, etc.)
    James Thurber, Soapland in The Best of Me.

    Comics:
    Comics Scholarship Annotated Bibliograhies
    Bibliography of Comics Reprints
    Little Orphan Annie
    Robert H. Abell and David M. White, eds., The Funnies: An American Idiom.
    RPI Comics Resource Page
    Stephen Becker, Comic Art in America.
    Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator.
    Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890-1945
    Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, All in Color for a Dime.
    Rick Marschall, ed., The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat.
    David M. White and Robert Abel: The Funnies: An American Idiom.
    William Murrell, A History of American Graphic Humor.
    Coulton Waugh, The Comics.


    Photography:
    Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces.
    Walker Evans, et al.
    Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade; Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the 1930s.
    Hank O'Neal, A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and Its People, 1935-1945.
    William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America.

    Music:

    Henry Cowell, ed., American Composers on American Music.
    Woody Guthrie, Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People.
    P. Oliver,, M. Harrison, and W. Balcom, The New Grove: Gospel, Blues and Jazz With Spirtuals and Ragtime.

    Charles Schwartz, Gershwin, His Life and Music.
    George T. Simon, The Big Bands.
    Swing Dance
    Nicholas Tawa, Serenading the Eagle: American Musical Life 1925-1945.

    Film:

    Kenneth Cameron, America on Film : Hollywood and American History.
    Philip Davies, ed., Representing and Imagining America.
    Michael Pitts, Hollywood and American History.
    Eugene Rostow, Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America.
    Welsh Arts Council, Selling Dreams: British and American Film Posters 1890-1976.

    3/01: The American Writer and the Great Depression

    Reading:
    Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds, pp. 239-406.


    Recommended:
    Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left.
    Ralph Bogardus and Fred Hobson, eds., Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s.
    Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties.
    Richard King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South.
    Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers Project.
    Joseph North, ed., New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties.
    Rita James Simon, ed., As We Saw the Thirties: Essays on Social and Political Movements of a Decade.
    Harvey Swados, ed., The American Writer and the Great Depression.
    Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America.

    • Suggested:
    Louis Adamic, My America.
    James Agee and Walker Evans, Let us Now Praise Famous Men.
    American Stuff: An Anthologyof Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers' Project.
    Nathan Asch, The Road: In Search of America.
    John Dos Passos, U.S.A.
    James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan.
    William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom.
    William Faulkner, The Hamlet.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald, TheLast Tycoon.
    Upton Sinclair, ed., The Cry for Justice.
    John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.
    Nathaniel West, Miss Lonely Hearts.
    Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust.
    Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel.
    Edmund Wilson, American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties.
    Richard Wright, Native Son.
    Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children.

    3/08: Searching for the Real Thing:

    SPRING BREAK


    3/22:The Machine Age: Art, Architecture and Design.

    Reading:
    Richard Guy Wilson et al, The Machine Age in America. (R)

    Recommended:
    Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in 20th Century America.

    Jonathan Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America

    Martin Grief, Depression Modern: The Thirties Style in America.
    Janet Kardon, ed., Craft in the Machine Age.
    Richard McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists.
    Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to-Wall America.
    Jeffry L. Meikle, Twentieth_Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939.
    Walter D. Teague, Design This Day.
    Allen Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge.

    Suggested:

    Sue Bridewell Beckham, Depression Post Office Murals and Southen Culture.
    Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways.
    Lorraine B. Diehl, The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station.
    James J. Flink, The Automobile Age.

    NOTE: Next week, we'll critique the MA98 projects; I'll ask each of you to choose one project and to redesign it on paper. NOTE: Your own BIG Project Proposals are due 4/5.

    3/29: The 1930s Project.

    4/5:Workshop I: Project Design

    4/12:Workshop II:

    4/19: Workshop III:

    4/26: Workshop IV:

    5/3: Workshop V:

    5/7-5/14: Final Examinations

    NOTE: Projects due 5/14