Week 1: Introductions

Thursday

January 20

Introductions (on Microsoft Teams)

Introduction of the course, each other. Research brainstorming. We won’t stay the entire time, but I am interested in a decent conversation about what we hope to accomplish in this course. As an upper-division course, we are deliberately moving beyond the information distribution and reception mode of history courses and more into the interpretative and research elements of historical scholarship. Please come to class prepared to discuss potential research projects. Your research idea can be broad or narrow, but I’m interested in a class-wide discussion on research and what we know and what we would like to know about the process or the production. My own scholarship trends toward the intersections of business and politics, but I encourage you to explore whatever type or subject that interests you.

Week 2: understanding modern america

Thursday

January 27

Lecture: Understanding Modern America

Discussion/Close Reading: Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart

Reading: Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart

Due: Moreton Handout

Bring: Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart

Today’s class and the assignment that precede it are about learning to make sure we understand the argument and importance of a piece of historical scholarship besides its straight-up content. Moreton’s book is one of the most important books on American history in the last ten years. It has fundamentally challenged the way modern historians view religion, region, business, and gender. This is not just a book about Wal-Mart, but rather a completely different way of understanding work and culture. Let’s focus our discussion on the book’s insights and what we learned. Let’s make sure that everyone walks out of the classroom with a solid understanding of the contributions of this book. Come prepared to talk about passages or sections that you found interesting and why. I will open class with a brief lecture on some of the ways that we should think about the time period under discussion.

Note: Lecture Summary and Notes will be due Saturday January 29th by 4:00 p.m.

Week 3: getting started on a project

Thursday

February 3

Research Workshop: Asking Questions and Finding Answers. Finding the Five Big Books. Using JSTOR. Being a sponge.

Writing Workshop: How to cut the fluff and get to what you want to say. Bring in a recent piece of writing for a class. History would be best, but any nonfiction writing will suffice.

Bring: Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart + laptop + one piece of your recent writing.

Today’s class is our first set of research and writing workshops. You will need to bring in your Moreton text, your computer, and a recent writing assignment. For our research workshop, we will want to reread the footnotes of Moreton’s introduction. We are looking for the books and articles that make important points for the conversations she and her book enter, books that have asked similar questions as she did about business, religion, gender, region, culture. Then we are going to crank down on trying to find the books that ask similar questions to those we are asking in our research projects. It’s an important process, but a fairly simple one. Then we will turn to different passages from Moreton to see how she has constructed her points with style and only as many words as she feels necessary. Our writing workshop will be devoted to recognizing those moments in our own writing where we could afford to lose some words – sometimes a lot of words. Sometimes a whole lot of words. We’ll talk about how to produce much stronger and forceful prose and better, more well-argued papers. Hint – the keys are providing appropriate context, more data, and knowing what you are talking about.

Week 4: Southern Business and Southern politics

Thursday

February 10

Lecture: Southern Politics and Southern Business

Discussion/Close Reading: McRea, Mothers of Massive Resistance

Reading: McRea, Mothers of Massive Resistance

Due: McRea Handout

Bring: McRea

Today’s class will be devoted to understanding how political projects and movements to preserve white supremacy have been central to the development of the United States since 1945. One cannot understand. the world we live in today without a solid comprehension of how extensive and powerful white supremacy has been in the nation’s politics, culture, economy, and society. I will lecture, drawn from my own research, on massive resistance in the South. We’ll then turn to a discussion of McRea’s book. Again, we are most interested in her contributions to our understanding of this period of American history and this particular subject. As with Moreton, we want to focus on big-picture understandings and what we learned. And, again, let’s make sure that everyone walks out of the classroom with a solid understanding of the book. Come with passages and sections and evidence and structure that you liked and let’s talk about why you found those powerful. Let’s talk about how she constructs the book and its argument.

Week 5: THe importance of knowing what you are talking about

Thursday

February 17

Research Workshop: Becoming an Authority

Bring: McRae + laptop

In this workshop we are going to address one of the major issues that plagues student research, an often superficial understanding of their subject. To write well, one needs to be able to write with an authority. Sometimes lacking that authority, students (and more than a few professionals) resort to b.s.ing their way through whole paragraphs trying to sound like they know what they are talking about. The sad news is that this strategy works far more often than it should and students are too rarely given the opportunity to actually become something of an expert on their subject. The happy news is that it’s never been easier to become an authority on a subject. It still requires the same old research work, but a great deal of the materials needed are easily accessed for the first time in human history. Today’s workshop is a set of lessons designed to teach you how to use many of the resources available to you including: Wikipedia, Google Books, JSTOR, newspapers.com, Haithi Trust, NARA documents, and more. But our primary focus will be on identifying and procuring the FIVE BIG BOOKs on our subject. These five will provide us with the foundational knowledge and expertise that we will need to more fully understand our subject.

Week 6: THe rise of the metropolis

Thursday

February 24

Lecture: The New Urban

Discussion/Close Reading: Fernandez, The Young Lords

Reading:Fernandez, The Young Lords

Due: Fernandez, TYL Handout

Today we will explore the relationships between race and space in modern America. The lecture will focus on the rise of the metropolis in the postwar era and the and the different ways that race and ethnicity and gender were renegotiated within the spaces of cities and suburbs. Our reading this week is an award-winning monograph based on an incredible set of sources to tell the story The Young Lords a cultural and political movement meant to improve the lives of Puerto Ricans and others in New York City and elsewhere.

Week 7: discipline and drafting

Thursday

March 3

Research Workshop: Student Presentations on the books that shape their research project

Writing Workshop: Paragraphs and Organizing Data. Bring in a recent piece of writing for a class. History would be best, but any nonfiction writing will suffice.

In this last set of workshops before Spring Break we will first hear presentations on the work so far. Each student will give a basic run-down on their subject, their historiography, and their research. These are informal. The second workshop will focus on organizing data within a paragraph structure. Bring in a recent piece of scholarship/writing along with Fernandez’s book with examples of information within paragraphs to see how this works in a piece of published writing.

Week 8: Unintended consequences

Thursday

March 10

Lecture: Unintended Consequences

Discussion/Close Reading: Chatelin, Franchise

Reading: Chatelin, Franchise

Due: Chatelin, Franchise

Week 9: The rise and fall of an american culture

Thursday

March 31

Lecture: The Death of Rock and Roll

Reading: Brand, American Dreams, 1-130

Reading: Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Discussion: Brand’s America

Workshop: Your Research in the Larger Picture

Workshop: Writing in Sections

Due: Brand Worksheet.

H.W. Brands, American Dreams Worksheet

H.W. Brands’s book is a very readable quick survey of American life in the years since WWII. He has divided the work into three main long chapters and each of those into five subchapters and each of those into 5-8 mini sections. You can actually see the outline at work.

For each of the three Brands Assignments create one paragraph summaries of each chapter and one sentence summaries of each of the mini sections.

Due: The 5 books

Week 10: institutional collapse

Thursday

April 7

Lecture: The Collapse of Richard Nixon’s America

Reading: Brands, 133-262

Reading: Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (selections)

Reading: Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (selections)

Discussion, Institutional Collapse

Workshop: Writing in paragraphs. Writing with a point.

Due: Draft Section One. Each student will bring in a 3-5 paragraph section of their research paper. Use Brands as a model

Due: Brand Worksheet.

H.W. Brands, American Dreams Worksheet

For each of the three Brands Assignments create one paragraph summaries of each chapter and one sentence summaries of each of the mini sections.

Week 11: Franchise

Thursday

April 14

Discussion. Chatelin, Franchise

Workshop: Tearing down first drafts

Due: Another section of research paper

Due: Chatelin Worksheet (create your own based on previous)

Week 12: meet the New Right, same as the old right

Thursday

April 21

Lecture: The Conservative Movement 1954-1994

Workshop: 90 second research trips

Due: Another section of research paper

Week 13: Bill clinton, newt gingrich, and the weaponization of american politics