Over the course of the semester you must answer 10 sets of discussion questions, and complete two short book reviews.  The 10 sets will be graded on a scale of 1-10.  Your answers to each of the sets of questions should be typed, 1.5-2 pages, and double-spaced.  These are due in class on the day that the reading is assigned.  All readings are to be completed on the day they are listed.  No late discussion sets will be accepted.
 

WEEK 1 Course Intro 
 TUES JAN 31 Cover syllabus, outline course, go over objectives

 Last day to register for a class: 2/2/06

WEEK 2 State of Field
TUES FEB 7 Novick, intro, pgs. 1-17; “Preface” in Eric Foner, Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (2002); George Marsden, “Christian Advocacy and the Rules of the Academic Game” in Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart, eds., Religious Advocacy and American History (1997); John T. McGreevy, “Faith and Morals in the United States, 1865-Present,” Reviews in American History (1998); “Introduction” in David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (1997) 

Set 1: Answer one question from each section. 

Section A: Novick, intro, pgs. 1-17
1. How does Peter Novick describe the role of “objectivity” within the historical profession? 

2. How could one think of “objectivity” as a kind of organizing myth?

3. What is the central theme of Novick’s book? 

Section B: “Preface” in Eric Foner, Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (2002)

4. Columbia University historian Eric Foner describes some of disjunctions between popular and scholarly history.  What are these? 

5. Foner argues that battles over history “underscore the basic differences between historians’ understanding of their task and what much of the broader public thinks the writing of history entails” (xvi).  According to Foner, how did history become a “wedge issue” in the culture wars? 

Section C: George Marsden, “Christian Advocacy and the Rules of the Academic Game” in Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart, eds., Religious Advocacy and American History (1997)

6. In George Marsden’s opinion, how and why would religion become divorced from the academy?

7. How does Marsden think religious perspectives “ought” to be treated in the academy?

8. What is the answer to Marsden’s question on page 19, “What Difference Does It Make?”

Section D: John T. McGreevy, “Faith and Morals in the United States, 1865-Present,” Reviews in American History (1998)

9. After describing the expanding field of American religious history, John T. McGeevy asks, “But is anybody listening?” (2)  What is his answer?

10.  How have some of the works that McGreevy discusses changed the field of American history? 

Section E: “Introduction” in David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (1997) 

11.  What does David Harlan mean when he claims that historians now “write history not to deepen our indebtedness to the past but to liberate us from the past”?

12. How does Harlan perceive the impact of postmodernism on the historical profession?

13.  Would Foner and Harlan agree about the state of the field?  Why or why not?

WEEK 3 The Emergence of an American Discipline
TUES FEB 14 Novick, chapter 1, pgs. 21-46; preface, chapter 1, and chapter 2 in Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life (1847, 1949); Francis Jennings, “Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among Untouchables,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1985); “George Bancroft” in Michael Kraus, The Writing of American History (1953); “Colonization of Virginia” and “The Pilgrims” in George Bancroft, The History of the United States of America: From the Discovery of the Continent (1876-79, 1966)

Set 2: Answer one question from each section.

Section A: Novick, chapter 1, pgs. 21-46

1. Peter Novick writes that in Germany “young American students of history found institutions of higher education whose structure and values were totally unlike anything they had known at home” (22).  Explain what he means.

2. How would the work of Leopold von Ranke influence the first generation of American historians?

3. Why does Novick argue that science “was never more highly regarded in the United States, was never more of a cult, than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”? (31)

4. How would the philosophy of Francis Bacon shape the early discipline of American history? 

Section B: Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life (1847, 1949) 

5. In Francis Parkman’s intro, how does he contrast his experience in the West in 1847 with what the West had become by the 1870s?

6. Describe Parkman’s journey on the Missouri river.  What is the scene at Westport like? 

7. Parkman’s text is roughly 160 years old.  How does it hold up to contemporary writing standards? 

8. How does Parkman describe the Native Americans he encountered? 

Section C: Francis Jennings, “Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among Untouchables,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1985)

9. According to Francis Jennings, why do so many historians still value the work of Francis Parkman?

10. Jennings is particularly critical of what Parkman edits out of his history.  Why does Jennings level this charge?

11. Jennings argues that Parkman wrote about Indians in a very biased fashion.  Was Parkman biased?  Was Parkman’s work racist propaganda? 

Section D: “George Bancroft” in Michael Kraus, The Writing of American History (1953)

12. In Michael Kraus’s telling, how was George Bancroft influenced by German models of education and historical study?

13. How is Bancroft an example of a nationalist historian? 

14. Bancroft viewed American history, from the first settlements, as directed by larger, ideological goals.  What were these? 

Section E: “Colonization of Virginia” and “The Pilgrims” in George Bancroft, The History of the United States of America: From the Discovery of the Continent (1876-79, 1966) 

15. In Bancroft’s account, what were the challenges early Jamestown colonists faced?  Was the colony a success?

16. Bancroft writes that the pilgrims helped implant liberty of conscience in the wilderness.  What does he mean by that?

WEEK 4 Professionalization
TUES FEB 21 Novick, chapter 2, 3, and 4, pgs 47-108; Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) in The Annals of American History, vol. 11 (1976)

Set 3: Answer one question from each section.  Remember to bring your copy of Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History to class on Tues. 

Section A: Novick, chapter 2

1. How does Novick answer the question he poses at the outset of chapter 2: “What, in the case of historians, did ‘professionalization’ mean?” (47)

2. In what ways did the new professional historians distinguish themselves from earlier amateur and gentleman historians?

3. Did professionalism alter notions of objectivity?  Why or why not?

4. Novick remarks that early professional historians “sacrificed criticism to comity” (58).  Explain this statement and its implications.

Section B: Novick, chapter 3

5. According to Novick, the American historical community at the end of the nineteenth century was extraordinarily homogenous.  How was that so?  What did that mean for the quest for objectivity? 

6. How did the profession police religious, political, and social orthodoxy?

7. Being that there was so little consensus in the United States in this era, why was there so much agreement among historians? (63)

8. Novick discusses turn-of-the-century historians’ shifting views on both the Civil War and the American Revolution.  What does this tell us about American historians during this period? (72-85)

Section C: Novick, chapter 4 

9. What does the “genteel insurgency” in Novick’s chapter title refer to?

10.  Why did older contemporaries find the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, Carl Becker, and James T. Shotwell to be disconcerting? 

11.  How and why did younger historians shift their focus from continuity to discontinutity?

12. What is the answer to Novick’s question: “How much of a challenge did these unorthodox tendencies pose to the norms of historical objectivity?” (100)

Section D: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) in The Annals of American History, vol. 11 (1976)

13. In his pioneering essay on the frontier in American history, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier” (463).  Describe what this bold statement might mean.

14. Why did Turner want to shift attention away from the germ theory and Germanic roots and focus instead on the American context?

15. What role do Native Americans play in Turner’s account of the frontier?

16.  In Turner’s description, how would the frontier “Americanize” immigrants?

17. Do you agree with Turner’s conclusion?: “Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. . . .  Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise” (478).

Last day to withdraw or take a course as pass/fail or audit: 2/24

WEEK 5 Divergence in the Interwar Years 
TUES FEB 28 Novick, chapter 8, pgs. 206-249; chapter 1 in U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929); online selection from W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935); chapter 1 in Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913, 1986)

Set 4: Answer one question from each section.

Section A: Novick, chapter 8, pgs. 206-249

1. Why does Novick state that it “became increasingly clear that the profession included those with very different architectonic visions and commitments”? (207)

2. How and why did the controversy surrounding the war guilt question surface in the 1920s? 

3. What does the war guilt debate tell us about the polarization of the history profession in the ‘20s?

4. How did the war guilt issue wreak havoc on the idea of historical objectivity?

Section B: Novick, chapter 8, pgs. 206-249

5. Describe the standard orthodox views early 20th century historians held on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

6. How and why did a few younger scholars challenge the regnant theories of race and southern history in the ‘20s and ‘30s?

7. Explain the 1930s conflict between historians who supported “intervention” and those who favored “isolation.”

Section C: Chapter 1 in U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929)

8. Why do you think U. B. Phillips began chapter 2 of Life and Labor in the Old South with a discussion of weather?

9. Is Phillips’ description of the region on the mark?

10. How is Phillips’ approach to history similar to that of Frederick Jackson Turner?

Section D: W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935)

11. According to W. E. B. Du Bois, what were school children taught about the Reconstruction era?

12. What did Du Bois think accounted for the accumulation of so many historical misconceptions concerning the Reconstruction period?

13. How did Du Bois answer the question: “What was slavery in the United States?” (715)

14. Du Bois wrote that “One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over” (722).  Explain what he meant by that.

Section E: Chapter 1 in Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913, 1986)

15. Describe one of the three “schools of interpretation” that Charles Beard covers in the first chapter of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.  How does that “school” relate to the material we have studied so far?

16. What did Beard find to be the most critical problem of U. S. legal and constitutional history?  Why?

17. How did Beard use James Madison to drive home his basic argument? 
 

WEEK 7 Consensus 
TUES MARCH 14 Novick, chapter 11, pgs. 320-360; Eric Foner, “The Education of Richard Hofstadter,” in Foner, Who Owns History

Set 5: Answer one question from each section.

Section A: Novick, chapter 11, pgs. 320-360

1. Novick writes that after World War II the American historical profession was defined by orthodoxy, “not heterodoxy.  ‘Radical’ interpretations were abandoned; dissidents were increasingly marginalized” (320).  Explain this statement.

2. According to Novick, how would the historian Richard Hofstadter represent the conservative transformation of the postwar years?

3. Novick notes that “‘Complexity’—and such attendant characteristics as ‘irony,’ ‘paradox,’ and ‘ambiguity’—became the most highly valued qualities in postwar intellectual life” (324).  How was that so?  In what ways did this shift in thinking mark a departure from intellectual life in the interwar period?

4. How would historians in the late 1940s and 1950s deal with the issue of Communist party affiliation?  What does Novick think of these historians’ response to communism? 

Section B: Novick, chapter 11

5. “If one had to choose a single term to characterize the dominant tendency in postwar American historical writing,” Novick states, “‘counterprogressive’ would seem the best choice, for no project was more central to historians from the late 1940s onward than the revision and refutation of the alleged deficiencies of the Progressive Historians who had preceded them” (332).  How does Novick argue this point?

6. Explain what Novick means when he applies the term “consensus” to the mid-twentieth century American historical profession.

7. How was Richard Hofstadter’s treatment of Populists a kind of “social-psychologizing of dissidence and insurgency”? (338) 

Section C: Novick, chapter 11

8. What was “business history revisionism”?  How does it fit in with the larger themes Novick draws on for this era?

9. How did historians in the 1950s once again reappraise slavery and the Civil War?  In what sense did they break with earlier views on these subjects?

10. What were the implications of C. Vann Woodward’s classic study, The Strange Career of Jim Crow? 

Section D: Eric Foner, “The Education of Richard Hofstadter,” in Foner, Who Owns History 

11. Describe Richard Hofstadter’s initial political experience from his years in college until his graduate education at Columbia.  How did his early work as a historian reflect his views?

12. According to Eric Foner, how and why would Hofstadter break with his ideological mentor, Charles Beard? 

Section E: Eric Foner, “The Education of Richard Hofstadter”

13. Why was Hofstadter drawn to the topic of social Darwinism?

14. What impact would Hofstadter’s book on social Darwinism have on the historical profession?  How would this work reshape the history of the late 19th century?

15. Why does Foner find many of Hofstadter’s works to be dated?  Is Foner right on this point? 
 

Set 6: Answer one question from each section 

Section A: Introduction

1. What does Richard Hofstadter mean when he remarks that the period from the 1890s to WWII was the “age of reform”?

2. How is it, according to Hofstadter, that “a good deal of the strain and sense of anxiety in Populism results from [the] rapid decline of rural America”? (7)

3. Are their elements of so-called consensus history in Hofstadter’s introduction?  If so, what are these?

Section B: chapter I and II
4. What was the “agrarian myth”?  What accounts for its power in American history?

5. What are the “commercial realities” Hofstadter discusses in this chapter?  How do these realities challenge the agrarian myth?

6. What was new or unique about Populism?  What did it contribute to American politics?

7. Why does Hofstadter argue that for the Populist conspiracy ran throughout American history?

Section C: chapter III and IV

8. What problems did Populists face as they moved to become a third party?

9. What does Hofstadter make of the silver issue?

10. Explain what Hofstadter means by parity.  How did this mark a shift in the thinking of American farmers?

11. Describe some of the differences and similarities that existed between Populists and Progressives. 

12. Hofstadter uses the clergy in the period from 1870 to the 1890s as an example of a shift in attitude toward reform (149 forward).  How does he do this? 

13. Does he make a strong argument concerning “status anxiety”? 

Section D: chapter V, VI, and VII

14. Were Progressive reformers anti-urban and anti-immigrant?

15. Describe the role journalistic realism played in the reform movement?  In what ways did progressive historians like Charles Beard draw on this realism?

16. To what extent was Progressivism “the complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of organization”? (216)

17. How did WWI shape the reform movement?

18. In what sense does Hofstadter find the New Deal to be a departure from traditional American reform?

WEEK 9 American History and Autobiography
TUES MARCH 28 chapter 1 and 2 in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (1946); chapters 9, 12, and 21 in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (2000); read chapter 5 (58-72) and part II (152-163) from John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (2005); Turn in bibliography of at least eight items for final paper.  Avoid web sources. 

Set 7: Answer one question from each section.
Section A: Chapter 1 and 2 in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (1946) 

1. In The Age of Jackson, how did Arthur Schlesinger depict the political and social tension that descended on the nation’s capital in 1829? 

2. What is the significance of Schlesinger’s chapter title, “The End of Arcadia”?

3. According to Schlesinger, what new ideas did the Democrats bring with them?

4. Peter Novick writes that Schlesinger and John Higham considered history primarily to be an “art” rather than a “science.” (386-87)   Does The Age of Jackson reveal this perspective?
Section B: Chapter 9 in Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century

5. Describe the influence that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s tutors at Harvard, Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen, had on him.  What did he value in their scholarship and teaching methods?

6. Explain some of the political and social views that dominated the Harvard scene in the 1930s.  How did these shape Schlesinger?

7. What was his research and writing process like as he composed his thesis and then translated it into a book?

Section C: Chapters 12 and 21 in Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century

8. At the beginning of chapter 12, Schlesinger writes, “War hovered over all, and the argument between interventionists and isolationists grew each week more savage and despairing” (241).  How does he weave that theme throughout the chapter?

9. Did Schlesinger’s views concerning politics and diplomacy influence his work as a historian? 

10. Does Schlesinger seem unbiased in his treatment of the Supreme Court?

11. In this chapter Schlesinger deals with a few of the problems/challenges that face the historian.  Describe one of these in detail.

Section D: Chapter 5 in John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America

12. John Hope Franklin remarks, “A day, and often an hour, didn’t go by without my feeling the color of my skin. . .” (62)  Explain what he means by this.

13. In what sesne was the educational experience of Franklin and Schlesinger, Jr. different?

14. How did Franklin’s Harvard career shape him as a historian?

Section E: Part II in John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America

15. How did Franklin participate in the work of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund?

WEEK 10 The “New History”
TUES APRIL 4 Novick, chapter 13 and 14, pgs. 415-521, and chapter 16, pgs. 573-629; Jim O’Brien, “‘Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible’: Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and a Committed History,” Radical History Review (Winter 2002); Straughton Lynd, “Reflections on Radical History,” Radical History Review (Winter 2001)

Set 8: Answer one question from each section.

Section A: Novick, chapter 13

1. “The sixties,” writes Peter Novick, “were years of distrust. . .” (415).  How would that distrust alter the historical profession?

2. What were some of the divisions within the left?  How did the new left and the old left move in different directions this era?

3. How did new, leftists historians grapple with the objectivity question?

4. Mark Naison took his Ph.D. oral exams at Columbia in 1968. (428-29) What does his experience tell us about the generational and social divides that shook American universities? 

5. How did historians like William Appleman Williams and E. P. Thompson influence the profession?

Section B: Novick, chapter 14

6. Explain the significance of Novick’s chapter title “Every group its own historian.” 

7. “A new generation of black historians,” Novick remarks, “aggressively challenged the claims of any whites to speak authoritatively on their past” (475).  How did this new stance change the field of what was once called “Negro history”?  What impact would younger, white historians like Eugene Genovese have on the field?

8. What were some of the major themes that dominated women’s history in the 1970s?  Who were the chief contributors to this relatively new field?

Section C: Novick, chapter 16

9. According to Novick, “In no other field [history] was there such a widespread sense of disarray; in no other discipline did so many leading figures express dismay and discouragement at the current state of their realm” (578).  Why did things seem so bleak in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  What accounted for all the gloom?

10. In what sense did the discipline actually broaden in these years, dealing with subjects and themes that were peripheral or nonexistent in the work of earlier historians?

11.  Describe the new debate between history as “literature” and history as “science” that reemerged in the 1970s.

12. How does the David Abraham case sum up many of the problems of objectivity and accuracy that continued to plague the profession?

Section D: Jim O’Brien, “‘Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible’: Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and a Committed History,” Radical History Review (Winter 2002)

13. In what sense were new left scholars like Staughton Lind and Jesse Lemisch “activists” as well as historians?

14. Describe the 1969 meeting of the AHA.  How did that convention reflect some of the issues of the day?

15. Why were new left historians accused of “presentism” or “present-mindedness”?

Section E: Straughton Lynd, “Reflections on Radical History,” Radical History Review (Winter 2001) 

16. Who does Straughton Lynd cite as his influences?  Why?
 

WEEK 11 American History in a Global Context: The Atlantic World
TUES APRIL 11 Review section C from week 10. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (Vintage, 1988). 

Set 9: Answer one question from each section.

Section A:

1. In the first pages of Bernard Bailyn’s The Peopling of British North America, he imagines what a satellite orbiting the globe over hundreds of years would have witnessed.  What major changes would have unfolded on earth over that period?  What does this sort of macrohistory tell us about the deep changes occurring in human history?

2. How does Bailyn make the case for migration history?  What makes this such a rich field of study?

3. What are some of the basic questions Bailyn asks concerning the migrants catalogued by the British Empire in the 1770s?  What does he learn from these families and individuals?

Section B: 

4. Bailyn suggests that historians might better understand early American immigration if they studied other patterns of population movement in Europe and elsewhere.  How would these patterns compare to the American situation?  How could this perspective broaden views of Atlantic and colonial history?

5. What drew early immigrants to North America?  Why did the colonies become like a magnet to Europeans? 

6. At the beginning of part two, Bailyn compares colonial history to the rings of Saturn.  What does the history of this era look like from afar and from a closer perspective?

Section C:

7. Compare major European cities to large American cities.  How did American port cities function?

8. Bailyn claims that the continuing need for labor and land speculation stimulated population recruitment in the American colonies.  How did these two features shape North America?

Section D:

9. What might a Doomesday Book for 1700 have looked like? (90)  What would it have said about America in this era?

10. How was American culture, as Bailyn argues, “the exotic far western periphery, a marchland, of the metropolitan European culture system”? (112) 

WEEK 12 Narrative History 
TUES APRIL 18 John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (Vintage, 1994); Roger Kimball, “In Defense of Facts: What Opinion Rests On,” National Review (Oct 25, 1999)

Set 10: Answer one question from each section

Section A: Demos, The Unredeemed Captive

1. In the preface to John Demos’s Unredeemed Captive, he states that the themes of “contact” and “encounter” guide his narrative (xii).  How is that so? 

2. In chapter 1, “Beginnings,” Demos suggests that his story could begin at any number of points and with any number of subjects.  How might the narrative take on a different shape depending on the its starting point?

3. Describe the setting for the 1703 raid on Deerfield.  How does this incident reflect some of the larger political and religious struggles of the era?

4. As the natives march their captives north, what cultural and religious differences divided the two groups?  How would some of those captured eventually assimilate native ways?

Section B:

5. In The Unredeemed Captive, Demos reveals “the strangeness of Indians from a European standpoint. . .” (xii).  Discuss how white English colonists understood Native Americans.  Consider, for instance, why Indian culture, religion, and society were so foreign, so frightening, and so unusual to white colonists.

6. How successfully does Demos’s narrative move from one scene and region to another?  What kind of a writer is Demos?

7. What was the Puritan communal response to the raid on Deerfield?  How would the event remain a powerful memory for New Englanders?

8. Demos notes that “Most of the Deerfield captives are beyond the reach of historians” (55).  How does Demos get around this lack of evidence?

Section C:

9. What made the status of Eunice Williams as an “unredeemed captive” so horrible to imagine for the Williams family in particular and Puritan colonists in general?  What did the capture and subsequent life of Eunice Williams mean to English colonists?

10. John Williams was especially pained by Eunice’s exposure to Catholicism and “savagery.”  What did these mean to Williams and his Puritan brethren?  How did Puritanism differ from Native American Catholicism?

11.  Describe the Williams family reunion with Eunice (chapter 9).  What had changed?  How did they interact with one another?

12.  What is the significance of Demos’s three different endings?

Section D: Roger Kimball, “In Defense of Facts: What Opinion Rests On,” National Review (Oct 25, 1999)

13. What is it that bothers Roger Kimball about the work of Simon Schama and Edmund Morris?

14. Might Kimball’s critique apply to John Demos’s Unredeemed Captive?  If so, how?

WEEK 13 The Place of Race in U. S. History 
CHANGE IN SCHEDULE - WE WILL COVER THE DEMOS QUESTIONS; THE PROLOGUE, CHPT 1, CHPT 3, AND CHPT 4 FROM HAHN; AND THE JACOBSEN INTRO.

TUES APRIL 25 Turn in 1.5 page abstract for final paper.  Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2004); introduction in Matthew Fry Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)

Set 11: Prologue, chapter one, chapter 3, and chapter four from Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet; and intro in Matthew Fry Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color

Section A: Prologue and chapter one from Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet

1. In July 2005 Tavis Smiley interviewed Steven Hahn on PBS.  Smiley commented: “I think a lot of people perhaps are shocked to consider that there was a great political struggle, that there was a great political process that was begun in fact by slaves.”*  According to Hahn, what made slaves and free blacks political actors?  How does Hahn extend the idea of “politics” beyond its traditional realm?

2. How does Hahn’s work differ from that of U. B. Phillips in the 1920s or Stanley Elkins in the 1950s?

3. In what ways did slavery differ from one region to another?  How would that impact the freedom and movement of slaves?

4. Explain Hahn’s point about the importance of kinship networks and the slave community.

Section B: chapter three from Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet

5. What does Hahn say we might learn from the celebrations that irrupted in black communities after the fall of the Confederacy?

6. How did the rumors that circulated through the rural South shape former slave communities?  How did such rumors point to the gulf between the rural and urban South?

Section C: chapter four from Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet

7. Kinship ties, Hahn argues, continued to play a significant role as blacks entered politics in the reconstruction era.  How was that so?

8. How would black armed resistance and the Union League further the cause of African American politics?

Section D: Introduction in Matthew Fry Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color

9. What does Matthew Fry Jacobsen mean by his intro title, “The Fabrication of Race”?  In what sense is race made or created? 

WEEK 14 Gender and Class in U. S. History
TUES MAY 2 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2001); Toby L. Ditz, “What's Love Got to Do With It?: The History of Men, The History of Gender in the 1990s,” Reviews in American History (June 2000)

Set 12: Answer one question from each section

Section A: introduction in Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity

1. What is the main theme and argument of Alice Kessler Harris’s In Pursuit of Equity?

2. How does Kessler-Harris use “gender” as an organizing theme in her book?  In what sense should the concept of gender serve as a unifying theme in history?

3. According to Kessler-Harris, why did court decisions throughout the 20th century appear not to be “unfair or unjust”? (3)

4. In the course of American history how did the legal status of men and women connect to the family?

5. How was it that the struggle for gender equity was permeated by race and class issues?  

6. Define “economic citizenship.”

Section B: chapter one in Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity

6. Why does Kessler-Harris use the Full Employment Act of 1945 to open her discussion in chapter one?

7. Kessler-Harris pays particular attention to the quest for political and economic rights.  How did these two differ?

8. Why did marriage, childbearing, and family commitments seem to early 20th century Americans to be at odds with wage work?

9.  How would the Great Depression alter the views of Americans on work and gender?

Section C: chapter five and epilogue in Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity
   
10. Kessler-Harris contends that women slowly began to demand economic as well as political citizenship in the post World War II years.  How and why did this occur?

11. Kessler-Harris notes that “The thinking of the PCSW [President’s Commission on the Status of Women] demonstrates how difficult rights were to assert in the face of conceded differences” (219).  Unpack that statement.

12. Explain the purported problem in black America concerning “matriarchal” families.  What does this tell us about differing perspectives concerning race and gender?   
 
13. What are some of the conclusions Kessler-Harris draws concerning the Sears, Roebuck and Company Case that dominated the headlines in the early 1980s?

Section D: Toby L. Ditz, “What's Love Got to Do With It?: The History of Men, The History of Gender in the 1990s,” Reviews in American History (June 2000) 

14. In what sense do the works reviewed by Toby Ditz attempt “a history of men as gendered beings”? (167)

15. Does gender add to our understanding of the founding fathers?  If a historian wrote about the founding generation and did not consider the significance of gender, would that limit his/her work?

WEEK 15 – Present Final Papers