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Teaching American History Grant Program
Course Syllabi for History 551:
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History
551
Robert Johnston
Fall
2006
University Hall 930, UIC
Wed,
4:30-7:30
(o) 312-413-9164
Homewood Flossmoor High
School (h) 773-381-7285
johnsto1@uic.edu
PROBLEMS AND CASES IN UNITED STATES
HISTORY AFTER 1877
Homewood-Flossmoor American History
Consortium
Teaching American History Grant
This course is one of
many possible introductions to the massive
and amazing historical literature on the
United States after 1877. The purposes of
the course are many: to offer some sense of
coverage of the modern American past, as
well as a realization that complete coverage
is impossible; to provide a communal forum
for discussing some of the boldest and most
imaginative works of scholarship around; to
prepare you for a lifetime of world-class
scholarly literacy; and to aid you in the
thought processes that will eventually allow
you to teach (and perhaps even produce) this
kind of scholarship.
Your primary assignment
each week is to think creatively about all
of the readings and come prepared to engage
the issues that they present in a lively,
contentious, and respectful discussion. We
will, of course, honor the teaching of
history by discussing pedagogical issues.
Yet the main purpose of the course is to
provide a space to talk about historical
scholarship and big intellectual issues in a
graduate-level environment. The core of the
course will be weekly discussions of one
common book, along with some additional
reading from academic journals (the journal
articles are, with one exception, all
available through the UIC Library webpage
and will not be distributed in hard copy).
Through the grant, each
district has received a copy of Eric Foner’s
Give Me Liberty!: An American History
(2004). I invite you to look at the
appropriate sections of Foner during the
course in order to see how his treatment of
issues differs from those in the texts that
you use, and also how he incorporates
scholarship of the kind that we are
examining.
Your other
assignments for the class are:
1) For
September 6th, you must find reviews of
Suzanne Lebsock’s A Murder in Virginia.
Please see below for details.
2) Due at the
start of class, by email or in hard copy, a
two-page evaluation of the main reading for
each week. This should emphatically not
be a summary of the book, but rather an
analysis that explores the strengths and
weaknesses of each book. Please attach to
this paper three questions that you would
like the class to explore, and cite three
passages from the text that you believe are
worthy of further intellectual exploration
(you can reproduce the passages if they are
short; otherwise just point to where we can
find them if they are long). You are exempt
from this assignment in weeks in which you
are doing assignments #s 3 and 4.
3) Due at the
start of class, by email or in hard copy,
two five-page analytical reviews of the
week’s readings. You will probably wish to
model such reviews after the ones you see in
Reviews in American History. One of
these papers needs to be done before October
4th, and the other one before November
15th. If you have not done a similar
assignment for a course in this grant,
please print out and attach to the first
paper the review from Reviews in American
History (or elsewhere, such as the
New York Review of Books or The New
Republic) that served as the model and
inspiration for the kind of review you
wished to do. In the weeks that you write
these papers, you do not need to do the
two-page assignment above.
4) In groups of
either three or four, you will present a
secondary book to the class. Your report
should be, strictly, no longer than 20
minutes long, with 15 minutes highly
preferable. You should spend no more
than one-third of your time summarizing the
book: its themes, characters, events,
and stories. You should spend the other
half of your time critically evaluating and
analyzing the book, answering questions that
might include: Is the argument compelling or
unsatisfactory? How does the book fit into
the existing scholarly literature? How does
it relate to that week’s common book? How
has the book fared in reviews? Would you
recommend the book to other teachers, and
how might the book change your teaching?
Please work together with your group to
produce a presentation that will be
informative and provocative. You will have
at least 10 minutes for questions at the end
of your presentation. You should also
produce and distribute to the class a one-
to two-page handout that summarizes your
presentation. Again, less is also generally
more when it comes to the handout; please
present us with something useful that won’t
overwhelm us! In the weeks that you give
these reports, you do not need to do the
two-page assignment above.
5) Your final
project will be the creation and
presentation of two lesson plans, along with
two accompanying three- to five-page
papers.
a) The first lesson plan must
incorporate primary documents used by one of
the scholars that we have read in either the
common or secondary readings.
b)
The second lesson plan must
incorporate a historical debate that one of
our readings is part of. You must do
further research on this debate, bringing in
the perspectives of at least four other
articles or books.
The lessons must
identify content objectives for student
learning, the materials you will use, the
process students will follow, and the
assessment(s) you will employ to gauge
student achievement. You may use whatever
lesson plan template you are familiar with.
The guidelines for the
papers are a bit more complex. Your
paper should address the following issues:
1) Why did you choose
this topic?
·
What is significant about this
topic to high school students?
·
What is significant about this
topic to you? What content and
historiographical arguments during the
course prompted your intellectual engagement
with this topic?
2) Why did you choose
these sources?
·
What is significant about
these sources compared to others you might
have chosen?
Note: Responses to
questions one and two should constitute a
significant component of your paper. You
should think of it as the intellectual
foundation upon which your lesson rests. It
is the part of your paper that distinguishes
it from the type of paper you might write in
an Education class.
3) Why did you choose
the process/method that you did?
·
If you chose to have your
students do a jigsaw, for example, what
pedagogical reasons did you have for doing
so?
4) What obstacles or
potential difficulties do you anticipate
when conducting this lesson with your
students?
5) Why have you chosen
your method of assessment?
The drafts of these
lesson plans and papers are due on November
22nd, with final
versions due on December 6th. That latter
evening they will be presented to the class
(please note that we will be meeting that
night until 9:00 p.m.); you will also
present them at a symposium at the Newberry
Library on December 12th. You will need to
distribute the lesson plans to all members
of the class, and you will have ten minutes
total to discuss both of your plans.
The evaluation
you will receive in this course follows the
spirit of the way professional historians
work, and the way assessment is done in most
humanities graduate courses. Just as
scholars do not get letter notations on
their book reviews or books—but they do
receive plenty of challenging comments—I
will not provide any grades on your work.
Instead, I will offer copious feedback. If,
though, at any time you feel unsure of your
standing in the course, please do not
hesitate to contact me.
COURSE SCHEDULE
8/30
Introduction
9/6
The New South and the New Writing of History
Suzanne Lebsock, A
Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on
Trial (2003)
***ASSIGNMENT DUE:
Find, print, and read at least five reviews
of Lebsock’s book. You need to track down
the ones from the Journal of American
History, American Historical Review,
and Reviews in American History.
Besides those three, at least one of the
others must be from a non-scholarly source
(such as the New York Times or the
New York Review of Books). Be prepared
to discuss the most important points of the
reviews.***
Secondary Book: Rebecca
J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana
and Cuba after Slavery (2005)
9/13
The Politics of Environmental History
William Cronon,
Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great
West (1992)
Robert D. Johnston,
“Beyond ‘The West’: Regionalism, Liberalism,
and the Evasion of Politics in the New
Western History,” Rethinking History
2(Summer 1998): 239-277
Secondary Book: Aaron
Sachs, The Humboldt Current:
Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots
of American Environmentalism (2006)
9/20
Church and State and … Populism
Michael Kazin, A
Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings
Bryan (2006)
Jeffrey P. Moran,
“Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African
American Elites, Science, and
Fundamentalism,” Journal of American
History 90(December 2003): 891-911
Secondary Book: Rebecca
Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the
Gilded Age (2006)
9/27 How Progressive Was
Progressivism?
Daniel T. Rodgers,
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a
Progressive Age (1998)
Robert D. Johnston, “Re-Democratizing the
Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive
Era Political Historiography,” Journal of
the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
1(Jan. 2002): 68-92
Secondary Book: Philip
L. Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and
Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly
Destroyed Itself (2005)
10/4
How Valuable was, and is, “Whiteness”?
Linda Gordon, The
Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999)
Daniel Wickberg,
“Heterosexual White Male: Some Recent
Inversions in American Cultural History,”
Journal of American History 92(June
2005): 136-156
Recommended:
Eric Arnesen,
“Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination”
and responses by James Barrett, David Brody,
Barbara Fields, Eric Foner, Victoria Hattam,
Adolph Reed, and Arnesen in International
Labor and Working-Class History, No.
60(Fall 2001): 3-92
Secondary Book: Mae M.
Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens
and the Making of Modern America (2004)
10/11 Gay
History and the History of Sexuality
George Chauncey, Gay
New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the
Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
(1994)
Elizabeth Reis,
“Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in
America, 1620-1960,” Journal of American
History 92(September 2005): 411-441
Secondary Book: Mary
Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery:
Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous
Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York
City (2004)
10/18
Race and the Urban North
Kevin Boyle, Arc of
Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and
Murder in the Jazz Age (2004)
Thomas J. Sugrue,
“Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and
the Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban
North, 1940-1964,” Journal of American
History 82(September 1995): 551-578
Secondary Book: Nick
Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land: C.
L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the
Transformation of America (2005)
10/25
*****BREAK***** (BUT READ AHEAD, BECAUSE THE
LONGEST BOOK ON THE SYLLABUS IS NEXT WEEK!)
11/1
New Perspectives on the Greatest Generation
John Dower,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World
War II (1999)
Robert B. Westbrook,
“Fighting for the American Family: Private
Interests and Political Obligation in World
War II,” in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J.
Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of
Culture: Critical Essays in American History
(1993), 194-221
Secondary Book: Brian
Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy:
The Japanese American Internment (2004)
11/8
Reckoning with Violence and Nonviolence
Timothy B. Tyson,
Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and The
Roots of Black Power (1999)
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall,
“The Long Civil Rights Movement and the
Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of
American History 89(March 2005):
1233-1263
John D’Emilio, Lost
Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
(2003)
11/15 The
Rise of the Right
Lisa McGirr,
Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New
American Right (2001)
M. J. Heale, “The
Sixties as History: A Review of the
Political Historiography,” Reviews in
American History (March 2005): 133-152
Secondary Book: Sylvie
Murray, The Progressive Housewife:
Community Activism in Suburban Queens,
1945-1965 (2003)
11/22
Thanksgiving Break
*****Assignment Due: Drafts of Final
Assignments (by email)*****
11/29
Break
*****Titles and Equipment Needs for 12/12
Symposium Due*****
12/6
Final Presentations and Potluck
Class Meets until
9:00 p.m.
Tuesday,
12/12 Symposium at the Newberry
Library, 9:00-3:00
Keynote speaker:
Suzanne Lebsock
Presentation of lesson
plans
Guidelines for Symposium Presentation
(with great thanks, as in so much of the
preparation of the grant, to Paul Kolimas)
Plan your presentation
to be 15 minutes.
1) Begin by explaining
why you chose this topic.
·
What is significant about this
topic to high school students?
·
What is significant about this
topic to you? What content and
historiographical arguments during the
course prompted your intellectual engagement
with this topic?
2) Why did you choose
these sources?
·
What is significant about
these sources compared to others you might
have chosen?
Note: Think
of these first two questions as providing
the context for your audience members.
Remember, they have not been exposed to the
same intellectual discussions and the same
books you have. It is very likely that you
know a lot more about the content of the
lesson than they do. You need to prepare
them for the lesson by explaining why the
lesson matters. Try to get them to care
about the intellectual issues upon which
your lesson rests.
3) Pick some part of
your lesson and have audience members do it
like your students would. For example, if
your lesson includes a variety of primary
sources, choose one and have audience
members engage with it just as you would
your students.
Lessons are much better
experienced than they are described. Giving
audience members five minutes to interact
with you is likely to help keep them
engaged.
4) Describe the rest of
the process the students will follow in the
lesson.
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