HISTORY 460/560 III
FALL 1999
AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
TOPIC: IDENTITY AND BELONGING

Tuesday/Thursday: 12:30-1:50 in 360 Condon
Professor Ellen Herman
office: 239 PLC
phone number: 346-3118
e-mail address: eherman@darkwing.uoregon.edu
office hours: Tuesday, 2:00 - 3:30; Thursday, 2:00 - 3:30

This course explores significant themes in 20th-century intellectual and cultural life by engaging a series of conversations about the place of the individual in a modern, mass society. The emphasis in this course will be on the work of people--mainly social reformers, social critics, and social scientists--who self-consciously formulated arguments about the thing we call "society."

We will begin by asking some basic questions. Who are intellectuals? What work have they done, why has their work mattered, and what is involved in thinking historically about ideas? At the beginning of the course, we will consider why race and nation matter in contemporary culture and strive to understand the history of today's conversation about diversity, multiculturalism, and the enduring challenge of forging a common culture in a multiethnic, multiracial society.

The course will then move on to consider how three of the most important legitimizing ideals of 20th-century life--democracy, science, and personality--have shaped the cultural meanings of individual and collective experience. Never straying very far from the social environments that nurtured these ideals, we will consider them from the vantage points of Progressive-era reform, the dramatic expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal through the 1960s, and the dramatically changing international role of the United States during world wars and Cold War.

Format: This course will combine lectures with frequent discussions and occasional films. Students are expected to come to class with the required reading for that day completed and ready to talk! Active participation is the most important part of the course. Graduate students will meet separately with the professor, at a time to be arranged. Additional reading and writing will be required.

Writing Requirements: There will be two short Internet exercises, two five-page essays, and a take-home final exam. The first essay (due on November 2) will be devoted to one of the first three required texts: McBride, Hollinger, or Tocqueville. The choice of which book to write about will be left up to students, but the expectation is that the paper will take the form of a book review attentive to the historical context of the author's ideas. The second essay (due on November 23) will be a short intellectual biography of a 20th-century thinker whose ideas are relevant to the subject matter covered in this course. The choice of who to write about will again depend upon student interest, but you are required consult with the professor early on in the term for help in selecting a figure and identifying appropriate material about him or her. The final week of the course will be devoted to group presentations of these intellectual biographies.

The final exam will consist of essay questions that integrate major themes from the course as a whole. It will be handed out in class on December 2 and will be due exactly one week later, on December 9.

Lateness Policy: No late assignments will be accepted and no makeup exams will be given. Students who miss deadlines will be given an F for that assignment.

Academic Honesty: If this course is to be a worthwhile educational experience, your work must be original. Plagiarism and other forms of cheating are very serious infractions and will not be permitted. Students who are uncertain about exactly how to cite published, electronic, or other sources should feel free to consult with the instructor. There will be a brief essay-writing tutorial during class time before the first essay is due.

Accommodations: If you have a documented disability and anticipate needing accommodations in this course, please arrange to see me soon and request that Disability Services send a letter verifying your disability.

Grading:

attendance and participation: 20%

exercises and essays: 55%

take home final exam: 25%

Books and Required Reading:

The following books are required and have been ordered through the university bookstore. They can also be found on library reserve. Article-length readings can be found in a course packet (CP), also on library reserve. Titles below are listed in the order in which they will be read in the class.

James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (Riverhead, 1996).

David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic Books, 1995).

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2 (Vintage, 1990).

B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (Prentice Hall, 1976).

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Dell, 1983).

week 1: Men and Women Thinking

Tuesday, September 28: What is intellectual history about?

Thursday, September 30: Intellectual Keywords: Race and Nation

• Randall Kennedy, "My Race Problem--and Ours," Atlantic Monthly 279 (May 1997):55-66. [CP]
• UO Diversity, selected documents [CP]
• begin reading The Color of Water

weeks 2 and 3: Solidarity

Tuesday, October 5: Descent, Difference, and the Problem of Commonality

• continue reading The Color of Water

Thursday, October 7: Race and Its Meanings

• finish reading The Color of Water

Tuesday, October 12: Between Universalism and Tribalism? Whatever happened to the family of man?

• begin reading Postethnic America

• Check out the following web page: http://www.expo98.msu.edu/ (Pluralism and Unity)

This cite contains information about pluralism, including the debates about it by a range of early 20th-century American intellectuals. Write one concise, carefully crafted paragraph describing some aspect of pluralism's history that you encountered there. Due today, at the beginning of class.

Thursday, October 14: Nation and Its Meanings

• finish reading Postethnic America

• Michael Walzer, "What Does It Mean to Be an American?" Social Research (Fall 1990):591-614. Reprinted in David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition, 2nd ed., vol. II: 1865 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 388-399. [CP]

week 4: The Historical and Institutional Geography of Intellectual Labor

Tuesday, October 19: In and Out of the Ivory Tower

• Louise L. Stevenson,"Colleges and Universities" in A Companion to American Thought (Blackwell, 1995), 134-137. [CP]
• American Association of University Professors and Association of American Colleges, "1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure With 1970 Interpretive Comments," http://www.aaup.org/1940stat.htm [CP]
• James E. Perley, "Tenure Remains Vital to Academic Freedom," Chronicle o f Higher Education, April 4, 1997, http://www.aaup.org/jeped44.htm. [CP]

Thursday, October 21: Industrialism, Interdependence, and the Problem of Value in a Disenchanted World

• William James, "The Will to Believe" [CP]

• brief, in-class essay-writing tutorial

weeks 5 and 6: Democracy

Tuesday, October 26: Tocqueville and Democracy in America

• Democracy in America, vol. 2: part 1, chaps. 1-5 (3-28); part 2, chaps. 1-8, 20 (94-124; 158-161); part 3, chaps. 1, 5, 8-12 (162-167; 177-185; 192-214); part 4, entire (287-334).

• Check out either of the following Tocqueville web pages: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/intro.htm (Democracy in America: Tocqueville's America)

http://www.tocqueville.org/ (The Alexis de Tocqueville Tour)

Write one concise, carefully crafted paragraph describing some aspect of Tocqueville's life, travels, or historical moment that you encountered. How does it illuminate the ideas expressed in Democracy in America? To be turned in today at the beginning of class.

Thursday, October 28: Tocqueville and Democracy Today

guest lecture: Ed Weeks, UO Deliberative Democracy Project

• Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6 (January 1995):65-78. [CP]

Tuesday, November 2: Jane Addams: The Reformer as Thinker

• Essay #1 due at the beginning of class

• Jane Addams, "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements"; "Why Women Should Vote"; "The Progressive Party and the Negro"; from Peace and Bread in Time of War, in Christopher Lasch, ed., The Social Thought of Jane Addams (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 28-43, 143-151, 169-174, 231-249. [CP]
• Jean Bethke Elshtain, "A Return to Hull House: Reflections on Jane Addams," in Power Trips and Other Journeys (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 3-12. [CP]

• Check out the material on Addams' life and ideas at the Dead Sociologists' Society web page: http://www.runet.edu/~lridener/DSS/DEADSOC.HTML

Thursday, November 4: Towards Social Democracy

• Jane Addams, from Democracy and Social Ethics; "A Modern Lear"; "A Function of the Social Settlement" in Christopher Lasch, ed., The Social Thought of Jane Addams (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 62-84, 105-123, 183-199. [CP]

weeks 7: Science

Tuesday, November 9: Social Knowledge and Social Engineering

• begin reading Walden Two

Thursday, November 11: B.F. Skinner: The Experimentalist as Public Philosopher

• finish reading Walden Two
• Thomas Kuhn, selection from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), in David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition, 2nd ed., vol. II: 1865 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 317-325. [CP]

film: "Margaret Mead: The Observer Observed"

weeks 8 and 9: Personality

Tuesday, November 16: The Psychological Society

• Warren I. Susman, "`Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture," in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Pantheon, 1984), 271-285. [CP]
• Lawrence K. Frank, "Society as the Patient," American Journal of Sociology 42 (November 1936):335-44. [CP]

film: "In Search of Ourselves"

Thursday, November 18: Sex, Gender, and the Therapeutic Sensibility

• begin reading The Feminine Mystique

Tuesday, November 23: Society as the Patient

• finish reading The Feminine Mystique

• Essay #2 due at the beginning of class.

November 25: THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY

week 10: Student Group Presentations

Tuesday, November 30

Thursday, December 2final exam to be handed out in class; due December 9