Fall Term, 1999 Professor Ellen Herman
The US in the 20th Century: The Depression and WWII Office Hours
CRN: 15728/15729
 Time/Location:
09:30-10:50 UH / 360 CON

Overview

This course will survey the dramatic historical landscape of the period between 1929 and 1945, first shaped by the Great Depression and then by World War II and the dawn of the atomic age. In addition to the intrinsic interest of this period--in which both American movies and militarism came into their own--it served to consolidate the national welfare state and superpower status that characterized U.S. history throughout the Cold War era.
We will consider how these big events looked from different vantage points: sharecroppers and industrial workers, government bureaucrats and radical activists, men and women, members of various ethnic and racial groups. Our expectation is that doing so offers not only a more complete and human story about the past, but original ways of thinking about which actors and social forces matter historically. Special emphasis will be placed on the emergence of institutions oriented toward mass consumption and on the role of economic and military crisis in revealing and reshaping race and gender relations. Topics to be covered include: the New Deal from the top down and from the bottom up; the Scottsboro case;  racial, ethnic, and gender conflict during the homefront mobilization; the significance of wartime morale; the emergence of the U.S. as a nuclear superpower. Lectures and discussions will periodically reflect on the meaning of this period for postwar and contemporary society.


Course Policies

Format: This course will combine lectures and discussions with occasional films. Students are expected to come to class with the required assignment for the day already done and ready to talk!  Active participation is the most important part of the course.

 Writing Requirements: There will be two short Internet exercises, two 5-page essays and a take-home final exam. The first essay will be a book review of Making a New Deal: summarizing the book=s major argument and assessing its chief strengths and weaknesses. The other essay will compare Stories of Scottsboro and Snow Falling on Cedars. The final take-home exam will consist of essay and short-answer questions that integrate major themes from the course as a whole.

 Lateness Policy: Assignments will be marked down if they are turned in late, at the rate of one grade per week. (For example, a AB@ paper will be lowered to AC@ after one week and to a AD@ after two weeks.)

Academic Honesty: If this course is to be a worthwhile educational experience, your work must be original. Plagiarism and other forms of cheating are extremely 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: 25%

two five-page papers and Internet assignments: 50%

final exam: 25%

Books and Required Reading:

The texts listed below are all required. You can purchase them at the University Bookstore. You can also find them on reserve at Knight Library.
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1990)..

James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (Random House, 1995).

David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars (Random House, 1998).

John Dower, War Without Mercy (Pantheon, 1986).

course packet [noted below as CP]

Course Calendar

key:

<                    reading assignments

‘                  writing assignments

‚                   film/media


Week 1: The Uses of History

 

Tuesday, January 5: Introduction

 

Thursday, January 7: The Past in the Present

Race, Gender, and the Making of the Welfare State

<                    Linda Gordon, AHow >Welfare= Became a Dirty Word,@ The Chronicle of Higher Education 40 (July 20, 1994):B1-2. [CP]

<                    Jason DeParle, AGetting Opal Caples to Work,@ New York Times Magazine (August 24, 1997):33-37, 47, 54, 59-61. [CP]

Warfare and National Identity:

<                    Paul Boyer, AThe Bomb and the >Good War=,@ Chronicle of Higher Education 41 (August 4, 1995):A36. [CP]

<                    Ronald Roach, ADoing What Had to Be Done: The Integrated Military Seen as Model for Society,@ Black Issues in Higher Education 14 (August 21, 1997):18. [CP]

<                    Charles Moskos, AFrom Citizen=s Army to Social Laboratory,@ The Wilson Quarterly 17 (winter 1993):83. [CP]

<                    Betty Jean Craige, AMulticulturalism and the Vietnam Syndrome,@ Chronicle of Higher Education 40 (January 12, 1994): B3. [CP]

Consumption as a Cultural Force:

<                    Daniel Boorstin, AWelcome to the Consumption Community,@ in The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today (New York: Random House, 1969), 20-39. [CP]

<                    Juliet Schor, AWe Want What We Cannot Afford,@ Boston Globe (May 17, 1998):E1. [CP]

 

Week 2: Hard Times

 

Tuesday, January 12: Experiencing the Depression: Rural Workers

‘                  Internet assignment comparing different types of historical sources:

1. Go to the web site: Every Picture Tells A Story: Documentary Photography and the Great Depression:

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/browseUnderM.html

2. Read the text and do the short exercise.

3. Now, go to the web site, American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers= Project, 1936-1940:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html

4. Search by keyword for the following document: AMountain Sharecroppers.@ (The one you want is 15,780 bytes.)

5. After reading this short document, write a single, concise paragraph comparing this prose description with the documentary photographs you have just seen. Reflect on the distinctive characteristics of these sources. Do you think they tell us similar or different stories about the hard times endured by rural Americans?  Do you think the writers and photographers who did this work were trying to accomplish similar or different goals?

These paragraphs will be collected in class.

 

Thursday, January 14: Experiencing the Depression: Urban Workers

<                    Making a New Deal, introduction, chaps. 1, 5.

‚                   film: AModern Times@

 

Week 3: The New Deal State

 

Tuesday, January 19: Moral Capitalism?: State Formation From the Bottom Up

<                    Making a New Deal, chap. 6.

 

Thursday, January 21: The Regulatory State as an Elite Accomplishment

<                    Making a New Deal, chap. 7.

 

Week 4: Community Transformed in a World of Mass Culture

 

Tuesday, January 26: Class, Ethnicity, and the New Culture of Consumption

In-class essay writing tutorial and discussion of outlines for essay #1

<                    Making a New Deal, chap. 3.

 

Thursday, January 28: Commercial Culture as Common Ground

<                    Making a New Deal, chap. 8.

‚                   film clips: the Disney golden years

 

Week 5: A New Deal on Race and Gender?

 

Tuesday, February 2: What Was Left Out of the Welfare State?

‘                  Essay #1 due

<                    Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, AA Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,@ Signs 19 (Winter 1994):309-336. [CP]

<                    begin reading Stories of Scottsboro, part 1

 

Thursday, February 4: The Scottsboro Case

<                    finish reading Stories of Scottsboro, part 1

<                    Check out the following web site: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scottsboro/scottsb.htm

 

Week 6: Scottsboro

 

Tuesday, February 9: Race and Radicalism

<                    Stories of Scottsboro, part 2.

Thursday, February 11: Narrative as History and Literature

<                    finish Stories of Scottsboro, part 2

<                    begin Snow Falling on Cedars

 

Week 7: The Home Front

 

Tuesday February 16: Mobilization

<                    continue reading Snow Falling on Cedars

 

Thursday, February 18: The Wartime Experience of Japanese-Americans

<                    continue reading Snow Falling on Cedars

‘                  Internet assignment: Go to the site called the Japanese American Exhibit:

http://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/harmony/

Under the Camp Harmony Exhibit, go to Bainbridge Island. Read the text and look at the photographs. Write a single, concise paragraph comparing what you find there to the description of the evacuation on San Piedro in Snow Falling on Cedars.

These paragraphs will be collected in class.

 

Week 8: The Good War?

 

Tuesday, February 23: Racial Geopolitics

<                    War Without Mercy, chapters 1-3.

<                    Sigmund Freud, AWhy War?,@ in Collected Papers, vol. 5, ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 273-287. [CP]

‚                   film clips: wartime depictions of the enemy

 

Thursday, February 25: A Democratic People at War: Propaganda and Morale

<                    War Without Mercy, chapters 4, 7-8, 10-11.

‚                   film: Why We Fight: AA Prelude to War@

 

Week 9: The Postwar Liberal Consensus: Rhetoric and Reality

 

Tuesday, March 2: The New Deal at War=s End

‘                  Essay #2 due

<                    Alan Brinkley, ALegacies of World War II,@ in Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 94-110. [CP]

<                    Thomas J. Sugrue, ACrabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964,@ Journal of American History 82 (September 1995):551-578. [CP]

 

Thursday, March 4: The Dawn of the Cold War and the Birth of the National Security State

<                    Richard J. Barnet, AClearer Than Truth,@ in The Rockets= Red Glare: When America Goes to War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 249-284. [CP]

<                    George F. Kennan, AThe Sources of Soviet Conduct,@ in American Diplomacy, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 107-128. [CP]

 

Week 10: 1945 in Retrospect: Globalism in Memory and Culture

 

Tuesday March 9: Hiroshima

<                    Marilyn B. Young, ADangerous History: Vietnam and the >Good War= in Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Henry Holt), 199-209. [CP]

<                    Stephen B. Ambrose, AThe Atomic Bomb and Its Consequences,@ in Americans at War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 99-106. [CP]

‚                   film: AAtomic Café@

 

Thursday March 11: Nuclear Power and Nuclear Culture

<                    Paul Loeb, Nuclear Culture: Living and Working in the World=s Largest Atomic Complex (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), 11-74. [CP]

‘                  final exam, to be handed out in class, due: March 16