Guidelines for 5-10 minute presentation on readings
You have 2 choices:
1) present on an article assigned for the day
2) if you reviewed a book that is recommended for that class meeting, you can choose to present on the book you reviewed
For example, for Sept. 19, you can either present on an article by Kathleen Blee, or on one of the books, either by Kathleen Blee, Leonard Moore, or Nancy MacLean (see syllabus).
Questions to consider in preparing for your presentation:
What is the article author's argument?
Does the author present sufficient evidence to support his/her argument?
What author's insights you found most original and useful?
In what ways do you think the author might have done things differently?
Schedule:
Sept. 21 David Suisman, "Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music," Journal of American History (March 2004).
Sept. 26 Roland Marchand, "The Corporation Nobody Knew: Bruce Barton, Alfred Sloan, and the Founding of the General Motors 'Family,'" Business History Review 65 (Winter 1991), 825-875.
Sept. 28 Lizabeth Cohen, "Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s," American Quarterly 41 (March 1989), 6-33.
Oct. 3 Constance Areson Clark, "Evolution for John Doe: Pictures, the Public, and the Scopes Trial Debate," Journal of American History 87 (March 2001).
Oct. 5 William Leach, "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925," Journal of American History 71 (September 1984): 319-342.
Oct. 17 Michael A. Bernstein, "Why the Great Depression Was Great: Toward a New Understanding of the Interwar Economic Crisis in the United States," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 32-54.
Oct. 19 Robert S. McElvaine, "Action, and Action Now': The Hundred Days and Beyond," The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 (New York: Random House, 1984), 138-169.
Oct. 24 William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," Journal of American History 78 (March 1992), 1347-76.
Oct. 26 Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, "Introduction," in The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).
Oct. 31 Alan Brinkley, "The Radio Priest," in Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 82-106.
Nov. 2 Alan Brinkley, "The Concept of New Deal Liberalism," in The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
Nov. 7 Lizabeth Cohen, "Becoming a Union Rank and File," Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 291-321.
Nov. 9 Michael Denning, "'Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Walt?': Disney's Radical Cartoonists," in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 403-422.
Nov. 14 John Morton Blum, "Prologue: The President, the People, the War," in V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harvest, 1976), 3-14.
Nov. 16 Robert B. Westbrook, "'I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl That Married Harry James': American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II," American Quarterly 42 (December 1990): 587-614.
Meaghan Ferguson
Nov. 21 Mark H. Leff, "The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II," Journal of American History 77 (March 1991), 1296-1318.
Nov. 23 Arthur A. Hansen, "Oral History and the Japanese American Evacuation," Journal of American History 82 (September 1995), 625-639.
Nov. 28 Robin D. G. Kelley, "'We Are Not What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South," Journal of American History 80 (June 1993), 75-112.
Nov. 30 James T. Sparrow, "Fighting over the American Soldier: Moral Economy and National Citizenship in World War II," Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2002, 249-282.
Dec. 5 Lewis A. Erenberg, "Swing Goes to War: Glenn Miller and the Popular Music of World War II," in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness During World War II, edited by Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 144-168.
Eve Buisson St.-Cyr (book review)
Dec. 6 Paul S. Boyer, Part One of By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 1-26.
Liz Barthelemy