May 30, 2006
American Studies Road Trip
Tags: Teaching the anti-survey, not that Oz, why Ken Kesey is like Increase Mather.
It’s that time of year, as excellent posts by Caleb McDaniel and Kevin Levin remind us, and I too have been (re)designing the courses I’ll be teaching next fall. I have one new course to prep (20th Century U.S. History) and one course I’ll be repeating (American Studies).
Some people asked me to describe my American Studies course after I mentioned it in a post-Katrina post nearly a year ago, but I got so busy teaching it that only now have I had much of a chance to reflect on the class and how it went. It was a learning experience, as any first-year professor’s courses are going to be, but it really was a joy to teach. Our undergraduate program in American Studies is brand new, and the faculty very generously gave me a free hand to do almost anything I wanted with this seminar. In a lot of ways I got to teach my dream course.
One of the few design specs they gave me was that I should not reproduce the perfectly good U.S. history survey we already have, so I designed American Studies 200 as a kind of anti-survey. I tried to think of the course as an anthology instead of a narrative, a road trip rather than a bird’s-eye-view. Rather than stepping back to survey the nation as a whole, we zoomed in on very specific times and locales. Rather than a sweeping chronological narrative, I offered several staccato portraits. Of course, I hoped and planned for larger themes to emerge, but I banished any pretensions of completeness, any illusions that we would somehow cover it all. Most of my students were planning to concentrate on American Studies so I was not forced to wrestle with the potentially paralyzing fear that this was the only course on the subject they were ever going to take.
Instead, I had the luxury to take up a really rather narrow question—what has “America” meant to different people in different times, and what consequences have those meanings had? Each week we examined a different place and a different historical moment where America and what it meant was constructed, contested, or otherwise up for grabs. (Don’t tell anyone, but I got the idea for the course while outlining a “secret Americana” book I wanted to write for the late lamented role-playing game Unknown Armies.)
When we were talking about transnational history at Cliopatria, I think just about everybody had problems with the idea of the nation as an unmarked category, a “container” that frames the history we tell but never gets questioned itself. I flatter myself that my course did the reverse: here the nation and what it meant was the subject of analysis, but not the frame. I did this not by widening the lens to study the globe but by narrowing it to look at individual locales.
I think it’s easy to underestimate the extent to which American politics, identity, and life remained locally and regionally oriented and distinct, right up to the Second World War or so. Canadian students, and a lot of Canadians who aren’t students too, are prone to do this. I expect my students know more about the U.S. than most American students know about Canada, but they are still given to making very broad generalizations about Americans, and inclined to see the United States as a single monoculture. This view is officially endorsed by the mantra of every civics class they’ve ever taken: “the U.S. is a melting pot, Canada is a mosaic.”
Anyway, here are the places and times we visited in the course this past year. I took a few classes to introduce the field (what is American Studies, anyway?—but that’s another post) and then we got down to it:
- Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630-1693
- Virginia, 1676-1776
- Boston, 1773-1776
- New Orleans, 1814-1860
- The Burned-Over District, 1830-1848
- Philadelphia, 1844-1865
- Gettysburg, 1863 and after
- Chicago, 1871-1894
- Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 1883-1916
- Oz, 1892-1907
- Cuba & The Philippines, 1898
- New York, 1920-1929
- The Dust Bowl, 1931-1939
- Hawaii, 1941-1945
- Suburbia, 1950-1963
- The Mississippi Delta, 1955-1966
- San Francisco, 1966-1969
- Orange, Cobb, & Johnson Counties, 1971-1994
- Los Angeles, 1991-2001
- Tokyo, Moscow, and Baghdad, 2001-present
Since somebody always asks, “Oz” has nothing to do with HBO—that’s Oz as in Dorothy and her little dog Toto too. That’s the week we talked about Populism and bimetallism, the great merger movement and the rise of big business in America. We considered the old Henry Littlefield theory that The Wizard of Oz was a “parable on Populism” but we also discussed William Leach’s (to me) more convincing argument that Oz is an ad man’s fairy tale, a guilt-exorcising celebration of the dawning consumer culture.
There were a few hiccups with the way I’d set up the course. “Places in time” are all very well, but I can see now that I need to provide some connective tissue. My students had varying levels of experience in American history, and some were prepared to be discussing Puritan jeremiads right off the bat while others were not. This year I’ll have an additional hour each week, and I think I’ll use it to do a little more scene-setting and framing. What I hope to do is to use the last third of each class to talk about the place and time we’ll be discussing the following week, so that my lecture precedes the readings and orients students to them.
But the big themes did emerge—some planned, some unplanned. And the students got very good at making their own connections across time. I’ve never been more proud of my students than I was on the day it occurred to them—a day one of my senior colleagues was observing the class, no less—that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is both about a jeremiad and a kind of jeremiad itself. “Ken Kesey is Increase Mather!” said one student. “You just blew my mind,” said another.
I won’t change the course too much next year, but I think I will swap out a few of the units, just to keep it fresh. I’d really like a unit that let us do some traditional political history—a key Supreme Court decision or a moment in constitutional history that still fits into the “place in time” paradigm. I won’t agitate KC Johnson by even pretending this is a political history course, but classic political history topics—checks and balances, the Constitution, the various two party systems—came up in our discussions again and again. My students were particularly struck (as other Canadians studying the U.S. have been) by American reverence for the Constitution and its relevance to all manner of contemporary debates. Appealing to the intentions of long ago founding fathers is a rhetorical move that few modern Canadians would think to make. I’d like a little more emphasis on women’s history too. There were a number of weeks where women’s experiences were at the center of our discussions, but we could have done more to make this a thread running through the course rather than a topic we visited a couple of times a term before moving on.
If you’ve made it to the end of this post, I’d love to hear your suggestions for other places and times that would be interesting to study. Or if you study other parts of the world, I’d love to hear the places you might visit or the topics you might cover in an anthology-style course.
(Cross-posted to Cliopatria.)
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May 14, 2006
The War Against Mothers Day
Tags: The Greeting Card Octopus, Net Neutrality Moms, the difference an apostrophe makes.
In North America, at least, a lot of the spring holidays seem like also-rans: Heritage Day, Family Day, Administrative Professionals Day… They’re like the movies that come out in Spring, neither summer blockbusters like the 1st or 4th of July, nor the prestige offerings of Winter and Fall. They’re the Hallmark holidays. We celebrate them, if at all, with the dim sense we’ve been had by the Greeting Card Octopus or the Florists’ Trust.
Mother’s Day is different, of course. I’ve never really heard anyone complain about Mother’s Day. And I’d never heard anything about its melodramatic history or its progressive roots until I read Stephanie Coontz’ 1992 book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. (It’s possible I’m just out of the loop, though: I see the story is all over the internets today.)
“Mother’s Day originated to celebrate the organized activities of women outside the home,” Coontz writes. “The people who inspired Mother’s Day … believed that motherhood was a political force. They wished to celebrate mothers’ social roles as community organizers.” The holiday became “trivialized and commercialized,” she says, only after it was reoriented to celebrate private family relations.
The first American proponent of a day for mothers was Anna Reeves Jarvis, who organized Mothers’ Work Days in West Virginia in the 1850s to improve sanitation in rural Appalachian communities. During the Civil War, Jarvis’ mothers groups provided medical services for soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict. Another nineteenth-century precursor of the day for mothers was Julia Ward Howe’s Mothers’ Day for Peace, established in Boston in the wake of the Civil War.
Note the placement of those apostrophes. Jarvis and Howe organized Mothers’ Days, in the plural, as vehicles for organized social and political activity by mothers, not the private celebration of a mother’s services within the home. In the migration of the apostrophe one letter to the left—from Mothers’ Day to Mother’s Day—Coontz sees a declension both grammatical and political. After Anna Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, began lobbying for a special day for mothers. The idea caught on, but not in the way Jarvis had hoped:
The adoption of Mother’s Day by the 63rd Congress on May 8, 1914 represented a reversal of everything the nineteenth century mothers’ days had stood for. The speeches proclaiming Mother’s Day in 1914 linked it to celebration of home life and privacy; they repudiated women’s social role beyond the household. One antisuffragist leader inverted the original intent entirely when she used the new Mother’s Day as an occasion to ask rhetorically: If a woman becomes “a mother to the Municipality, who is going to mother us?” Politicians found that the day provided as many opportunities for self-promotion as did the Fourth of July. Merchants hung testimonials to their own mothers above the wares they hoped to convince customers to buy for other mothers. A day that had once been linked to controversial causes was reduced to an occasion for platitudes and sales pitches.
Here’s where the melodrama comes in. The younger Jarvis came to be horrified by what she had wrought. She attacked florists selling Mother’s Day carnations as “profiteers,” and railed against commercial greeting cards as a “poor excuses for the letter you are too lazy to write.” In 1923, she tried to prevent a political and commercial celebration of Mother’s Day by filing suit (against New York Governor Al Smith, among others) for copyright infringement. When she tried to prevent the sale of flowers at a Mother’s Day festival, she was arrested for disturbing the peace. Jarvis spent the rest of her life (and her family inheritance) campaigning against the holiday, becoming more and more paranoid about those who “would undermine [Mothers’ Day] with their greed.” The final five-hanky Stella Dallas touch? Anna Jarvis was eventually committed to a sanitarium, where she died, blind and penniless, in 1948.
The history of Mother’s Day is, for Coontz, “a microcosm of the simultaneous sentimentalization and commercialization of private life.” I’ve got no right to criticize the sentimentalization of family life, at least not this year, as Ralph Luker has pointed out. And railing against commercialization sometimes seems like railing against the tide. But maybe we can still find a lesson in the story of Anna Jarvis’ moving apostrophe.
Today, Mother’s Day seems the least political of holidays. The political clout of modern mothers does get a nod in our discussions of Soccer Moms and Security Moms, Peace Moms and Earth Moms. (Me, I’m rooting for the appearance of Net Neutrality Moms.) It’s tempting to dismiss these as focus groups rather than movements—marketing labels in an era where political ideas are not something mothers or other citizens generate but rather consume. But that is reductive. And if it is our collective sentimentality about motherhood gives a figure like Cindy Sheehan such political resonance, is that such a bad thing? Maybe it’s possible to reimagine, or remember, Mothers’ Day as a holiday that simultaneously honors our private relationships and celebrates the political engagement of mothers and others with society.
Hi Mom. Happy Mothers’ Day!
Crossposted to Cliopatria.
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May 11, 2006
For Those Who Like That Sort of Thing...
… I go on at some length about the new baby in my more personal weblog, here. Right up to the frontiers of the treacly, even, with photographs and all. Caveat lector.
