Note: When you look at this schedule you might think “There is no way I can do all this reading, listening, looking, watching, and analyzing.” While that might not be true if you were a junior or senior in college, I can understand how you might think so as a freshman. But the fact is, for this class, you do not need to do all the reading or viewing each week. Use this schedule with the questions in the Discussion Board in Blackboard. Each week you will choose one discussion question to respond to. Let this choice guide you in your work for the week.
To a certain extent, you will be able to roam through this material picking and choosing the topics that you want to learn about. Of course, that is not totally true, but it is more true than not. With your essays and other writing assignments, you will be able to select your topics from the material presented. If this freedom is difficult for you, I will provide a few set topics for you to choose from.
With regard to our two tests: each week, I will include for a brief overview of that week’s content, pointing out sections of readings or elements of the art or music or film that I think are most important (and thus might show up on the mid-term and final tests). You might be able to use these “overviews” as guides to what you what to read or examine or listen to for that week. In addition, I will provide study modules, in Blackboard, that will help you review for the two tests.
Part 1: 1945-2015 (Weeks 1-4)
Week 1
The Newsroom
Barack Obama: “A More Perfect Union.” DHUS 645-658
Ronald Reagan: “Inaugural Addresses.” DHUS 551-561
Gerald R. Ford: “Inaugural Address.” DHUS 529-531
Lyndon Baines Johnson: “Great Society.” DHUS 477-480
John Kennedy: “Inaugural Address.” DHUS 445-448
Dwight C. Eisenhower: “Farewell Address.” DHUS 436-439
The Cinema
All the President’s Men
Week 2
The Newsroom
Arthur M Schlesinger, Jr.: “Folly’s Antidote” DHUS 643-645
“Republican Contract with America.” DHUS 574-576
Mario Cuomo: “A Tale of Two Cities.” DHUS 561-571
Barry Goldwater: “Conservatism, Religion, and Politics.” DHUS 548-551
Cesar Chavez: “1984 Address to the Commonwealth Club of California.”
Gloria Steinem, “Testimony before Senate Hearing on the Equal Rights.”
Martin Luther King: “I Have a Dream.” DHUS 472-477
Edward R. Murrow: “Chicago Speech to Radio and Television News Directors Association.” DHUS 499-508
William Faulkner, “Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Prize.”
The Cinema
Good Night, And Good Luck
Assignment
Assignment 1: My America
Week 3
The Library
Jackson Pollock, “My Painting.”
Randall Jarrell, “Against Abstract Expressionism”
Andy Warhol, “What Is Pop Art?”
Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Romare Bearden”
The Music Hall
Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang Clan (36 Chambers)
Joan Jett, “Cherry Bomb,” “Bad Reputation,” “I Love Rock and Roll.”
Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys), Pet Sounds
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
The Gallery
Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Jean-Michel Basquait, Romare Beardon, Judy Chicago, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Duane Hanson, Keith Haring, Mark Disuvero, David Hockney, Robert Indiana, Jess, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Franz Kline, Barbara Kruger, Roy Lichtenstein, Sally Mann, Robert Maplethorp, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock, Charles Ray, Mark Rothko, Betye Saar, George Segal, Andres Serrano, Lorna Simpson, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Dorothea Tanning, Cy Twombly, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth.
Cinema
Round Midnight
A Face in the Crowd
Week 4
The Library
Donald Barthelme, “The Balloon”
Tomas Rivera, “And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.”
Kurt Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron”
Sandra Cisneros, “Barbie-Q”
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”
Allen Ginsburg, Howl
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
The Music Hall
Phillip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi, from Satyagraha
John Adams, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, from Nixon in China
Leonard Bernstein, “America,” from West Side Story
John Cage, “Some of the Harmony of Maine” and “4:33”
The Cinema
Night of the Living Dead
Koyaanisqatsi
Assignment
Assignment 2: Essay 1: Summary
Part II: 1890-1945 (Weeks 5-8)
Week 5
The Newsroom
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Four Freedoms” DHUS 396-405
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address,” DHUS 367-372
Herbert C. Hoover, “Rugged Individualism,” DHUS 350-359
Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” DHUS 305-312
William Jennings Bryan, “’Cross of Gold’ Speech,” DHUS 273-280
Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” DHUS 257-261
Samuel Gompers, “Letter on Labor in Industrial Society,” DHUS 252-257
The Cinema
Citizen Kane
The Grapes of Wrath
Week 6
The Library
John Steinbeck, “Chrysanthemums,”
Ralph Ellison, “The Party at the Square.”
Poems of Robert Frost and Langston Hughes
The Music Hall
Aaron Copeland, “Appalachian Spring,”
William Grant Still, “Symphony # 2”
Ferde Grofe, Grand Canyon Suite
Antonin Dvorak, New World Symphony
Woody Guthrie, “This Land Is My Land”
The Gallery
Frank Lloyd Wright
Thomas Hart Benton, Margaret Bourke-White, Paul Cadmus, Alexander Calder, John Stuart Curry, Charles Demuth, Walker Evans, Arshile Gorky, John Haberle, Marsden Hartley, Palmer Hayden, Alexander Hogue, Edward Hopper, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou, Jones, Gertrude Kruger, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, Russell Lee, Reginald Marsh, Grandma Moses, Gerald Murphey, Georgia O’Keefe, Maxwell Parrish, Norman Rockwell, Ben Shahm, Alfred Stieglitz, Grant Wood.
The Cinema
Modern Times
Show Boat
Assignment
Assignment 3: Statement of Topic for Synthesis Essay
Week 7
The Library
Henry Adams, from The Virgin and the Dynamo”
Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home”
William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily.”
Azia Yezierska, “Hunger”
Kate Chopin, “Desiree’s Baby”
Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, e e cummings, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams
The Music Hall
The American Songbook of Berlin, Gershwin, Carmichael, and Porter
George Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Blue”
Charles Ives, “The Unanswered Question,” Three Places in New England
Louis Armstrong and the Hot Seven
Duke Ellington
Scott Joplin
The Cinema
The Birth of a Nation
Assignment
Assignment 4: Essay 2: Analytical
Week 8
Assignment 5: Test 1: Parts 1 and 2: 1890-2015
Part III: 1830-1890 (Weeks 9-12)
Week 9
The Newsroom
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” DHUS 242-252
Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” DHUS 228-236
Jane Adams, “The Problem of Poverty”
Abraham Lincoln: “The Gettysburg Address.” DHUS
Abraham Lincoln: “The First Inaugural Address.” DHUS 194-207.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolution.” DHUS 175-180
Roger B. Taney, “Dred Scott v. Sanford.” DHUS 180-191
Alexis deTocqueville, from Democracy in America
Week 10
The Library
Charlotte Gilman Perkins, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Jacob A. Riis, from How the Other Half Lives
Mark Twain, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Ambrose Bierce, “Chicamaqua.”
Black Elk, from Black Elk Speaks
Harriet Jacobs, from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
William J. Grayson, from “The Hireling and the Slave.” DHUS 165-172
Poems of Walt Whitman, Sidney Lanier, Emma Lazarus, and Emily Dickinson.
Cinema
Stagecoach
Assignment
Assignment 6: Bibliography for Synthesis Essay
Week 11
The Music Hall
Amy Beach,
Anthony Philip Heinrich, “Moan of the Forest Cherokee’s Lament”
John Philip Sousa
Cowboy Songs
African American Spirituals
Stephen Foster
Assignment
Assignment 7: Biography Presentation
Week 12
The Library
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “American Scholar”
Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark.”
Poems of Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier
The Gallery
Thomas Ball, George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, Mathew Brady, Mary Cassatt, George Catlin, William Merit Chase, Frederic Church, E. Irving Couse, Thomas Cole, Frank Duveneck, Thomas Eakins, William Michael Harnett, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Edward Hicks, Winslow Homer, William Morris Hunt, Henri Inman, William Smith Jewett, Thomas Moran, Eadweard Muybridge, REmbrandt Peale, John F. Peto, Hiram Powers, William Tyler Ranney, Frederic Remington, Jacob A. Riis, Charles Russell, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Henry Ossawa Tanner, John F. Weir, James Whistler.
Cinema
The Fall of the House of Usher
Part IV: Beginning until 1820 (Weeks 13-16)
Week 13
The Newsroom
Tom Paine, from Common Sense. DHUS 7-10
The Declaration of Independence. DHUS 10-15
The Constitution of the United States. DHUS 15-20
George Washington, “Farewell Address.” DHUS 68-70
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. “On Aristocracy, Letters.” DHUS 114-123.
The Gallery
John Singleton Copley, Asher Brown Durand, Gustavus Hesselius, John Wesley Jarvis, Jacques le Moyne, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Charles Wilson Peale, Raphaelle Peale, Matthew Pratt, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, Benjamin West.
The Music Hall
1776
Week 14
The Library
Poems of Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley
Jonathan Edwards “Sinners at the Hands of Angry God”
William Bradford, The Mayflower Compact
The Music Hall
William Billings
Supply Belcher
Bay Psalm Book
Assignment
Assignment 8: Synthesis Essay
Week 15
The Library
Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, from The Relation
John Smith, from A General History of Virginia
The Six Nations
The Gallery
Native American Art
Week 16
Assignment
Assignment 9: Test 2: Parts 3-4: Beginning to 1890
Assignment 10: “My America II” (part of Test 2)