syllabus

Ethnic History of the American South

University of Florida
Fall 2003

AMH 3930                                                                                                                                                                                                     Prof. Jack E. Davis
R 5-7, FLI 109                                                                                                                                                                                FLI 235/ 392-0271, ext. 251
Ofc hrs: T 12:30-2PM                                                                                                                                                                                      davisjac@ufl.edu
R 3-4:30PM

You are likely familiar with the Cajun culture of Louisiana, the Cuban (not Latino) presence in Miami, and the more recent influx of Mexican immigrants to the South. You might even have seen the movie Mississippi Masala? But have you ever heard of a Jewish film festival in Nashville, Tennessee? A Lebanese food festival in Birmingham, Alabama? A "big fat" Greek wedding in Columbia, South Carolina? A Mississippi Delta cotton farmer of Chinese decent? Or a Jordanian Muslim who prays five times a day at his computer-repair shop in Pinellas Park, Florida? You might know that Florida itself owes its name to Juan Ponce de Leon, who referred to the region as a "flowery Easter." But are you aware that "Alabama" comes from the Creek Indian wordAlibamo, which means "we stay here."

Culturally and socially, the South is not simply black and white, not simply the sum of Anglo and African cultures. Since the coming of the first settlers from the Old World, the South has never been anything but an ethnically rich place, adding to (and to a large extent destroying) the preexisting diversity of native cultures.

In this course, we will explore ethnicity and ethnic groups in the American South from pre-colonial native inhabitants to twenty-first-century Mexican immigration. While comparing rural and urban experiences, we will give special attention to immigration patterns, identity, assimilation, and alienation. If we understand the South as a distinct place, one defined by the convergence of culture, geography and historical experience, we must consider its history of ethnic pluralism and the cultural impact of ethnic groups.

Course Objectives:

Expanding one's knowledge of southern society.
Introducing the student to the experience of ethnic groups and their impact and place in the United States, specifically the American South.
Promoting critical thinking about the dynamics of ethnicity in American society.
Advancing the student's experience in the reading, researching, and writing tasks of the historian.
Improving the student's cognitive and communication skills.

Course Requirements:

Class participation 20%
Oral history project 20%
Take-home essay assignments (2 X 15%) 30%
Research paper

Presentation

Writing Mechanics exercise

Prospectus/Bibliography 30%

Required Texts:

Eli N. Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997).

Marcia Cristina Garcia, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1960(Berkeley: University Press of California, 1997).

David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 1999).

James W. Loewen, Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Waveland, Mississippi: Waveland Press, 1988).

Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

Additional readings are provided in the course packet (available only at University Copy, 1620 W. University Ave.).

Week I (August 28):Introduction: Ethnic History, and The Salad Bowl South

Readings:

Mary C. Water, Ethnic Options: Choosing Ethnic Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),1-15.

D. C. Young and Stephen Young, "Ethnic Mississippi 1992," in Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi, ed., Barbara Carpenter (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 157-77.

Week II (September 4):Native Cultures and the Case of Lost Identity

(Writing Mechanics Exercise Due)

Readings: Fergus M. Bordewich,Killing the White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans

at the End of the Twentieth Century(New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 60-92.

Week III (September 11):Celtic Settlers of the Colonial South

Readings:

Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina.

Joyner, Shared Traditions, 151-65.

Week IV (September 18):Making the South African

Readings:

Joyner, Shared Traditions, 11-92.

Week V (September 25):The Celtic "Others"

Readings:

Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1-106, 121-94.

Joyner, Shared Traditions, 166-76.

Week VI (October 2):The "Original" Cajuns

Readings:

Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803-1877 (Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 3-44, 89-111 (ON RESERVE, LIBRARY WEST).

Week VII (October 9):The Torah in the Bible Belt

Readings:

Mark I. Greenberg, "Becoming Southern: The Jews of Savannah, 1830-1870," American Jewish History86 (March 1998), 1-8.

Evans, The Provincials, 3-155, 160-67, 187-97, 216-51, 263-93.

(Prospectus/Bibliography Due)

Week VIII (October 16):The Urban Mix

Readings:

Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozetta, Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their

Neighbors, 1885-1985(Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 16-38, 97-134.

Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozetta, "Immigrant Women in Tampa: The Italian Experience, 1890-1930,"Florida Historical Quarterly 61 (January 1983): 296-312.

Susan Greeenbaum, "Urban Immigrants in the South: Recent Data and a Historical Case Study,"

in Carol E. Hill and Patricia D. Beaver, eds. Cultural Diversity in the U.S. South:

Anthropological Contributions to a Region in Transition (Athens: University of

Georgia Press, 1996), 144-62.

(1^st Take-Home Essay Due)

Week IX (October 23):Arabs in the New South

Readings:

Nancy Faires Conklin and Nora Faires, "'Colored' and Catholic: The Lebanese in Birmingham, Alabama," in Eric J. Hooglund, ed., Crossing the Waters: Arab-Speaking Immigrants to the United States Before 1940, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 69-84.

Sarah Gualtieri, "Becoming 'White': Race, Religion and the Foundations of Syrian/Lebanese Ethnicity in the United States," Journal of American Ethnic History (Summer 2001): 29-53.

Week X (October 30):Asians in the New South

Readings:

Loewen, Mississippi Chinese.

Week XI (November 6):Offshore Immigrants

Readings:

Garcia, Havana USA, 1-119.

Raymond A. Mohl, "Black Immigrants: Bahamians in Early Twentieth-Century Miami," Florida Historical Quarterly65 (January 1987): 271-97.

(Oral History Project Due)

Week XII (November 13):The Sunbelt South and New Hispanic Immigrants

Readings:

Raymond A. Mohl, "Latinization of the Heart of Dixie: Hispanics in Late Twentieth-Century Alabama," Alabama Review 55 (October 2002): 243-74.

Week XIII (November 20):New Asian Immigrants

Readings:

Mark Moberg and J. Stephen Thomas, "Indochinese Resettlement and the Transformation of Identities Along the Alabama Gulf Coast," in Cultural Diversity in the U.S. South, 115-26.

Choong Soon Kim, "Asian Adaptations in the American South," in Cultural Diversity in the U.S. South, 129-42.

Joyner, in Shared Traditions, 275-81.

(Research Paper Due)

Week XIV (November 27, Thanksgiving holiday)

Week XV (December 4):Presentations

(2^nd Take-Home Essay Due)

Course Requirements Descriptions:

All written work for the course must be typed or computer generated and in 12-point double-spaced print. Your work also must be written in third-person language.

Class participationmeans that students must come to class prepared to participate in discussions. Classes will be conducted as a seminar, and attendance is required. Beyond one absence, each additional absence occurring without a written excuse will result in two points deducted from your final grade. If the class is particularly lethargic when it should be animated and eager to discuss the reading assignment, the frustrated professor deserves the right to give a pop (i.e., surprise) quiz. Your experience in the course will largely depend on how prepared you come to class.

The Oral history projectrequires that you conduct interviews with two individuals who can share their ethnic experience in the South. The subjects of your interviews should be contemporaries whose lives were similar in some ways but different in others. For example, you might choose to interview a Cuban immigrant and a Southern Jew. Or you might prefer to interview a man and a woman of similar ethnic identity. Your objective is to compare and contrast the experiences of these individuals. Once you've completed the interviews, you will write a 750-1,000-word paper describing the interview experience and the historical information gleaned from the interviews. With the paper, you will turn in a taped copy of the interviews. Your grade will in part be determined by your consistency in following the rules covered in the "Writing Mechanics" exercise.

Take-home essays will represent responses to a list of questions handed out in class. The questions will be drawn from the assigned readings, and you will be expected to use the course readings and your class notes as sources to answer the questions. Each answer must be presented in essay format, using formal, academic language and style (i.e., complete sentences, tightly constructed paragraphs, no colloquialisms). Do not, in other words, provide answers in lists or bullets. Those essays that address each question in a rigorous and organized manner are more likely to earn a decent grade. These grades, too, will be dependent in part on your compliance with the rules in the "Writing Mechanics" exercise.

Research paper grades are based on (1) turning in a prospectus/bibliography on the assigned date, (2) an in-class presentation of the research undertaken for the paper and the conclusions articulated in the paper, (3) consistency in following the rules of the "Writing Mechanics" exercise, (4) the quality of work completed, and (5) the class presentation. Part of the exercise of writing a research paper requires one to choose and conceptualize one's own topic of research. Students may pursue any topic that is related to the subject of the course, and research papers (approximately 2,500 words, separate of notes and bibliography) must represent original work. Please ensure that you read, consult, memorize, and otherwise obey the "Research Paper" handout provided with the syllabus. Doing so will improve your chance for a favorable grade.

Plagiarism:

Keep in mind that your written assignments must represent original work. You cannot copy the work of anyone else or text from the Internet. Do not cobble together paragraphs or passages of separate texts and then try to claim that you have done original and legitimate work. You must write with your own ideas and in your own words. If you copy the words of someone else without putting those words in quotation marks, you are plagiarizing. Plagiarism is theft, and it is academic dishonesty. Plagiarism is grounds for an automatic failing grade in the course, a grade that is final and that cannot be made up. Please, if you have any questions about how you are citing or using sources, come to me for the answers.

Special Needs:

Students requiring classroom accommodation must first register their needs with the Dean of Students Office. The Dean of Students Office will provide necessary documentation that the student will then deliver to the instructor.

Welcome, and good luck!