AMH 6290-6744, Spring 2007

Readings in the History of Modern America

Jack E. Davis

392-0271 ext 251/ Keene-Flint Hall 235

davisjac@ufl.edu

CDB 216, Thursday 4:05-7:05

Ofc Hours: Wed 11-12:30; Thrs 2-3:30

The course you are undertaking is a readings seminar, and a foundation course for graduate students enrolled in the AMH section. You may note that outside of chronology, no overarching theme ties together this course. Instead, you will be introduced to a variety of fairly recent works of historical research that, while not defining the twentieth century as a whole, define an area or field of study or an interpretive category within twentieth-century U.S. history. (Why did I use the hyphen here but not above when I wrote twentieth century? You will need to know why–and put that reason into practice--before completing this course.) The idea here is to give you a framework to which you can refer when engaged in your own historical inquiries or when preparing to teach a subject or period from the twentieth century. The course is also intended to expose you to model forms of scholarship.

As a required course for U.S. PhD students, much of the busy conversation during class will be generated by a shared anxiety over forthcoming pre-qualifying exams. Indeed, the readings for this course, along with readings beyond the course requirements and prescribed by Dr. Spillane and me, should be mastered for successful completion of prequalifying requirements. The course objectives, however, are broader than preparing you for exams. As suggested above, the course should provide you with a working knowledge of the methodologies, interpretive categories, and historiography of twentieth-century U.S. history. With this knowledge should come an expanded understanding of the course’s various subjects, their potential impact on other fields of history, and their contributions to the study of the past. Students should also treat the course as an opportunity to improve their skills as an academic historian--critically analyzing works of history, asking heuristic questions, and presenting their findings in a cogently argued and clearly written text.

Please note that the course allows the time to give you only a sampling historiography. The books you will read have been drawn from a much longer list of historical literature, including classic works that we will not encounter here. However, to quote my colleague, Dr. Spillane, "remember that the notes in most monographs provide a ready way to work backwards through the essential literature in the field. You can create a good roadmap by paying attention to the author’s footnotes."

discussion leadership 20%

Chicago Manual of Style worksheet

3 essays x 10% 30%

prospectus/bibliography

presentation 40%

( Please see the last section of the syllabus for a description of these requirements.)

Assigned Books (available at Goerings Books):

Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War Two (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)

Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)

Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1996)

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003)

Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)

Davis M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (New York Oxford University Press, 2006)

Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap (Harvard University) Press, 2000)

Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage to the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)

Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998)

Readings: Thomas Bender, "Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives," in Rethinking American History in a Global Age (available as an E-book)

Dorothy Ross, "Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing," American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 651-77.

Michael Kammen, "Explaining One’s Self to Clio and Her Colleagues," Reviews in American History 33 (December 2005): 627-36.

**All of the above are accessible electronically through the UF Library catalog**

Supplemental Readings (related to defining a new century):

John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (1985)

James C. Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (1999)

Donna Gabbacia, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (1988)

Gary Gerstle, "Liberty, Coersion, and the Making of Americans," Journal of American History (197)

James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989)

Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999)

Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migration that Made the American People (1951)

Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (2002)

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995)

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (1999)

Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1988)

Gary Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tamps, 1885-1985 (1987)

Louise Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (1999)

Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115^th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (1985)

Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (2005)

Steven A. Reiss, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (1991)

Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2001)

Joe William Trotter, Black Milwaukee (1985)

Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (1982)

Week Two (Jan 18) Progressive Reform and Politics

Reading: Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings (chapters 1-6 should be adequate)

Supplemental Readings:

Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (2003)

Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemma of Democratic Commitment (1997)

Dewy Grantham, Southern Progressivism: Ythe Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (1983)

Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920 (2003)

Samuel P. Hays, The Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920

(1999)

Ricahed Hofstadter, Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (1955)

Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933 (1990)

Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of American Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (1977)

William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism (1993)

James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986)

Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (2003)

Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982)

Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (1999)

Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1870-1920

Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (2003)

Reading: Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform

Supplemental Readings:

Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (1980)

Karen J. Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in American, 1890-1930 (1994)

Mary Jane Brown, Eradicating This Evil: Women in the American Anti-Lynching Movement, 1892-1940 (2000)

Robert Clarke, Ellen Swallow: The Woman Who Founded Ecology (1973)

Estelle Freedman, Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (1998)

Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (1996)

Nancy Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 18802-1920s (2001)

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church (1993)

Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (2005)

Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (1993)

Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (1994)

Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequalities in the Welfare State, 1917-1942 (1995)

Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider, American Women in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920 (1993)

Anne Frior Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (1991)

Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992)

Reading: Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness

Supplemental Readings:

Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (1996)

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1995)

Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars (2003)

Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995)

Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex Violence, and American Modernity (2000)

Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture (1981)

Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (1977)

Sherrie A. Inness, ed. Deliquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures (1998)

George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (1993)

Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (1982)

Reading: Brinkley, The End of Reform

Supplemental Readings:

Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (1998)

Anthony Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940 (1989)

Anthony Badger, Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina (1979)

Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982)

Barry Cushman, Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (1998)

Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1940 (1994)

Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994)

Michael Johnston Grant, Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945 (2002)

Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (1966)

Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990)

David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999)

William Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963)

Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works (2005)

Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (1996)

Reading: Adams, The Best War Ever

Supplemental Readings:

Sheri Chinen Biesen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (2005)

John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory (1976)

Marilyn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (1993)

Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II (2000)

Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War At Home: The CIO in World War Two (1982)

Kenneth P. O’Brien and Lynn H. Parsons, The Home-Front War: World War II and American Society (1995)

William O’Neill, A Democracy At War: America’s Fight At Home and Abroad

Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of World War Two

William M. Tuttle, Jr., Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (1993)

Reading: Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic

Supplemental Readings:

Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1991)

Cheryl Greenberg, "Or Does it Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression (1991)

Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2005)

Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (2004)

T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994)

Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940

Larry May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (1980)

Kathleen Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947 (2004)

Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (1998)

Reading: Oshinsky, Polio

Supplemental Readings:

Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (2004)

Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (1994)

Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Culture and Thought at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985)

Tom Englehardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (1998)

John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (2000)

John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005)

Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State (1998)

David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2003)

Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (1995)

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988)

Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: A History of American Anticommunism (1995)

Ellen Schrecker, Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998)

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005)

Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (1991)

Reading: Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside

Supplemental Readings:

Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (2000)

Pete Daniel, Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South (2006)

Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1989)

Thomas W. Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 (1998)

Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (1985)

Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (2002)

Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against the Automobile Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (2004)

Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (2004)

Reading: Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis

Supplemental Readings:

John Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (1993)

Howard Gillette, Jr., Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City (2005)

Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (rev. ed. 1998)

Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (1995)

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of American Cities (1961)

Michael Johns, Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s (2003)

Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2003)

Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (1990)

Walter Thabit, How East New York Became a Ghetto (2003)

Reading: Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties

Supplemental Readings:

Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (2006)

Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (2004)

John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1996)

Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2000)

Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (1979)

Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (2004)

Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (2003)

Steven Lawson, Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle (2003)

Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty

James Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (2001)

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003)

Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1999)

Reading: Rymph, Republican Women

Supplemental Readings:

John A Anderson, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (1997)

William Berman, America’s Right Turn From Nixon to Clinton (2^nd ed. 1998)

Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (1995)

Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (2005)

Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1992)

J. Brooks Flippen, Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism (2006)

Ronald Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (1991)

Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (1990)

Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005)

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2002)

Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unraveling of the American Consensus (2001)

Jonathan Reider, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (1985)

Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time of Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (2005)

Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy and the Decline of Liberalism (1998)

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

Class participation has two requirements. First, students must complete the assigned readings of the week and come to class prepared to discuss the scholarly merit of the work. Second, they will be responsible for leading one class discussion. The discussion leaders should come prepared with a set of questions to direct the seminar.

Literature review presentation asks you to choose a week in which you will give an oral overview of the supplemental reading section. You are not expected to read each of the books, but to do enough research on them (reading book reviews and ad-copy descriptions) to be able to give your fellow classmates a sense of each book’s contents. This is an oral exercise and is accompanied by no written work.

Review essays should be approximately 750 words in length each and cover the reading for one’s assigned weeks. The written reviews will be due the week after the assigned reading has been discussed in class. With book reviews from academic journals serving as a model, the essays should identify the author’s central argument; evaluate the author’s research, empirical analysis, and success in supporting her/his interpretation; and assess the book’s organization and quality of presentation. Essay grades will in part be determined by the student’s consistency in following the rules covered in the Chicago Manual of Style worksheet.

Final historiographic paper (approximately 15 pages in length) requires you to choose a specific area of historiographic literature related to the twentieth-century U.S. and write a comprehensive review of that literature. Grades are based on (1) turning in a prospectus/bibliography on the assigned date, (2) an in-class presentation of the work undertaken for the paper, (3) consistency in following the rules of the Chicago Manual of Style worksheet, and (4) content of work completed.

Keep in mind that your written assignments must represent original work. You cannot copy the words, phrases, arguments, ideas, and conclusions of someone else or of another source (including Internet sources) without giving proper credit to the person or source by using quotation marks and a foot note. 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, REGARDLESS OF CITING THE SOURCE, 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. If you have any questions about how you are citing or using sources, come to me for the answers. Please also review the university’s honesty policy at: {http://www.dso.ufl.edu/judicial/academic.htm}. HYPERLINK "http://" http://

Please do not hesitate to contact the instructor during the semester if you have any individual concerns or issues that need to be discussed. Students requesting classroom accommodation must first register with the Dean of Students Office {http://www.dso.ufl.edu/drp/}. The Dean of Students Office will provide documentation to the student who must then provide that documentation to the instructor when requesting accommodation.

Keep in mind that the undergraduate- and graduate-student members of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society at the University of Florida publish an academic journal each spring. In the fall, the journal editors will be sending out a call for submissions (articles and book reviews) to the journal.