HISTORY 909, SELECTED READINGS

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20th CENTURY AMERICAN HISTORY

 

FALL SEMESTER 2008

PROFESSOR JAMES E. SHEROW

 

ROOM: Eisenhower 201

TIME: Mondays, 3:30 to 6:20 p.m.

Office Hours, MW 10 to 11 a.m., and by appointment

 

CLASS DESCRIPTION:

 

The catalog description simply reads: “An examination of the major historical problems and literature.”  More than this, the course will emphasis critical historical analysis of 20th Century America.  The course will introduce a variety of historical writing including works on race, gender, environment, and culture besides those on politics and warfare.  By the end of the course, you should possess the rudimentary skills for devising your own course syllabus suitable for teaching a freshman-level survey course of 20th Century American History.. 

 

I will place a heavy emphasis on effective writing, and on well-versed discussions of the required readings.

 

READING ASSIGNMENTS:

 

There are twelve required books for this course, and they are noted in the class calendar below.   You are to order these books by any means – Amazon.com or any other online book seller, or through the union, or Claflin Books and Records.  Ordering online is the fastest and lest expensive means for getting your books.

 

Order your books now!

 

You are to have completed your first required reading by September 8, and I will not except excuses for missing the first assignment on the 8th.

 

We will discuss and analysis the required readings in class.

 

I will assign, or you will select, an individual book from the selected readings.  You will prepare a 2-3 page typed review of your book and make copies of your review for your classmates and me.  Your reviews will be graded and form a percent of your final grade.

 

You will be expected to follow the book review guidelines in Marius, A Short Guide to Writing about History, Chapter 7, “Book Reviews”.  In your review, you will include excerpts from reviews of your book in at least two professional historical journals.  This inclusion will give your classmates an indication of how well scholars have received the book.  Your review begins with a full bibliographic citation of your book along with the library call number of it.

 

COURSE PROJECT:

 

Your end-of-class project is to create a fifteen week course syllabus for a freshman-level survey course in the 20th century history of the United States.  Your syllabus will contain three major sections: 1), a one paragraph course description suitable for a university course catalog; 2), a fuller course description for inclusion into the main body of the syllabus; and 3), a course calendar with lectures titles.

 

Each section is described in fuller detail below.

 

Section 1:

 

At the beginning of your syllabus, compose a one paragraph course description that is suitable for publication in an undergraduate course catalog.  This one paragraph needs to cover succinctly the content and main theme of your course.

 

Section 2:

 

Compose a course description that explains your course to any student wanting to take the class.  Your statement must include the organizing theme/s for the class and the chronological groupings of your topics.  Given a fifteen week semester, you need to identify a major topic for each week along with a well argued rationale for the inclusion of each topic.  Your rationale must be referenced with endnotes.  This essay should be between seven to ten pages in length.

 

Section 3:

 

Create a class calendar for your course.

 

First, identify a lecture topic for each day of the course.  This means the identification of 45 possible lectures.

 

Next, select a lecture from each week and outline it.  This means, state the main theme of the lecture; give three main points that will illustrate the main theme; list the important terms associated with the lecture; and give a working bibliography for the lecture.  Identify and reference four to six sources for each outline.

 

Last, select five lectures from the fifteen outlined ones, and following your outline, develop a three to four page lecture for each one.  The documentation, factual materials, and any quotes in the lectures must be referenced in endnotes.

 

 

GRADING SYSTEM:

 

Late written assignments and unexcused absences from class will automatically a zero.  Only substantiated, or documented, absences will excuse anyone from missing any scheduled class or assignment.

 

Any student caught plagiarizing his/her work is subject to the K.S.U. Plagiarism Statement: Plagiarism and cheating are serious offenses and may be punished by failure on the examination, paper or project; failure in the course, and/or expulsion from the university.  For more information refer to the “Academic Dishonesty” policy in Inside KSU.

 

Participation in Class: 30%

Six Book Reviews: 50%

Final Project: 20%

 

IMPORTANT NOTE:

 

Any student with a disability who needs an accommodation or other assistance in this course should make an appointment to speak with me as soon as possible

 

 

COURSE CALENDAR and READING ASSIGNMENTS

 

August 25

Introduction

September 1

Labor Day Holiday: No Class

September 8

Required Reading:

 

Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998)

Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (1998)

September 15

Selected Reading:

 

David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (1995)

Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (2001)

Elliot J. Gorn, Mother Jones (2001)

Lewis Gould, Reform and Regulation: American Politics From Roosevelt to Wilson (1996)

Marcus Hall, Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration (2005)

Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955)

Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (2000)

Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (2001, 2004)

Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001)

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

Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform (2001)

Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1880-1920 (1977)

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

Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2006)

John Thompson, Woodrow Wilson (2003)

Robert Weibe, The Search for Order (1967)

James Weinstein, Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (1968)

September 22

Required Reading:

 

Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War (2003)

David J. Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (1999)

September 29

Selected Reading:

 

Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (2008)

Kendrick A. Clements, Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life (2000)

Mark A. Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State-Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order (2000)

David Foglesong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920 (1995)

Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (1979)

John Keegan, World War One (2000)

David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980, 2004)

Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens (1999)

Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (1998, 2006)

William Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 (1958, 1993)

Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (2001)

Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (1992)

Richard Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross (1991)

Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance (1995)

Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (1975)

October 6

Fall Break: No Class

October 13

Required Reading:

 

Alan Brinkley, Culture and Politics in the Great Depression (1999)

John Keegan, The Second World War (1990)

October 20

Selected Reading:

 

John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory (1976)

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

Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy (1995)

Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial (1993)

Tim Egan, The Worst Hard Time (2006)

Thomas J. Fleming, The New Dealers’ War (2001)

Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time (1995)

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

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

William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963)

Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in the New Deal Public Policy (1998)

Linda Myers, Creating G.I. Jane (1996)

Jim Powell, FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003)

Richard Rhodes, Creating the Atomic Bomb (1986)

Gene Smiley, Rethinking the Great Depression (2002)

Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl (1979, 2004)

October 27

Required Reading:

 

William Leutchtenberg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Bill Clinton (2nd ed., revised and newly updated, 2001)

Lisabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003)

November 3

Selected Reading:

 

Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (1995)

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

Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (2003)

Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960-1973 (1998)

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (2nd ed., 2005)

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties (1987)

Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2002)

David Halberstam, The Fifties (1993)

Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (1995)

Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (1988)

George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (4th ed., 2001)

Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (2nd ed., 1997)

Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (1997)

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

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: Origins of the New American Right (2001) 

Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2001)

November 10

Required Reading:

 

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008)

Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculter, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1997)

November 17

Selected Reading:

 

Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (1999)

Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Post-Presidency (1997)

Peter Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s (1990)

David Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (2005)

Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia, Cesar Chavez: A Triumph of Spirit (1998)

E.J. Dionne, Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics: The Death of the Democratic Process (1991)

David Farber, Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam (2004)

Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (1993)

Jim Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: A Report of the Agribusiness Accountability Project on the Failure of America’s Land Grant College Complex (1973, 1978)

Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (1992)

Allen J. Matusow, Nixon’s Economy: Boom, Busts, Dollars, and Votes (1998)

Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: Diplomacy in the Carter Years (1986)

Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991)

November 24

Required Reading:

 

Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (2008)

Haynes Johnson, The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years (2001)

December 1

Selected Reading:

 

Andrew C. Bacevich, The New American Militarism (2005)

A.J. Bacevich, et al., The Gulf War of 1991 Reconsidered (2003)

Michael Beschloss, At the Highest Levels (1994)

R. McGreggor Cawley, Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics (1993)

Robert M. Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture during the Reagan Years (2006)

John Robert Green, Presidency of George Bush (2000)

Molly Ivins, Shrub (2000)

Haynes Johnson, Best of Times (2001)

Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History (1991)

John Judis, Folly of Empire: What George Bush Could Have Learned from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (2004)

Steve Lerner, Diamond: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor (2005)

David Marannis, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (1996)

Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy (2006)

Thomas Ricks, Fiasco (2006)

Michael Schaller, Right Turn: American Life in the Reagan-Bush Era, 1980-1992 (2007)

Steven Shull, Kinder, Gentler Racism (1993)

John Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (2002)

Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (2006)

December 8

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              

Selected Reading: America Now (No Written Review Required)

 

James Sherman, Affluenza (2006)

Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy (2004)                            

Al Gore, Assault on Reason (2007)

Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas (2005)

Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement (2008)

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (2008)

Rick Shenkman, Just How Stupid Are We? The Truth about the American Voter (2008)

Steven Greenhouse, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (2008)

Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life (2007)

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) (2008)

Anthony T. Krouman, Educations End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On the Meaning of Life (2007)

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (2008)

Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions (2008)

Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (2008)

Joseph Stiglitz & Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillon Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (2008)

December 15

Final Course Project Due