His 990: The American Colossus: A Thematic Survey
Spring 2008
Professor John McClymer (Founders 112), ext. 7278

"The New Colossus"

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

— Emma Lazarus, New York City, 1883

Description: This course takes its name from the Emma Lazarus poem. Her Colossus, unlike that of Rhodes, was a welcoming figure — "Give me your tired . . ., I lift my lamp beside the golden door." The land that became the United States was itself a colossus, at least potentially, from the beginning of European settlement. Americans were destined to be a "people of plenty," as the historian David Potter phrased it. Abundance, real and imagined, he argued, has shaped the American national character. So have the ongoing struggles over who is entitled to share in that abundance and on what terms. We will examine those battles from the end of the French and Indian War (1763) to the present.

Format: We will run the course as a workshop with participants, including the instructor, reporting on primary and secondary sources. I will provide "framing questions" for each source to guide our discussions. You should email responses at least one hour prior to the class meeting time. I will edit your notes and upload them to the course web site.

Requirements: In addition to the weekly notes, you will give an oral report and complete a final project of your own design. For the oral report, plan on having twenty minutes of class time to work with. I will give a ten minute tour of the web site you will be reporting on, usually the class before. As a result, DO NOT plan to spend any time listing the resources on the site. Instead focus upon the following issues:

Plan on leaving about five minutes for questions and discussion.

Since several people will be reporting on any given set of resources, it behooves you to get together and PLAN on how you can avoid overlap and duplication.

The final project may be a detailed set of lesson plans or it may be an historiographical essay on some topic germane to the course. I will be available to discuss your final project with you.

Readings:
Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America
Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925
Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
John Lewis, Walking With The Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
+ relevant web resources

Schedule:
Jan. 23: Introduction + Benjamin Franklin, "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind" (1751) — Franklin's essay helped establish the foundations of demography, that is, the study of population, by elaborating the relationship between population growth and the means of subsistence. It also laid the intellectual groundwork, in part, for the notion of American independence, a notion grounded in racialized thinking. And so it offers us a chance both to pull together our look at the peopling of North America and to begin our study of the Revolution. We will wrestle with the following issues:

+ Emma Lazarus, "The American Colossus" — we will read and discuss these works in class

Indians and Whites do not exist. These words do not mean real people—flesh and blood, sentient humans like those we meet on the street or in the countryside. Indian and White represent fabled creatures, born as one in the minds of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thinkers trying to make sense of the modern experience, particularly the European "discovery" of new continents and their populations. Ever since, Indians and Whites have been entangled with one another in the collective thought of both European and New World peoples, like some artist's image of a mad duo in a dark embrace. To borrow a thought from the Iroquois, Indians and Whites are false faces peering into a mirror, each reflecting the other. — Jean-Jacques Simard, "White Ghosts, Red Shadows: The Reduction of North-American Natives," quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930 (2004), p. 3

Jan. 30: Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen (complete) — the MCAs test in American history covers the period between 1763 and 2001. We will devote the first portion of the class to Calloway's book. With The Scratch of a Pen we have a firm historical foundation for the first of those dates. Calloway is interested in the "transformation of North America," all of it, and he argues that it is necessary to understand American history within this continental frame. Further, one can only understand the continental by understanding how British, French, and Spanish ambitions and rivalries played out in the context of the ambitions and rivalries of the First Peoples who occupied the contested lands of the west. The Scratch of a Pen (2006) has already become required reading for American historians. Submit one hour before class notes that address the following issues:

Notes

Feb. 6: Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail (complete) Notes + McClymer, The Dakota Sioux Conflict of 1862 (oral reports)

Wallace's The Long, Bitter Trail focuses upon the removal of the so-called civilized tribes but manages to place that within the context of centuries of contact between European Americans and Native Americans. Submit one hour before class notes that address the following issues:

Feb. 13: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of an American Slave (complete) + McClymer, "What to the Negro is the Fourth of July" NEH prototype web site (oral reports) — postponed to Feb. 27

Douglass' Narrative grew out of the autobiographical speeches he gave for the American Anti-Slavery Society. This experience gave Douglass the opportunity to polish his story over the course of several years. Perhaps as a result, the Narrative features a number of brilliant set pieces — Douglass witnessing the whipping of his Aunt Hester, Mr. Gore's shooting of Demby, the transformation of Sophia Auld, Douglass teaching himself to read and write, the abandoned old age of his grandmother, Douglass' description of "Master Thomas Auld," life on Edward Covey's farm, thoughts of suicide and of rebellion, the fight with Covey, escape. Select two or more of these and submit notes, one hour before class, on the following issues:

Notes

Mar. 12: Alexis De Tocqueville, "The Present and Probably Future Condition of the Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of The United States" from Democracy in America

Introduction to the burning of the Ursuline Convent. We will start with "Burning Down the House," by Nancy Schultz, an excellent brief narrative of the riot and fire + "Burning of the Charlestown Convent," Boston Evening Transcript, 12 August, 1834; "Great Meeting at Faneuil Hall," Boston Evening Transcript, 12 August, 1834; "The Convent," Boston Evening Transcript, 12 August, 1834; "The Outrage," Boston Evening Transcript, 13 August, 1834.

How does Schultz's narrative deepen, complicate, and/or confuse your understanding of what happened and why? Pick two or three specific passages from the news accounts and discuss how Schultz's essay does or does not help you make sense of the riot. Submit your notes one hour before class.

+ Six hours in a convent: or the stolen nuns: tale of Charlestown in 1834 by Charles W. Frothingham. Frothingham was a well-known family name in Charlestown. William and Anne Frothingham arrived in Charlestown in 1630, possibly aboard the Mayflowner. Charles W. was not a descendant.

How does Six Hours in a Convent deepen, complicate, and/or confuse our understanding of anti-Catholicism? Choose specific passages in the story to illustrate your comments. Submit your notes one hour before class. (instructor oral report)

 

Mar. 19: McClymer, "Emancipation and Freedom" + in-class tours of Eric Foner and Oliva Mahoney, A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln and Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War
One hour before class submit notes discussing the following issues raised in "Emancipation and Freedom".

Mar. 26 : Higham, Strangers in the Land, chapters 1-6 + Chinese Exclusion — Notes

Apr. 2: Higham, Strangers in the Land, chapters 7-11 + Epilogue + Eugenics in the Culture Wars of the 1920s: Some Approaches to Studying a Neglected Topic (oral reports); submit notes, one hour before class, on the following:

Notes

Report Notes

Apr. 9: Gerstle, American Crucible, Introduction + Chapters 1-4; submit notes, one hour before class, on the following:

Some musical variations on the theme of the Melting Pot: Blue Mink (1969), Schoolhouse Rock, "The Great American Melting Pot"

Notes

Apr. 16: Gerstle, American Crucible, Chapters 5-8 + Epilogue + "The Americanization of Irving Berlin" + Duke Ellington, "Black and Tan Fantasy" song and film available on YouTube™ — Part One, Part Two, Part Three (oral reports); submit notes, one hour before class, on the following:

Notes

Apr. 30: McClymer, "Passing From Light Into Dark" + scenes from "The Jazz Singer" and Betty Boop, "Minnie, the Moucher" AND McClymer, "The KKK in the 1920s " + scenes from "The Birth of a Nation" — we will divvy up these two sets of materials

May 7: Lewis, Walking With The Wind (complete) + evaluations — in thinking about the Lewis autobiography, here are some questions you may want to keep in mind:

Notes

May 14: Projects due

Notices
1) Educators
Fellowship Date: 2008-03-05
Date Submitted: 2007-12-17

The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) is offering fellowships to public and/or parochial/independent schoolteachers and library media specialists during the summer of 2008. The fellowships carry a stipend of $4,000 for four weeks of on-site research at the MHS. Applications are welcome from any K-12 teacher who has a serious interest in using the collections at the MHS to prepare primary-source-based curricula in the fields of American history, language arts, or science.
Kathleen Barker
Massachusetts Historical Society
1154 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02215
Email: education@masshist.org
Visit the website at http://www.masshist.org/fellowships/adams.cfm