Introduction to U.S. Political Culture PS 410/510

Winter 2009

 

 

Professor: Joseph Lowndes                                                    Office:  PLC 919

Email: jlowndes@uoregon.edu                                               Phone:  (541) 346-1478

Office hours: Wednesday 1-4pm

 

Course Description

This course will introduce some of the key themes animating U.S political culture, including religion, liberalism, democracy, race, sexuality, and empire, and seek to understand the ways they intersect.  Along the way we will address a number of questions, among them: Is the U.S. better characterized by basic values held in common or by conflict over those values?   Is political culture generated from above, below, or both?  Are there enduring themes or conflicts in U.S. political culture?   

 

Requirements

  1. 40 percent of grade: Weekly response papers (2 pages each), due at the beginning of class on Mondays. These papers are not meant to be summaries of the week’s readings, but rather evidence of your engagement with the reading.   These will be graded and returned each week.   Six papers in all.

 

  1. 40 percent of grade: Twelve page essay on some aspect of American political culture.   You must give me an abstract in class on Week seven.

 

  1. 20 percent of grade: Seminar participation. This includes being prepared to discuss the readings in class, and discussing them.  You are required to bring a copy of the day's readings to class, and you need to make sure you have read that day’s readings in advance of class so that you can critically discuss them. 

 

Course materials

All readings will be posted on Blackboard.

 

 

Week One:  No class

 

Week Two: Course introduction and narrating foundational identities

• Course introduction

• James Morone, “The Struggle for American Culture” in PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 29, No. 3 (September 1996) pp. 424-430

• Anne Norton, selections from 95 Theses on Politics, Culture and Method

 

           

 

 

 

 

• James Madison, Federalist Paper #10

• R.W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

• Michael Rogin, “Two Declarations of Independence”

 

Week Three: Errand into the Wilderness

• John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity.”  (1630)

• Perry Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 10, No. 1, Jan. 1953, pp. 3-32.

• John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity.”  (1630)

•  George Shulman, “Introducing Jeremiah’s Legacy: Placing Prophesy in American Politics and Political Theory.”

 

Week Four: Liberalism

• Louis Hartz:  “The Concept of a Liberal Society” Chapter 1 in The Liberal Tradition in America, pp. 3-34

• Nikhil Pal Singh, “Liberalism” in Keywords of Transnational (American Cultural) Studies (forthcoming)

• Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America” and response by Jacqueline Stevens in American Political Science Review, Volume 87, No. 3, September 1993, pp549-566 

 

Week Five: the Frontier

• Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier”

• Richard Slotkin, “Bffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West’ and the Mythologization of American Empire.”

• William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, “The Discovery of Kentucky” New   Directions Publishing, 1929, pp 131-159.

 

Week Six:  Race and the ambiguities of American Identity

• Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" 5 July 1852.

• James Baldwin, selections

• Russell Banks, “John Brown’s Body: James Baldwin and Frank Shatz in Conversation,” Transition 9.1 and 2 (2000) 250-266

 

Week Seven: Gender, sexuality and the American nation

• Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America, selections

• Anne Norton, Engendering Another American Identity

 

Week Eight: Spectacle and democracy
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, excerpts

• Hariman and Lucaites, “Public Culture, Icons, and Iconoclasts”

• Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique

 

Week Nine: Visualizing national identity

• Harold Holzer, “Visualizing Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln as Student, Subject, and Patron of the Visual Arts”

• Kevin Bruyneel, “U.S. Race Politics and the ‘King’s Two Bodies’:

The Paradox of Memorializing Change in American Culture and Institutions”

 

 

Week Ten: City on a Hill or American empire?

• Amy Kaplan, “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today.” Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003

• Michael Ignatieff, “Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?”

• Michael Rogin, “‘Make My Day!’ Spectacle as as Amnesia in Imperial Politics and the Sequel”

 

Final essay due Monday, December 7, at 5pm.