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

Spring 2008

 

Location: 905 PLC

Time:  M 2-3:50 pm

 

 

Professor: Joseph Lowndes

Office: PLC 919

 

Email: jlowndes@uoregon.edu

Phone: (541) 346-1478

 

Office hours: TH 9am-12pm

 

Course Description

This course will introduce some of the key themes animating U.S political culture, including religion, liberalism, democracy, race, gender 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 strains or conflicts in U.S. political culture?

 

Requirements

  1. 60 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. Papers are due for weeks 2-10. You can miss one week’s paper for the quarter, so you will turn in eight papers in all. These will be graded and returned each week. Any papers turned in late will result in a ˝ grade reduction per day.

 

  1. 30 percent of grade: One in-class presentation of one or more of the readings.  In the presentation, which should be roughly ten minutes in length, you must present the key arguments of the reading, offer your OWN critical perspective on it, and link it to themes discussed in the course so far.

 

  1. 10 percent of the 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 intelligently discuss them.

 

Course materials

All readings will be available on Blackboard.

 

Week One: Introducing politics and culture

• Course introduction

            •  Film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

 

Week Two: Introducing politics and culture continued

• Raymond Williams, “Culture” from Keywords

• James Morone, “The Struggle for American Culture” in PS: Political Science and    

              Politics, Vol. 29, No. 3 (September 1996) pp. 424-430

For 510:

• George Shulman, “On Political Identity”

 

Week Three: Narrating foundational identities

• James Madison, Federalist Paper #1

• R.W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

• Michael Rogin, “Two Declarations of Independence”

• Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional    Discussion,’ 1786-1789” Journal of American History, Volume 79, Number 3, 1992, pp 841-873.

For 510:

• Margaret Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity”

Week Four: 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.

• Isaac Kramnick, “Is America a Christian Nation” in The Godless Constitution, eds.  

  Kramnick and Moore, Norton, 1996, pp.11-25

• Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America”

For 510:

• Sacvan Bercovitch: “Investigations of an Americanist” Journal of American  History, December 1991, pp 972-987.

 

Week Five: 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

For 510:

• Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie, chapter 9, “American Political Demonology.”

• Benjamin Barber, “Louis Hartz”

 

Week Six: Expansion, empire and the frontier myth

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

• Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Davey Crockett”

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

• One more tba

 

Week Seven: 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

• Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union.”

For 510:

• Hattam and Lowndes, “From Birmingham to Baghdad: Rethinking (Dis)Order       and Change”

Week Eight: Gender, sexuality and the American nation

•  Michael Kimmel, “The Birth of the Self-made Man”

•  Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”

• More selections tba

 

 

Week Nine: 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?”

• “President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East”
Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, D.C.

• Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, pp 283-312

For 510:

•  Steve Caton, “What is an Authorizing Discourse”

 

Week Ten: Empire cont’d and course wrap up

 • Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim women Really Need Saving?”

 • Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, pp 283-312

•  Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, Chapter One