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 1-30-4:30pm

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 analyze 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 for 410

1. 80 percent of grade: Weekly response papers (2 to 3 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.   Eight papers in all. 

2. 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 intelligently discuss them. 

Requirements for 510

1. One 15 to 20 page research paper on some aspect of U.S. political culture. Proposals due at the beginning of week three.

Course materials

For 410/510: 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

410:

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

• Anne Norton, 95 Theses on Politics and Culture - selections

510:

• Raymond Williams, “Culture” from Keywords

• Glen Gendzel, “Political Culture: The Genealogy of a Concept” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, No. 2 (1997)

Week Three: Narrating foundational identities

410:

• James Madison, Federalist Paper #10

• R.W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

• 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.

• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp 1-36.

510:

Homi k. Bhaba, Nation and Narration, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation”

Week Four: Errand into the Wilderness

410:

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

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

• Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America”

James Marone, Hellfire Nation, “Introduction: A Nation With the Soul of a Church”

For 510 this week:

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

Week Five: Liberalism

410:

• 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

510:

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

• Benjamin Barber, “Louis Hartz”

Week Six: the Frontier

410:

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

• Joseph Lowndes, “Unstable Antistatism: The Left, the Right and The Outlaw Josey Wales”

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

510:

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, “Introduction: The Significance of the Frontier Myth in American History”

Week Seven: Race and the ambiguities of American Identity

410:

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

• James Baldwin, “A Stranger in the Village”

• “A More Perfect Union” Barack Obama

• Michael Rogin, “Two Declarations of Independence”

510:

• Patricia Hill Collins, “Like One of the Family: Race, Ethnicity, and the Paradox of US National Identity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24 (1), January 2001: 3-28.

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

Week Eight: Gender, sexuality and the American nation

410:

 • Priscilla Yamin, “Nuptial Nation: Marriage and the Politics of Civic Membership in US”

• Nancy Cott on the Intersection of Love and Law

• Andrew Sullivan, “Here Comes the Groom: a Conservative Case for Gay Marriage” • James Q. Wilson, “Against Homosexual Marriage” Commentary, March 1996, Vol. 101 Issue 3, p34

 • Cathy Cohen, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential
of Queer Politics?" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3.4: 437-66.

510:

• Carole Pateman, “Women and Consent” ON BLACKBOARD

Week Nine: Spectacle and democracy

410:
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, excerpts

• Anne Norton, “A Culture of Consumption,” from Republic of Signs

• Stephen Duncombe, selections from Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an age of Fantasy

510:

Peter Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat”

Week Ten: City on a Hill or American empire?

4/510:

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

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

• Barack Obama, “Renewing American Leadership,” Foreign Affairs, 2007.

• Andrew Sullivan, “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters”

• Paul Street, “Barack Obama: The Empire’s New Clothes”