Seminars

Discuss seminar content, post questions for the class, and review discussions below.

SEMESTER 1

 * Week 1**


 * Week 2**


 * Week 3**


 * Week 4**


 * Week 5**


 * Week 6**


 * Week 7** - READING WEEK


 * Week 8**


 * Week 9**


 * Week 10**


 * Week 11**


 * Week 12**

SEMESTER 2

 * Week 1**


 * Week 2**

Tuesday: reading is Smith, //Urban Disorder//, and Scobey, //Empire City//, both e-offprints. Before you read Smith, you ought to find out a little about the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871. Reasonably good background information can be found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1871_Great_Chicago_Fire

Remember that we’ll spend the first twenty minutes or so finishing our discussion of the sources on women’s suffrage from the other day. Keep in mind the broader question: what kind of arguments could be marshaled for or against the enfranchisement of women in the era?

I’d also like you to find out information about the following:

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux Central Park, Fairmount Park, and Lincoln Park Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann

General:

What place did empire and nation occupy in city-building rhetoric Should the reconstruction of American cities in era be told as part of story of Reconstruction of nation? Do these works, in suggesting the centrality of northern cities to Reconstruction-era nationalism, suggest the focus of most literature on the South is misplaced? Crucially, what do you think the ideal city of the urban elite in the North would have looked like (think here about streets, buildings, parks, homes etc.)? What kind of anxieties and aspirations would the design encapsulate?

Smith:

Why do you think Chicagoans so often represented their city figuratively as a woman after the Civil War? On page 59, Smith argues ‘The fire was its [the city’s] normal condition in intensor form.’ How persuasive is this claim? How do you think the fire revealed expectations about Chicago’s future and anxieties about its present? Do we see here the same class anxieties that Beckert identified in New York? What scared wealthier Chicagoans about the city’s poor?

Scobey:

Meaning of moral environmentalism? What kind of spaces had the power to influence character? On page 159, Scobey argues, ‘It was in urban space that American civilization would be forged and tested.’ What do you think he means by this? Do you agree with him? Based on reading for the last few weeks, to what extent do you think New York embodied ‘bourgeois values’? ‘Metropolitan space was not only an index but an instrument of moral and civic progress - and not only for New York, but for the nation as a whole.’ (p. 160) Scobey emphasizes the sometimes awkward coexistence of ‘capitalist erotics’ and ‘civilizational vision’ in the ambitions of ‘bourgeois’ New Yorkers. What do these terms mean? Were they possible to reconcile? What dangers do you think threatened the city if it could not grow harmoniously? Does the drawing of boundaries he observes have any parallels in the South? What do you think Olmsted (a Republican, fierce critic of slavery, and designer of Central Park) mean when he said the city is a ‘house of many rooms’, and what implications might this have had a for a small ‘r’ republican conception of the metropolis? Are you persuaded by Scobey’s reading of Brooklyn Bridge? And the relationship he draws between street and home? Is it appropriate to call city-building a form of melodrama? Where the stakes as high as he claims?

Student Questions and Thoughts:

[INSERT HERE]


 * Week 3**

This week we turn west to a region that does not necessarily lend itself well to the conventional periodisation of Reconstruction but nevertheless was changed fundamentally between the 1850s and 1870s.

Before coming to class, try and find out a little about Civil War-era Missouri (Fellman's //Inside War// is very good here), Jesse James, Allen Pinkerton, the Sioux Confederacy, and Wild Bill Hickok.

One thing I’d like you to consider is why this region has so often been left out of American histories of the period. Even Foner barely discusses it, and it hasn’t been until Heather Cox Richardson’s //West From Appomattox//, published two years ago, that the West has been placed center-stage in a major study of Reconstruction.

We might want to consider here the importance of mythmaking to the West. Clearly Stiles’s biography of Jesse James is taking on the popular image of the western hero, and the other authors too seem to be challenging our sense of the region as a land of rugged individualism and romance. What replaces the heroic story of cowboys and Indians? Is the ‘New Western History’ they craft persuasive?

One aspect here many of the writers focus on that seems to tie the West to other regions we’ve explored is the changing role of the state. We ought to discuss the place of the Federal government in a land supposedly characterized by statelessness.

Another area we will talk about is the place of Native Americans in this historical narrative. Our readings, if they talk about indigenes at all, do so largely from the perspective of white citizens, however critical the appraisal of the actions those citizens took might be. Is there a way to tell the history of the West from the perspective of the Indian population(s)? How does their experience compare to those of other non-white groups in the era (African-Americans, Chinese etc.) In becoming objects of reform (and perhaps paternalism) are the aboriginal people ‘reconstructed’? And when the likes of White talk about reservations as ‘concentration camps’ does genocide become a useful term to discuss the practice of white expansion in the era? You ought to be clear on how government policy changed over the course of the Civil War era towards Native Americans.

Very broadly, keep in mind – as we did with the North – to what the extent the history of the West in this period can be incorporated / can reshape our understanding of Reconstruction as a national process.

Having read works that are very much in the vein of the ‘New Western History’ on Tuesday, on Thursday we’ll be looking at the founding text of the ‘Old Western History’, Turner’s //Significance of the Frontier//: a work that did much to shape our image of the prospector and cowboy as archetypes of America’s democratic individualism. We’ll also explore through sources the idea of manifest destiny, and if possible, watch an episode of Deadwood – a recent TV drama that I think has been profoundly shaped by the scholarship of historians like Richard White.

Student Questions and Thoughts:

[INSERT HERE]


 * Week 4**

We’ve spent the last few weeks looking at how the ‘reconstruction’ of the United States was not necessarily a process limited to the defeated states of the former Confederacy. I think we can conclude that if the principle questions of the era – what would replace slavery as a system of economic production and social and political organisation – did focus on the South the answers raised suggested were both shaped by and in turn shaped Northern and Western society. The growth of state power, the struggle to define a free labour society, the rebuilding of household and family relations, the redrawing of citizenship: these were all questions that were as important to factory workers and Native Americans, say, as much as planters and former slaves.

This week we’re looking even further afield to explore how the struggles of Reconstruction shaped American foreign policy in the era. The chapter from LaFeber is taken from an important survey of U.S. foreign relations and provides an overview of the initiatives taken under William Seward’s tenure as Secretary of State. Read this carefully as it provides a good introduction to the expansionist politics in the period. In his other work LaFeber stresses the economic motives behind the American drive for empire in the late nineteenth-century. Is this his thesis here?

The excerpt from Love’s Race Over Empire is more about opposition to Manifest Destiny. He focuses especially on racial ideology to explain why Congress rejected a treaty for the annexation of Santo Domingo (the modern Dominican Republic) in 1870. Are you persuaded by his argument? What was the difference between buying Alaska and claiming Santo Domingo?

I was particularly struck by Love’s take on the Grant presidency. He seems to suggest that Grant’s entire Reconstruction policy hinged on imperial expansion – an argument I’ve never encountered before. I’d like you to think about the relationship here between condition in the South and the future of a Caribbean island.

As you read these texts keep in mind our discussion of Manifest Destiny last week. I’d like you to consider the varieties of imperial thought in the U.S. we’ve encountered both in America’s land empire (e West) and the overseas dominions the likes of Seward hoped it would claim. What kind of empire did Americans want? And to what extent do you think the major political questions of the Reconstruction era (i.e. the issues raised in the first paragraph) shape the debate that took place over expansion?

Follow up:

One thing we only touched lightly upon in the seminar was the role of African-Americans in the West. There hasn't been much work done here as far as I'm aware - Nell Irvin Painter's brilliant //Exodusters// on a group of blacks who migrated to Kansas in 1879 is one of the only monographs that come to mind - but Jennifer has found an [|intriguing essay in the unlikely setting of Ebony magazine] on black-Native American relations. Though not written for an academic audience, it touches nicely on the complexities of race when we go beyond the white-black or white-Native dichotomies.

Student Questions and Thoughts:

[INSERT HERE]


 * Week 5**


 * Week 6**


 * Week 7**


 * Week 8**


 * Week 9**


 * Week 10**


 * Week 11**