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Week One: Introduction to the Course -- Is this the REAL story of 19th Century America?
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Week Two: Antebellum Reform, Lydia Maria Child and Native Americans -- Why Puritans? Why Indians? Why Nature? Why Women?
“Of native novels we have no great stock, and none good; our democratic institutions placing all the people on a dead level of political equality; and the pretty equal diffusion of property throughout the country affords but little room for varieties, and contrasts of character; nor is there much scope for fiction, as the country is quite new, and all that has happened from the first settlement to the present hour, respecting it, is known to every one. There is, to be sure, some traditionary romance about the Indians; but a novel describing these miserable barbarians, their squaws, and papooses, would not be very interesting to the present race of American readers.” -- John Bristed, The Resources of the United States, 1818
Wednesday, January 21: Read Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times By an American (another e-text), up to Chapter XIV, (p. 100 in your text).
Supplementary Course Materials:Historical Contextual Resources for Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok
Representations of Nature in Nineteenth Century American Art
Supplementary Resources on Child and Hobomok:
Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times. [The North American Review. / Volume 19, Issue 44, July 1824]
Biographical information on Child: from Evert A. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, (New York: C. Scribner, 1856); from Samuel Austin Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1900); from EAF Authors: Lydia Maria [Francis] Child; from the William L. Clements Library; American Passages-Annenberg/CPB; The Reader's Companion to American History; from the Wayland Historical Society.
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Week Three: Antebellum Reform, Lydia Maria Child, Native Americans and African-Americans
All preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians have failed. It seems now to be an established fact they they can not live in contact with a civilized community and prosper. Ages of fruitless endeavors have at length brought us to a knowledge of this principle of intercommunication with them. The past we can not recall, but the future we can provide for. Independently of the treaty stipulations into which we have entered with the various tribes for the usufructuary rights they have ceded to us, no one can doubt the moral duty of the Government of the United States to protect and if possible to preserve and perpetuate the scattered remnants of this race which are left within our borders. In the discharge of this duty an extensive region in the West has been assigned for their permanent residence. -- Excerpt from Andrew Jackson's Seventh Annual Message to Congress, December 7, 1835
Monday, January 26: Conclusion of Hobomok, "The Church in the Wilderness," 233, and "Willie Warton," 251.Wednesday, January 28: Lydia Maria Child's "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" (1843), and “Charity Bowery” published in The Liberty Bell. Also, choose your Area of Expertise for the semester.
Supplementary Course Materials:Representations of American Indians in Early Nineteenth Century American Art and Writing: A Workshop
Supplementary Resources:Red, White, and Black: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Slavery and the Indian Problem
Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans including Logan's Mourner and Jefferson's Policy of Civilization and Assimilation
Background information on Indian Removal, from the PBS Africans in America site.
"Indian Removal," Extract from Andrew Jackson's Seventh Annual Message to Congress
December 7, 1835Andrew Jackson's Second Annual Message
Lydia Maria Child's An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
Slave Marriages, an explanation from the Spartacus.site.
You may find it interesting to contrast the descriptions of slave "marriages" offered above with the depiction provided in an 1897"plantation tale" by Thomas Nelson Page, author of The Clansman. In Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War Page offers the following wistful look back at life during the Christmas holidays at an antebellum southern plantation:
But it was not only in the "great house" that there was Christmas cheer. Every cabin was full of it, and in the wash-house or the carpenter-shop there was preparation for a plantation supper.
At this time, too, there were the negro parties, where the ladies and gentlemen went to look on, the supper having been superintended by the mistresses, and the tables being decorated by their own white hands. There was almost sure to be a negro wedding during the holidays. The ceremony might be performed in the dining-room or in the hall by the master, or in one of the quarters by a colored preacher; but it was a gay occasion, and the dusky bride's trousseau had been arranged by her young mistress, and the family was on hand to get fun out of the entertainment, and to recognize by their presence the solemnity of the tie.
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Angelina Grimke Weld
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Angelina
Weld Grimke
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Week Four, Antebellum Reform, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement: 1830-1870 . Also, an introduction to the analysis of literature as rhetoric.
Monday, February 2: Women's Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1840-1870, pp. 84-165
Wednesday, February 4: Women's Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1840-1870, pp. 165-205
Supplementary Resources:
People & Events, Pennsylvania Hall, 1838 at the PBS Africans in America site.
"Pennsylvania Hall," Pennsylvania Freeman, n. 14. 18 July, 1844.
Week Four: Antebellum Reform: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, [1852]
Monday, February 7: Uncle Tom's Cabin, chapters 1 to 10 (up to page 133).
Wednesday, February 9: Uncle Tom's Cabin, chapters 10 to 16 (up to page 240).
Supplementary Course Resources:Ultraists vs. Nothingarians: The 19th Century Debate over the Rhetoric of Social Reform.
Supplementary Resources:
Excerpts from The Fugitive Slave Law
Charles Dudley Warner's 1896 essay, "The Story of Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture
Uncle Tom's Houses: The American Domestic Ideal, 1840-1870
Week Six, Antebellum Reform, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin Continued
Monday, February 14: Uncle Tom's Cabin, chapters 16 to 27 (up to page 422).
Wednesday, February 16: Uncle Tom's Cabin, chapters 27 to 35(up to page 524).
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| Topspy and Eva in an |
Topspy and Eva in an edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin from the early 1900s |
Week Seven: Antebellum Reform, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom's Cabin Concluded
Monday, February 21: Uncle Tom's Cabin, chapters 35 - conclusion.
Wednesday, February 23: Papers and Presentations Due
Week Eight: William Wells Brown, Clotel, or The President’s Daughter, [1853]
Supplementary Resources:
Miscegenation, Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History
Week of March 8-17: Spring Break
Week Nine: Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches, 1863
Monday, March 15
Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, and Worcester's Lucy and Sarah Chase SistersWednesday, March 17
Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches; additional readings from Alcott on gender, race, and war including “The Brothers", and “M.L.” (on reserve)
Week Ten: Reconstruction -- Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn
Monday, March 22
Huckleberry Finn up to Chapter 17 (p. 80)Wednesddy, March 24
Huckleberry Finn up to Chapter 24 (p. 131)
Supplementary Resources:
Mark Twain in His Times by Stephen Railton, University of Virginia
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Guide at Jim Zwick's Mark Twain site
The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–20001 by the American Library Association
Masterpiece or Racist Trash? Bridgewater Students Enter the Debate over Huckleberry
by Barbara Apstein -- Includes a brief summary of the changing response provoked by the novel.THE LITERARY ADVENTURES OF HUCK FINN, by Norman Podhoretz, The New York Times, December 6, 1959
Is Huck Finn a Racist? by Peter Salwen
Born to Trouble: Huck Finn, a companion site to the PBS series, CultureShock. Includes Teaching Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Shelley Fisher Fishkin
"A Note on the Word 'Nigger,'" by Randall Kennedy, Professor of Law, Harvard University
In Praise of “Spike Lee’s Huckleberry Finn” by Ralph Wiley By Shelley Fisher Fishkin
"The Adventures of Jane Smiley," a 1998 interview available in the American Online with the author which asks: "In your article you expressed the wish that American literature had grown out of Uncle Tom's Cabin rather than Huck Finn. Were you surprised by the response you got?"
"A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It," by Mark Twain
Week Eleven: Reconstruction Workshop
Monday, March 29: Complete your reading of Huckleberry Finn; Paper Proposal Due.
Wednesday, March 31: Workshop
Depiction of slave woman by Kemble from original edition, 1885Depiction of slave woman by Kemble in 1899 edition.
Week Twelve: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn Concluded
Monday, April 5: Papers and Presentations Due
Wednesday, April 7: Papers and Presentations Due
"Tall lillies, white as angels' wings and stately as the maidens who walked among them." Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War, 1897
"This is the woman, and I am the man." Frontispiece from Charles Chestnutt's Wife of His Youth, 1899
Week Thirteen: Reconstruction and "The New South"
Henry W. Grady, "The New South," 22 December 1886; W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth," from The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day (New York, 1903); selected stories from Charles Chestnutt's The Wife of His Youth, including: “Her Virginia Mammy,” and “The Web of Circumstance"; A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South by W. E. B. Du Bois; Thomas Nelson Page's "Marse Chan, A Tale of Old Virginia," and a look at post-war editions of Clotel and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Also, a late-century look at representations of Native Amerians in the work of Zitkala Sa.
Course Resources:
The History of Jim Crow, a PBS web site
Virtual Jim Crow Museu of Racist Memorabilia
Plantation Tradition in Local Color Fiction, Donna Campbell
Week Fourteen: Post-Reconstruction -- Ida B. Wells, "Lynch Law in Georgia" [1899]; Thomas Dixon's The Clansman; an Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, 1905; and D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation"
Course Resources:
D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915, comments by Professor Catherine Lavender, Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York
D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, an essay at the PBS Flashpoints web site
The Birth Of A Nation (1915), a review by Tim Dirks
Ida Wells Barnett at About.com
How Did Black and White Southern Women Campaign to End Lynching, 1890-1942?, a project from Women and Social Movements in the United States
News and Lynchings in the Late 19th Century
Lynching, an essay from Houghton Mifflin
The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880-1950,
by Robert A. GibsonMusarium: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
Week Fifteen and Sixteen: Pulling it All Together
