Jacqueline Dirks Eliot 214A, ext.

7675
History 275/Fall 2005 Reed College
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:10-2:30 p.m.
Vollum 120

HIST 275: Culture and Society in 19th-Century America

Culture: "[denotes] those works and practices that have to do with the assigning or attribution of
meaning and significance to the things, persons, and happenings of the material world."

"Culture is formed by perceptions, intentions, and acts. It is a form of production or work

requiring energy and time, involving human choices and social consequences, engaging
materials and labor, and connecting the producer with the network of relationships--
social, political, economic--that constitute his society."
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, p. 21, 22

This course will introduce students to the history of the United States in the nineteenth century.
Course topics include the economic and social significance of slave and wage labor; the effects of
industrialization and subsequent changes in work and leisure; the social, economic, and cultural
changes wrought by civil war; urbanization and the problems of nineteenth century cities; the rise
of the labor movement and agrarian populism; and the beginnings of urban reform in the 1890s.

We will try to understand both culture (defined here as the ideals, values, and structures of
meaning shared by Americans) and society (the social, economic and political institutions and
frameworks which organized life) in this period. Culture and society are not static entities; they
change and evolve. Our goal is to try to understand and interpret evidence of how culture and
society have changed over time.

We will pay particular attention to analyzing events and ideas in the nineteenth century, and
trying to understand the meanings attributed to them by nineteenth-century observers. Where
were the boundaries of "the frontier" in nineteenth century North America? What did enslaved
people and wage earners mean when they invoked the term "freedom"? We will then ask how
historians and students of history at the beginning of this twentieth-first century understand and
make use of those same nineteenth-century events. The culture of nineteenth-century America
was very different from our own, yet consider how many representations of it pervade the
present, from popular movies to the PBS documentaries.

Our study and writing of history explores and interprets the past, yet we cannot escape the
perspective of the present. The purpose of this course is to provide you with the intellectual tools
with which to assess and understand the work historians do, and begin to develop your own
perspective on the American past.

The following books are required reading. They are available at the Reed College
Bookstore and on Book Reserve for HIST 275 in the Reed Library:

Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium (1976)

Thomas Dublin, Farm To Factory: Women's Letters, 1830-1860
(NY: Columbia University Press, 1993)
James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South
(New York: Vintage, 1991)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Classic Slave Narratives (New York: Mentor/Penguin, 1987)
Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877
(NY: Harper & Row, 1990)
Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil
War to Progressive Era (Oxford, 1997)
Nell Irvin Painter, Standing At Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (Norton, 1987)
Jacob Riis, How The Other Half Lives (Scribner's, [c1890])
Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-
American and Philippine-American Wars (Yale U. Press, 1998)

Copies of assigned articles will be available on library reserve. Pay attention to how
these are described in the syllabus--if articles are contained in books, then you will need the name
of the book in order to locate the reading under "Book Reserve."

Course requirements: Regular attendance at conferences, timely completion of

assigned readings and papers, and active and informed participation in class discussions.
Written work: Each student will write two short papers and one longer research paper.
The first short paper (8 pages) is due Thursday, September 22 in class. For this paper students
will read and analyze Frederick Douglass' Narrative (1845) in light of questions raised by James
Oakes' secondary historical work on slavery. Since the fourth week grade reports are due that
week, there can be no extensions for this assignment.
The second paper (10 pages) is due Friday, October 14
This paper will reflect your analysis of selected articles (your choice) from The Nation
published from 1865 through 1871. Reed owns the digital archive of this magazine,
which is available at http://www.archive.thenation.com/index_login.asp
The third paper (10-12 pages) is due Friday, November 18 by 5:00 p.m. at Eliot 214A.
For this paper you may choose your own topic, but the paper must use at least two secondary
sources on a topic from the period after the Civil War. We will discuss possible topics and
sources in class.
I hold office hours most Friday mornings. Please sign up for an appointment on the
sheet outside my office door, Eliot Hall 214A.

COURSE READING

Week One
Tuesday, August 30
Introduction to Course: Politics and Culture

Required reading:
R. Slotkin, "Myth and Historical Memory," Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 13-32
(Use book reserve--there's no need to buy this very thick book!)
Thursday, Sept. 1
Required reading:
Begin Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium (1976)
[Book reserve]

Week Two
Expansion and Evangelicalism
September 6, 8

Required reading:
Finish Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium (1976)
[Book reserve]

Mary Ryan, "A Woman's Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica,
New York, 1800-1840," American Quarterly 30 (Winter 1978): 602-623
[Article, e-reserve and on JSTOR]

Jama Lazerow, “Rethinking Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America,”
Mid-America 1993 75(1): 85-104
[Article and e-reserve]

Suggested for further study:

Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America:
Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880 (UVA Press, 1996)
Jama Lazerow, Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America
(Smithsonian Institution Press 1995)
Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (1981)
William J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic (1979)

See also the brief biography of Charles Grandison Finney at

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/religion/finney.html

Week Three
Market Revolution: Lowell, Massachusetts
September 13

Required reading:
Thomas Dublin, Farm to Factory (Book reserve)
(Please read selected letters first, then read the historian's Introduction, then the
remaining letters. Selections will be announced in class.)

September 15
Required reading:
Lise Vogel, "Hearts to Feel and Tongues to Speak: New England Mill Women in the
Early Nineteenth Century," in Bruce Laurie and Milton Cantor, eds., Class, Sex and the
Woman Worker (Greenwood Press, 1977): 64-82
[Article and e-reserve]
Suggested for further study:
Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood, Outlined From Memory
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889)
Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in
Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (1979)
Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order (1983)
Jonathan Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (1991)
Christopher Sellers, Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991)

Please check out the Web site of the Lowell National Historical Park, Lowell, MA:
http://www.nps.gov/lowe/

Week 4
The Economics and Experience of Slavery
September 20, 22

Required reading:
James Oakes, Slavery & Freedom, Intro., Ch. 1 "Outsiders," & Ch. 2
"Slavery & Liberal Capitalism" p. 3-79 [Book reserve]

Assigned reading for 7-8 page paper:

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
in Gates, Classic Slave Narratives p. 245-331 (Book reserve)

The first short paper (8 pages) is due Thursday, September 22

IN CLASS. We will discuss your papers in class; no extensions will
be granted.

Further reading on the history of slavery:

David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (1984)
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 1998)

Week 5
“Free” Wage Labor
September 27
Required reading:
Jonathan Glickstein, “Pressures from Below: Pauperism, Chattel Slavery, and the
Ideological Construction of Free Market Labor,” Radical History Review 69 (1997):
114-159
[Article and e-reserve]

Christine Stansell, “Women, Children and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender
Conflict in New York City, 1850-1860, Feminist Studies 1982 8(2): 309-335.
[Article, e-reserve and JSTOR]

September 29
Required reading:
 Richard Oestricher, "Terence Powderly, the Knights of Labor and Artisanal
Republicanism," p. 30-61 in Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, eds., Labor
Leaders in America (University of Illinois Press, 1987) [article and e-reserve]

Suggested for further study:

David Montgomery, "The Working Class of the Pre-Industrial City,"
Labor History 9 (1968) 3-22
Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (1980)
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the
American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984)
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986)
Lori Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (1990)

REQUIRED LECTURE:
You are to attend the historian Richard White’s presentation on environmental
history and the American West.

Week 6
Declaring The Rights of Woman
October 4
Required reading:
Judith Wellman, "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks,"
Journal of Women's History 3:1 (Spring): 9-37.
[Article and e-reserve]

October 6
Required reading:
Nell Irvin Painter, “Difference, Slavery and Memory: Sojourner Truth in Feminist Abolitionism,”
in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s
Political Culture in Antebellum America (Cornell, 1994): 139-158.
[Article and e-reserve]

Week 7
October 11, 13
The Antebellum West: "Freedom" on the "Frontier"
Required reading:
Richard White, 'It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own"
Chapters 3-9, pages 55-211. [Book reserve]

The second paper (10 pages) is due Friday, October 14. This paper will reflect your analysis
of selected articles (your choice) from The Nation published from 1865 through 1871. Reed
owns the digital archive of this magazine, which is available at
http://www.archive.thenation.com/index_login.asp

FALL BREAK OCTOBER 15-23

Week 8
Slavery and the Coming of War
October 25, 27

Required reading:
James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, Ch. 3, "Slaveholders and Nonslaveholders" and Ch.
4, "Slaves and Masters" in Slavery and Freedom, 80-194 and Epilogue

Required reading:
James McPherson, Ordeal By Fire, Chapters 4-9, 53-145 [Book Reserve]

And for debate:

James McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?” and Ira Berlin, “Emancipation and Its
Meaning in American Life,” in Reconstruction 2: 3 (1994): 35-44
[Article and e-reserve]

PLEASE BE PREPARED TO DEFEND A POSITION IN CLASS!!

Suggested for further study:

Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party
Before the Civil War (Oxford U. Press, 1970)
William Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (1987)
Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Freedom's Soldiers: The Black
Military Experience in the Civil War [Freedom and Southern Society Project.] (New
York: Cambridge U. Press, 1998)

Week 9
The Aftermath of Civil War: Reconstruction and the Meanings of Freedom
November 1, 3
David Montgomery, "The American Civil War and the Meanings of Freedom," (1987): 1-
22 [Article and e-reserve]

Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction

[Book reserve]

Week 10
Postwar Politics
November 8, 10

Required reading:
Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the
Civil to the Progressive Era
[Book reserve]

Week 11
November 15, 17
Required reading:
 Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 Introduction;
Chapters 1-5
[Book reserve]

Suggested for further study:

Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in
America (Oxford, 1978)
Peter Argersinger, The Limits of Agrarian Radicalism: Western
Populism and American Politics (University of Kansas Press, 1995)
Jeffrey Ostler, Prairie Populists: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska
and Iowa, 1880-1892 (University of Kansas Press, 1992)

The third paper (10-12 pages) is due Friday, November 18 by 5:00 p.m. at Eliot 214A. For this
paper you may choose your own topic, but the paper must use at least two secondary sources on
a topic from the period after the Civil War. We will discuss possible topics and sources in class.

Week 12
Labor in the New Century
November 22
Required reading:
James Barrett and David Roediger, "'In-Between Peoples': Race, Nationality and the
‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 1997): 3-
43.
[Article, e-reserve and Academic Search Premier]

Suggested for further study:

David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White
(Basic Books, 2005)

November 24-27 THANKSGIVING VACATION

Week 13
Mapping Ethnic New York in the 1890s
November 29, December 1

Required reading:
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890), selections
(Book reserve)

Note: Students should take a look at the hypertext edition of

Riis, How the Other Half Lives at
http://www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html

Suggested for further study:

Ellen Fitzpatrick, Muckraking: Three Landmark Articles (Bedford Books, 1994)
Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America,
1890-1950 (1989)
New Frontiers: U.S. Imperialism
Final Class
Tuesday, December 6
Required reading:
Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the
Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Selections) [Book reserve]