American History and Culture in Film Syllabus

American History and Culture in Film

Syllabus

“[Film] is life with the dull bits cut out.”——A. Hitchcock

Course Description

Films with historical themes have been produced for over a century, but only in the last generation have historians seriously considered cinema’s capacity to convey a useful past. This course will select several movies in the history of American film which cover American history from the colonial period to contemporary America. These films portray the past, present historical events, cultures and attitudes and present historical content. Through exploring these movies, students will learn how the time period in which the film was made interpreted historical personalities and events in American history. As historians we always analyze and use traditional primary and secondary sources. Putting films in American history, it is possible and helpful for us to apply many of those same skills to our approaches to non-traditional sources, such as these films. All movies are rated G, PG or PG13, no R-rated movies will be shown.

Course Objectives:

At the end of this course, you will be able to: define film as valid form of historical discourse; analyze how film has shaped and impacted our understanding of American history; recognize films as vehicles for the promotion of ideology, mythology, and political agenda setting; assess the ways in which film engages our emotions, cultivate our interests, instructs us and affect our beliefs about the past; and recognize yourself as a historical subject whose viewing experiences are contextually influenced and filled with meaning.

Course Requirements

Students are expected to attend all classes, read all assigned texts, watch all assigned films, and participate in class. Students are also expected to write two short response essays (3-5 pages) and take a midterm and a final exam. In writing essays, students should choose particular films dealing with a United States History topic and analyze the portrayal of the past in the film, exploring the perspective of the filmmakers, the historical accuracy of the portrayal, and the relative success and reliability of the film as a primary and secondary source of historical information. Students must cite all images, clips, facts, ideas, paraphrasing, and quotes, in footnotes and bibliography, using either Turabian (7^th edition) or the Chicago Manual of Style (15^th edition), including the movies themselves and any reviews of them that you have used. Attendance is required; there will be no make-ups for missed exams.

Grading:

Final grades will be determined based on class participation (20%), on performance on the midterm and final exams (25% each), as well as two response essays (30%).Completion of all assignments is required to pass the class.

Texts

Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002

Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts, eds. Hollywood's America: United States History Through Its Films (St. James: Brandywine Press, 1993)

Steven Mintz, Randy Roberts, Hollywood's America: Twentieth-Century America Through Film (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

TOPICS & MOVIES

1)      No movie – Introduction

2)      The Colonial Experience

Pocahontas (1995) 81 minutes

3) The American Revolution

The Crossing (2000) 89 minutes

4) The Expansion of the New Nation

 How the West was Won (1962) 162 minutes

5) The Civil War

The Red Badge of Courage (1951) 70 minutes

6) The Westward Movement

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007) 132 minutes

7) Immigration

Far and Away (1992) 140 minutes

8) World War I

1918 (1985) 91 Minutes

Midterm Exam

9) The Roaring Twenties

 Inherit the Wind (1960) 128 minutes

10) The Great Depression

Warm Springs (2005) 121 minutes

11) World War II

The Great Escape (1963) 172 minutes

12) The Cold War

October Sky (1999) 108 minutes

13) The Civil Rights Movement

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) 129 minutes

14) Life in the 50’s and 60’s

American Graffiti (1973) 110 minutes

14) Vietnam War

Forrest Gump (1994) 142 minutes

15) 1970 to present

Apollo 13 (1995) 140 minutes

16) 1970 to Present Continued

All the President’s Men (1976)

Final Exam

Age of the American Revolution

Age of the American Revolution

Syllabus

Course Description:

This course will examine the era of the American Revolution. It focuses on four units: political and economic developments of British colonies in North America; the Stamp Act Crisis and the colonial resistance; the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolutionary War as a military, social, and cultural event in the development of the American nation and government; the Confederate era, the United States Constitution-making, as well as the impacts and legacies of the American Revolution. It will help students to understand the ideological debates between colonial Americans and their Mother Country, how and why American Revolutionaries made their final decision to break with the British Empire, as well as the creative imaginations of American founding fathers in designing a new republic.

Course Objectives:

Students will know the steps by which the colonists came to think of themselves as Americans rather than English; understand the terms of the Revolutionary War settlement and its consequences for American politics, foreign and domestic; learn how to think historically and critically and understand the key principles and ideas of the American Revolution and the philosophic and political logics connecting these ideas in Revolutionary period; recognize what defects or vices Madison, Washington, Hamilton, and others discerned in the foundations and forms of both the Articles of Confederation and the state constitutions created in the course of the Revolution.

Course Requirements:

Students are expected to attend all classes, read all assigned texts, and actively take part in class discussions. There will be two exams: a midterm and a final. Moreover, students should write two response essays (3-5 pages) in terms of our reading assignments. In writing essays, students must cite all evidences, paraphrasing, and quotes in footnotes and bibliography, using either Turabian (7^th edition) or the Chicago Manual of Style (15^th edition), including the movies themselves and any reviews of them that you have used. Attendance is required; there will be no make-ups for missed exams.

Grading:

Midterm exam                                             25%

Final exam                                                   25%

Paper 1                                                         15%

Paper 2                                                         15%

Participation and attendance                        20%

Course Books

Gordon Wood, The American Revolution

Jack P. Greene (ed.) Colonies to Nation 1763-1789

Unit One: Origins

Lecture themes:

Introduction: The Significance of the American Revolution

The growth and movement of population

Economic expansion

Reform of the British Empire

British colonies in North America

              The Mercantile System and Imperial Policy

              The Great War for Empire                                                               Watch movie: Pocahontas (1995) 81 minutes

Unit Two: American Resistance

Lecture themes:

The Stamp Act Crisis

             Whig Ideology

              The Logic of Events

              Intolerable Acts

              Lexington, Concord & War

              Thomas Paine and Common Sense

                  ***Midterm Exam ***

Unit Three: American Revolution

Lecture themes:

Independence

              The Military Struggle

              The War at Home

              Confederation

              The Critical Period

Watch movie: The Reluctant Revolutionaries: 1763-1774, (1997) 40 minutes

Unit Four:  Constitution-Making and the War for Independence

              The Constitutional Convention

              The Constitution of the United States

              Federalists and Anti-federalists

              Ratification

              The War for Independence

              The Impact and legacies of the American Revolution

***Final Exam***

American Founding Fathers and the Creation of the American Republic

American Founding Fathers and the Creation of the American Republic

Syllabus

Course Description:

American founding fathers were genius and there are always many exciting things to learn from them, both from their personal and political lives and their primary writings. Focusing on John Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and other important founding fathers, this course will examine their lives and writings in American Revolutionary period. It will not only help students to know their political lives, but help them to understand their political thinking and recognize their great contributions in American founding.

Course Objectives:

It is our goal that by completing the work in this course, students will have a strong working knowledge of the thoughts and ideas that the United States was founded on. By immersing themselves in the thoughts and writings of these fathers, students will gain a greater understanding of the ideas that drove the founding of the American republic.

Course Requirements:

Students are expected to attend all classes, read all assigned texts and actively take part in class discussions. Students are expected to write two short response essays (3-5 pages) and take a midterm and a final exam. In writing essays, students must cite all ideas, paraphrasing, and quotes in footnotes and bibliography, using either Turabian (7^th edition) or the Chicago Manual of Style (15^th edition), including the movies themselves and any reviews of them that you have used. Attendance is required; there will be no make-ups for missed exams.

Grading:

Midterm exam                                             25%

Final exam                                                   25%

Essay one                                                     15%

Essay two                                                     15%

Participation and attendance                        20%

Course Schedule:

Class 1. Introduction

Class 2. John Adams

Class 3-4. George Washington

               

Class 5-6. Benjamin Franklin

               

Class 7-8. Thomas Jefferson

Class 9. Watch Movie: The Reluctant Revolutionaries: 1763-1774 (1997)

Class 10. Midterm Exam

Class 11-12. Alexander Hamilton

Class 13-14. James Madison

Class 15. Final Exam

Free Blacks, Seafaring Slaves and the Limits of Slave as a Category

Michael Jarvis, “Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), 585-622.

Arnold Sio, “Marginality and Free Colored Identity in Caribbean Slave Society,” in Slavery and Abolition (Sept. 1987).

Historians have paid great attention to the slave history in the 17^th and 18^th Atlantic world, but rarely have historians notice the changing relationships between masters and slaves, as well as the changing status of the African slaves. In this essay, focusing on Michael Jarvis’s Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783 and Arnold Sio’s Marginality and Free Colored Identity in Caribbean Slave Society, I will mainly discuss their historical approaches and their contributions in helping us to renew our understanding of slave history in Bermuda and Caribbean. 

       Historians usually assume slaves were in opposition to their masters due to their enslavement. While in fact, the relationships between them were not always the same. In Arnold A. Sio’s paper, he thinks the bipolar structure of Caribbean slave society simplifies the relationships between the slaves and their maters. According to him, their relationships could gradually alter through the genetic intermixture of the masters and the slaves, which produced an intermediate racial group and they were neither slaves nor masters. Unlike them, they were legally free, which “promoted questions regarding the boundaries of the respective groups, criteria of identification, and status allocation. In a society in which slavery was associated with race, a free coloured person was ‘a third party in a system built for two.’”[1] Then he points out, the people of free coloured “were marginal to Caribbean slave society: neither black nor white, neither African nor European, and neither slave nor free.”[2] In his opinion, it is very necessary for historians to treat them as free coloured people, because the categories of slave and master could not explain their complicated relationships. Moreover, in order to understand their identity, as well as their history and culture, according to Sio, historians should interpret them from the perspective of marginality. Following this approach, he examines three problematic or neglected issues that relate to the question of the identity of the free people of colour: culture and social organization, unity and group consciousness, and the style and goals of their political identity.

       Like Sio, Michael J. Jarvis also thinks the oppositional relationships between slaves and their masters had limitations. In Jarvis’s paper, he turns his attention to the Bermuda maritime community and examines the role of seafaring slaves in participating maritime business. In the 16^th and 17thth century, Somer Island Company imported African black and Indian laborers to the island, who taught the white English to cure tobacco for export. However, in the late 17^th century, there was a “maritime revolution,” which caused the economic shift of Bermuda community from field to sea and greatly transformed the island’s society and landscape. Jarvis points out, “from 1685 to 1700, Bermuda’s annual tobacco exports fell from more than half a million pounds to fewer than ten thousand.”[3] Accompanying with this big change, the Bermudians made many fleets and actively took part in the Atlantic-wide commercial expansion. According to him, “on the eve of the maritime transition in 1680, Bermuda owned only fourteen vessels. Seven years later this number had grown to forty-two, and by 1700, the island’s fleet included sixty sloops, six brigantines, and four ships. In 1716, all ninety-two Bermuda-registered vessels were sloops, and by 1750 the size of the fleet had grown and diversified to 115 vessels: eighty-one sloops, fourteen schooners, eighteen brigantines, and two others.”[4] Bermuda was a small island in the Atlantic Ocean and it lacked of white labor force, which caused the gradual integration of slaves into the maritime labor force, although it was risky for slave masters to use slaves as sailors, because they could run away in foreign ports.

For Bermuda’s white maritime masters, their aim was to create a captive labor force that would work for substandard rates. However, when African slaves became seafaring slaves and their legal status was admitted by the official, their destinies would be much more different. Until 1725, the Board of Trade admitted Bermudian slaves to be British subjects. With the official recognition of Bermudian slaves as British sailors, masters increased their use of slaves aboard ship with confidence. By the 1740s, blacks accounted for at least one quarter of the sailors on virtually every sloop. “On the eve of the American Revolution, slave sailors formed the backbone of Bermuda’s merchant fleet. At least 45 percent of Bermuda’s sailors were slaves, representing 38 percent or more of the adult male slave population.”[5] Historians usually assume “African and African-American slaves throughout the Americas were trapped in an exploitative system in which they were ubiquitously considered racially inferior, captive workers.”[6] Through examining the “maritime revolution” in Bermuda and its impact on the slaves, Jarvis tells us that the status of the slaves in Bermuda was changeable and the binary relationships of slaves and masters is insufficient for historians to interpret African slave history in Bermuda.

Focusing on Bermuda maritime community and Caribbean slave society, both Sio and Jarvis greatly challenge our understanding of slave history. Although they both work on slave history, their perspectives are totally new, which greatly help us to understand slave history in a new way. In Sio’s paper, he pays more attention to the free coloured people who purchased their freedom and became legally free slave in Caribbean. Compared with Sio, Jarvis turns his attention to the seafaring slave and maritime masters in Bermuda maritime community and tells us that the status of African slaves in Bermuda was not always the same. Instead, as the “maritime revolution” happened in Bermuda, African slaves became seafaring slaves and finally they became British citizens in Bermuda. Although they have done their case studies in different areas, they greatly questioned the usefulness of slave as a category, as well as the binary relationships between slaves and masters. Moreover, they tell us that traditional classifications of slave is too limited, which are still in need of further reflection for historians.

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[1] Arnold A. Sio, “Marginality and Free Colored Identity in Caribbean Slave Society,” in Slavery and Abolition (Sept. 1987), 668.

[2] Sio, Ibid., 669

[3] Michael Jarvis, “Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), 592.

[4] Jarvis, Ibid., 593.

[5] Jarvis, Ibid., 599.

[6] Jarvis, Ibid., 615.