The American Experience--The American Frontier

This seminar is an examination of the American Experience and an introduction to the Social Sciences (including History, Anthropology, and Sociology). Students will read and discuss several key primary documents regarding the idea of the Frontier in American history. Throughout American history, Americans have alternately struggled with and embraced the concept of the "frontier" in order to make sense of their experience in North America. This course will examine the American experience through historical and cultural ideas about the Frontier.

Organizing Concepts of the Course:

The Frontier--both the shifting places defined as the frontier and changing concepts of the frontier--has come to define for subsequent generations of Americans who "we" are and who is "over there" on the other side.

From the beginnings of Puritan settlement, English settlers established the "pale," a line which divided their own communities from what was "beyond the pale"--a nature which may have been the province of evil as well as Native populations who were thought of and dealt with in a variety of ways. The theme of the captivity narrative which plays out in early New England writing indicates the tensions over this definition of the frontier as something which both defined and threatened the community.

The frontier as place and as process emerges as powerful themes in American culture long after; think, for example, of Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, the Western dime novel, Twain's Roughing It, Henry Nash Smith's The Virgin Land, or Teddy Roosevelt's memoirs of life as a cowboy. By the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Jackson Turner's delineation of the Frontier Thesis provided a definition of what made Americans "American." Turner argued that encounters with wilderness on the frontier--and its human analogies, Native Americans--transformed Europeans into Americans. Not surprisingly, this definition of "American exceptionalism" emerged in other forms, through Western films, cowboy culture, and even in the Space Race and in American foreign policy.

Within debates over the Frontier run parallel debates about the emergence of American individualism; the lone cowboy, silhouetted against a Western sky, is the most common symbol of American self-reliance and self-definition. The American search for self led to the exploration of other "frontiers" which could not be confused with the West as a place. The struggle of the writers of the American Renaissance, the search for social justice in the face of the Great Depression, the psychotropic and psychedelic experimentation of the 1960s, and the efforts of Native Americans to maintain tribal identities reflect these forces at work in American culture.

More recently there has been a pointed examination of the impact on American life of the Frontier idea. This has especially focused on Turner's thesis, whose delineation of the frontier as a "line between civilization and savagery" is certainly problematic in a pluralistic society made up of people from both sides of that "line." The course will end with an examination of the challenges of the idea of a Frontier in American experience.

Course Requirements:

All students are required to attend class meetings and take part actively in class discussions. Written work will require students to synthesize readings, lectures, and discussions. Seminar participants must also read and assimilate assigned readings, and be prepared to discuss the readings on the schedule listed below. Students will submit all assignments on time; late assignments will only be accepted by prior arrangement with the professor.

A Note About Academic Integrity: Integrity is fundamental to the academic enterprise. It is violated by acts such as borrowing or purchasing term papers, essays, reports, and other written assignments; using concealed notes or crib sheets during examinations; copying others' work and submitting it as one's own; and misappropriating the knowledge of others. The sources from which one derives one's ideas, statements, terms, and data must be fully and specifically acknowledged in the appropriate form; failure to do so, intentionally or unintentionally, constitutes plagiarism. Violations of academic integrity may result in failure in the course and in disciplinary actions with penalties such as suspension or dismissal from the College.

Contacting the Professor:

My office is in 2N 203, and my office phone is 718-982-2869; I have office hours Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:15 to 3:15, Tuesdays 1:20-2:30, and by appointment. You may also reach me via email at lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu.

Assignments:

Nine Writing Projects: 10% each of final grade (80% total)

(You will complete nine, of which the eight highest grades will count toward your final grade, on the condition that all have been submitted and have received passing grades)

Participation in Class Discussions/Activities: 20% of final grade

Required Texts (starred * items for purchase at New York Book Exchange, Victory Boulevard):

    *Kate Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations
    Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"
    *Mary Rowlandson, The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
    Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, The Journals of Lewis and Clark (selections)
    *Henry David Thoreau, Walden
    Catherine Haun, "A Woman's Trip Across the Plains in 1849"
    *Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain
    *Peter Guralnick, Searching for Robert Johnson
    *John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies
    John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath (film)
    Philip Kaufman, The Right Stuff (film)
    Johnathan Wacks, The Powwow Highway (film)

Course Schedule:

Week One: Introduction to the "Frontier"
	Monday, August 30	What is History? What is the Frontier?
	Wednesday, September 1	Where Is the Frontier?: A Landscape History of the Frontier; discuss Turner
	Readings: Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."

Week Two: New World Encounters
	Monday, September 6	CSI Closed--No Classes
	Wednesday, September 8	New World Encounters; Exercise One (The Frontier as an American Idiom) Due.
	Readings: Rowlandson, Narrative of the Captivity

Week Three: Captivity
	Monday, September 13	Discuss Rowlandson, Narrative of the Captivity
	Wednesday, September 15	LANDSCAPE READING TRIP TO HIGH ROCK PARK
	Readings: Lewis and Clark, The Journals (selections)

Week Four: Conquering the West
	Monday, September 20	CSI Closed--No Classes
	Tuesday, September 21	Classes follow Monday schedule; Discussion of Lewis and Clark, The Journals;
	Wednesday, September 22	Continue discussion of Lewis and Clark, The Journals; Exercise Two (Encounters & Exploration) Due.
	Readings: Lewis and Clark, The Journals (selections); Thoreau, Walden (selections)

Week Five: Being Conquered by the West
	Monday, September 27	Discuss Thoreau, Walden (selections)
	Wednesday, September 29	TRIP TO THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; Exercise Three (Discovering "Nature") Due.
	Readings: Selections from Thoreau, Walden; Haun, "A Woman's Trip Across the Plains"; Zitkala-Sa, "Indian Childhood"

Week Six: American Expansion
	Monday, October 4	Discuss Haun, "A Woman's Trip Across the Plains"
	Wednesday, October 6	Discuss Zitkala-Sa, "Indian Childhood"
	Readings: Haun, "A Woman's Trip Across the Plains"; Zitkala Sa, "Indian Childhood"

Week Seven: Making it Home
	Monday, October 11	CSI Closed--No Classes
	Wednesday, October 13	Classes follow Monday schedule; Citybuilding as an American idiom; Exercise Four (Women's Wests) Due
	Readings: Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"; Austin, Land of Little Rain

Week Eight: From Victorianism to Modernism
	Monday, October 18	Salvage Ethnography and the "Primitive"
	Wednesday, October 20	TRIP TO NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
	Readings: Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"; Austin, Land of Little Rain

Week Nine: Modernism and the West
	Monday, October 25	Discuss NMAI trip
	Wednesday, October 27	Discussion of Austin, Land of Little Rain; Exercise Five (NMAI) Due.
	Readings: Austin, Land of Little Rain; Guralnick, Searching for Robert Johnson

Week Ten: The South as Frontier
	Monday, November 1	American Blues--and In-Class celebration of el Dia de los Muertos
	Wednesday, November 3	Discuss Guralnick, Searching for Robert Johnson; Exercise Six (Austin and Modernism) Due.
	Readings: Guralnick, Searching for Robert Johnson

Week Eleven: The Jazz City
	Monday, November 8	Looking Backward (Towards New York City); Exercise Seven (The Blues) Due.
	Wednesday, November 10	ARCHITECTURAL WALKING TOUR OF MANHATTAN/BROOKLYN BRIDGE
	Readings: Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies

Week Twelve: The Depression West
	Monday, November 15	View and discuss Ford, Grapes of Wrath
	Wednesday, November 17	View and discuss Ford, Grapes of Wrath
	Readings: Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies

Week Thirteen: Depression West
	Monday, November 22	Discuss Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies
	Wednesday, November 24	World War II in the West
	Readings: Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies

Week Fourteen: The Frontier as Cold War Metaphor
	Monday, November 29	The West as Cold War Metaphor; Exercise Eight (Steinbeck/Ford) Due.
	Wednesday, December 1	View The Right Stuff

Week Fifteen: The Mythic West
	Monday, December 6	View Wacks, Powwow Highway
	Wednesday, December 8	Discuss Wacks, Powwow Highway

Finals Week: Final Papers Due
	Wednesday, December 15	Exercise Nine (Powwow Highway) Due.