AMST 300: Comparative American Identities

• Students design their own final project with extensive one-on-one help with instructors.
• Uses Detroit as a case study, and includes a walking tour of the city.
• Interdisciplinary approach allow students to examine oral histories, fiction, photography, music, and feature films.
• Extensive discussion of Detroit native Kevin Boyle’s fascinating history of the Ossian Sweet case in Detroit
• Link to course flyer (pdf)

In this course, an introduction to American Studies as a discipline and as a major, students will be introduced to a broad range of perspectives and methodologies using interdisciplinary study as a major tool for analysis and meaning-making. In the course we will attempt to answer--as well as complicate--this fundamental question: what does it mean to be an American? From its inception, American culture, and thus the identity of its inhabitants, has been shaped by layers of encounters among diverse groups of people—such as the original encounters between the first colonists and indigenous Americans and the later encounters between established immigrants and those continuing to arrive as the centuries ensued. Using an historical lens, this course will concentrate on these encounters in the years 1870 to 1920. This period is ideal for examining questions about American identity and culture. A time of massive societal upheaval as well as substantial movements and meetings of diverse peoples on the American landscape, this period captures an American culture shaped by mobility across geographic as well as ideological spaces. During these years, the United States was experiencing a second wave of immigration that resulted in nearly 26 million newcomers. In related developments, industrialization and urbanization greatly accelerated during this period. Growth of cities resulted not only from new immigration but also from migration from rural areas, including the movement of African Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the North. Furthermore, the late nineteenth century saw the migration of hundreds of thousands of Americans, including recent immigrants, to the West. The course therefore examines immigrant and migrant encounters, including encounters with indigenous peoples, in two spaces: the urban center and the western frontier. We will use Detroit as a case study for the urban experience and hope to include a walking tour as part of the course.

Exploring a variety of perspectives, with an emphasis on narratives by and about immigrants and migrants, we will use the overarching theme of borderlands. We conceive borderlands to represent places where cultures meet and clash and where identities are negotiated based on myriad and sometimes competing values. The borderlands theme also speaks to students’ personal experiences and reflects the University of Michigan-Dearborn itself, a type of borderland, situated between diverse spaces and cultures. We will use this borderlands theme to discuss issues of nationhood and citizenship while emphasizing the diversity of American culture. At the same time, we will consider some core values and ideas uniting Americans both in historical and contemporary society. Using the borderland framework we also will examine the themes of self vs. “others,” urban space vs. rural space, and myth (and myth-making) vs. reality. Students will be invited to share their own stories and perspectives about what it means to be an American.

The sources we use in the course are varied not only in their medium (text, visual, auditory, film) and period (historical and contemporary), but also in their disciplinary perspectives, drawing mainly from the humanities and social sciences. Because we will be investigating American culture in the present as well as the past, we do not intend for the course to be a comprehensive historical study of the turn-of-the-century period; instead, we will use sources from and about this period as a point of departure to help answer our fundamental question about what it means to be an American.

Course requirements will include weekly short informal writing assignments, one major midterm paper, and a final paper whereby students will investigate an issue that interests them. Students will be invited to seek out and share fresh narratives of the American experience.

Other Topics and Readings include:

What is an American?
Readings by DeToqueville, Frederick Jackson Turner, Margaret Mead

The Theme of Borderlands
Readings by Rodriguez, Aria Torgovnick “On Being White, Female and Born in Bensonhurst,”

Outsider Narratives
Discussion of the Barry Levinson film, Avalon

Transformations in Turn-of-the Century America
Readings by Nasaw, “The City at the Turn of the Century”

Analyzing Immigrant Narratives
Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans

Primary Perspectives on Ethnicity and Assimilation
Historical speeches and primary documents such as:
Immigration Restriction League, 1894
German American Attacks “False Americanism,” 1889
Theodore Roosevelt Advocates “Americanism,” 1915
Governor of Iowa Proclaims English the State’s Official Language, 1917

Americanization Campaigns
Focus on Detroit Night Schools, “Americanizing a City”

Gender, Class, and Work in the Progressive Era
Triangle Fire documents
Lillian Wald, The House on Henry Street
McGerr, Fierce Discontent (excerpt)

The Rise of the City and its Neighborhoods: seeing Detroit through photography and architecture
Babson, Working Detroit (excerpts)

Cultural Life in the Turn-of-the-Century City: Art and Music
Examples of popular music

African American Migration to the North, African American Identity
Readings by Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (excerpt)

Race and Space
Walking Tour of Detroit

The West as Contested Space, Native American Identity
Native American narratives by Luther Standing Bear, An Indian Boy at Boarding School

Negotiating Identities in Fiction
Willa Cather, My Antonia