THE 1920s

I. Prohibition Law:

                     A. 18^th Amendment

(prohibiting manufacture, sale, transport)

                     B. Volstead Act

(making the 18^th a “bone dry” amendment)

                     C. "Five and Ten Law"

(1929, 5 year, $10,000 penalty)

III. Prohibition Failure:

Why Not More of a Success?

A. Minimal Enforcement:

B. Unrealistic Expectations:

C. Corruption:

D. Policy without Authority:

III. Repeal:

A. 21^st Amendment (Dec. 5, 1933)

         B. The Constitution and Federal Intervention

IV. Progress and Decline in the 1920s:

A.   20s as Decade of Cultural/Economic Flowering:

1.     Consumerism:

                    

                     Edward Bernays=father of modern pr

2.     Movies:

Warner Bros. Pictures inc. in 1923

MGM formed in 1924

Fox Film Corporation founded in 1912

         (became 20^th Century Fox in 1935)

United Artists, formed in 1919

(by stars Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Charlie Chaplin, and director D.W. Griffith)

3.      Harlem Renaissance

4.     “Lost Generation”

5.     The “New Woman”

B.      1920s as a Decade of Ignorance,

Cultural Decay

1.     Influenza

--killed 25 million worldwide

(700,000 in U.S.)

Historian Alfred Crosby:

The virus “killed more humans than any other disease in a period of similar duration in the history of the world.”

2.     World Economic Chaos:

Ø  England=industrial problems: General Strike of 1926

         --2 million unemployed by 1930

         --3 million unemp. in 1933

Ø  Depression

         One billion per year in reparations

Hyperinflation in Germany:

                    

1 dollar=9000 marks (Jan. of 1923)

1 dollar=4.2 trillion marks

(Nov. of 1923)

                    

--one loaf of bread=580 billion marks

3.     Urban Racial Unrest: Chicago, 1919

…48 recorded lynchings in 1917

…78 recorded lynchings in 1919

4.     Nativism:

a.     National Origins Act of 1924

b.     Sacco and Vanzetti

5.     The KKK

6.     Scopes Monkey Trial

VII. Significance:

EXAM #1 ON TUESDAY 5/1

As we discussed twice in class, the exam is on Tuesday, May 1.

ANOTHER PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT...WOMAN SUFFRAGE

“Suffering for the Vote”

I. Introduction:
Why be against Woman Suffrage?
II. Suffering for the Vote
A. The Seneca Falls Convention
B. Women’s Christian Temperance Union
C. National American Woman Suffrage Assoc.
(Carrie Catt and Florence Kelley)
D. The Great War and the Vote
E. The National Women’s Party
(Alice Paul)
F. Impact of The Nineteenth Amendment
1. Sheppard-Towner
2. Birth Control
III. Conclusion/Significance:

WORLD WAR ONE

--The Great War--
I. Introduction: Wm Jennings Bryan and War:
II. Origins of War:
--The Presidents--
1. T.R.
2. Taft and Dollar Diplomacy
3. Wilson
--Bloody Alliances—
Triple Alliance(France, GB, Russia)
Triple Entente (GR, Austro-Hungary, Italy)
III. The Great War:
A. The Trenches
B. Trenches in the Sea (Lusitania, Sussex)
C. Peace and Preparedness
D. WAR
IV. The End of War:
A. Wilson's 14 Points:
B. Versailles:
C. Spanish Flu of 1918
V. Significance:

PROGRESSIVISM

ARE THESE 2 QUOTES CONTRADICTORY?

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus"

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism...The one absolutely certain way of bringing the nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
Theodore Roosevelt, 1915

The Progressive Era:
I. Origins

A. Populism:
Farmers' Alliance
Omaha Platform:
--inflationary currency policy
--graduated income tax
--direct government ownership of railroad and telegraph industries
--redistribution of railroad owned lands

B. Hull House—1889
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/10870.html



II. A New Mindset:
Progressivism Defined:
Progressivism was a series of movements designed to combat the ills of industrialism. Some progressives also wanted to control the behavior of the working classes.


Stanley Schultz, Univ. of Wisconsin:
• Government should be more active
• Social problems are susceptible to government legislation and action
• Throw money at the problem
• The world is “perfectible”


III. Progressive Movements:
A. Anti-Trust
Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890
“Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.”

B. Anti-Lynching (Ida B. Wells-Barnett)


C. Good Government Movement
--17th Amendment=direct election of senators
--referendums and recalls

D. Consumer Protection: The Jungle
Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906

IV. Progressivism in Practice:

TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FIRE OF 1911

A. The ILGWU Strike:
B. Fire on the Factory Floor
C. Reporters and the Visibility of Triangle
1. "Love Affair in Mid-Air"
2. Mortillalo and Zito
D. The Public Response

INTERVIEW ASSIGNMENT DUE TUESDAY

Interviewer Name: ___________________/ INTERVIEW GUIDELINES/ Due: 4/17/12

Find someone who is at least 50 years old and an immigrant to this country. Do not interview a spouse or yourself. You may interview a parent or grandparent.

Gather the information with as little of your own input as possible. What you should include is not your interpretation of what is said. Instead, copy direct quotes of what is said: BAD: “Subject said she was unhappy at first.” GOOD: “I was so unhappy at first.”

If the respondent agrees, you may record the interview; you must bring the transcript on paper.
This may be handwritten. You may bring the interview in another language.

Be prepared for your interview to stray away from the questions below. This is the nature of oral history. Embrace it. Some of the best stories are answers to questions unasked.

Name of Interview Subject: (optional)

1. Where were you born? What was it like in your country of origin? Have you been back?

2. At approximately what age did you move to the United States?

3. Do you remember, or have you been told, why you left your country of origin?(push)

4. Was the decision to leave your own or were you pressured to leave by someone else? Explain.

5. What made you come to the United States instead of somewhere else? (pull)

6. Did you deal with immigration officials or anyone else in government as part of your journey or at some point after your arrival? How was that experience?

7. What difficulties did you face during the journey?

8. What difficulties did you face in the first years after arriving?

9. Did you find a community of other immigrants when you arrived? What was that like?

10. What do you think are the biggest problems facing immigrants today?

Excerpts From The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Mt. Carmel High School


Upton Sinclair was a famous author who wrote The Jungle. You will be reading an excerpt from this novel. The excerpt is divided into 3 sections. Summarize each section in a paragraph for a total of 3 paragraphs.

Section 1-Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss- crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails, – they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the "hoisters," as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham's architects had not built the killing room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor, – for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting, – sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

Section 2-There was meat that was taken out of pickle and would often be found sour, and they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant – a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor – a process known to the workers as "giving them thirty per cent." Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade – there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes – they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "California hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them – that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"

Section 3-Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions- a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one – there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water – and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage – but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatin to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.

INDUSTRIAL EXPANSION

Today, we discuss industrialism in the U.S.

Try to name an area of your life not now impacted by industrialism.




“This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times…It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.”
Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

Why does such wretched poverty often seem to accompany vast economic growth?


The Age of Unparalleled Industrial Expansion:


How much growth was there?

Handout: 1860 vs. 1900

1. Write your name on the back of the handout.
Look at the numbers, but do not say anything to your neighbor. Do, however, write extensively on the paper. Write down any idea that comes to mind, connecting them to the fact that spurred the thought. Circle. Draw lines. Write. Fill the page with your ideas.
Do this first part without conferring with your neighbor.

2. Pass the paper to someone in a row far far away.

3. With the paper now in front of you, choose a couple of the ideas that you think are most compelling or brilliant. Comment on them, asking questions, expanding the conclusions of the original author, or remarking in any way that you think will push the conversation on paper forward.

4. Pass the paper again…continue the conversation.


5. Get the thing back to the original author.



The Age of Unparalleled Industrial Expansion:


Why was there such vast growth so rapidly in the U.S.?

1. War: Why would war encourage industrial growth?

Example #1: Morrill Act (1862)

Example #2: Railroads:
1860: 30,000 miles of r.r.
1864: Congress grants 131 million acres
1910: 240,000 miles of railway

2. Resources: land, raw materials, people,
ideas=booooooom!
…in 1800 it took 56 man-hours per acre to raise wheat.
…in 1900, it required only 15 man-hours per acre.



1864: 872,000 tons of iron and steel
1919: more than 24 million tons

1860: 20 million tons of coal
1910: 500 million tons of coal

1860: 500,000 barrels of petroleum
1910: 209 million barrels of petroleum


3. Integration:

a. Horizontal Integration:
--monopolize one part of the productive process
Example: meatpacking plants

b. Vertical Integration:
--monopolize all elements of productive process

Example: Andrew Carnegie: mining iron ore, own blast furnaces (factories), own shops, own ships, own railroad and rail lines


4. Mindset:

a. Small Government is Best:
Laissez faire: “let it do”

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
“the invisible hand”

b. Aggressive Business Mentality:
The Robber Barons

Notable examples:
• John D. Rockefeller
• Andrew Carnegie


Andrew Carnegie: “It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced”.

• J.P. Morgan


• Jay Gould: “Mephistopheles of Wall
Street”
(bribed Grant’s brother in law for gold
secrets)
• Cornelius Van Derbilt:
(steamships and railroads: $100 million)


Gentlemen:
You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you.
Sincerely,
CVD

c. Justifying the New World:
How do you justify the world when fabulous wealth and wretched poverty exist so closely together?
William Graham Sumner:
Social Darwinism


The product of all that wealth so quickly is the NEW CITY,
The New Impoverished City

Rapid Urbanization:
1860: 25 million Americans lived in rural areas

6.2 million in what the Bureau of the Census
called "urban territory" (2500 or more)

1910: 42 million of the 92 million in urban areas



Tenement Buildings:
1879 NYC law declared that every room must have a window and every floor must have a bathroom

Contamination:
1877-Philadelphia: 82,000 privies

Boston Harbor was “one vast cesspool, a threat to all
the towns it washed.”

Crime-Filled:
Murder Rate: 1266 in 1881
7340 in 1898
(an increase of 25 per million people, to 107 per million people)

Women in Workforce:
1/7th of the Paid workforce
(2.6 million of the 17.4 million)
500,000 married, yet they were paid less than
men, especially after 1900 when the “family wage” idea spread.

Immigration:
Newspaper in 1900: "It is well known that nearly every foreigner…goes armed. Some carry revolvers, while many others hide huge ugly knives upon their person."

Senator William Bruce (Maryland):
Immigrants are “indigestible lumps in
the national stomach.”

1890-1900: 3.5 million
1900-1910: 7 million
Ellis Island:

“Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day. The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit-stands, while his black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in which a few years ago he was an intruder.”
Jacob Riis on social fluidity

Child Labor:
1900: 700,000 10 and 15 year olds in workforce.

--Monangah, West Virginia, 1907:
Martin Honick


Children Working in the cotton mills (Tennessee Valley)
"They were children only in age…little, solemn pygmy people, whom poverty had canned up and compressed…the juices of childhood had been pressed our…no talking in the mill…no singing…they were more dead than alive when at seven o clock, the Steam Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home…in a speechless, haggard, over-worked procession.

What if you do not want to justify the disparity between rich and poor? What could you do?
(next is Progressivism)

JACOB RIIS HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVE READING GUIDE:

How to Read How the Other Half Lives:
1. Read the book quickly. There’s no need to read every word or remember every story.
2. However, as you read, focus on individual scenes, descriptions, or characters who stand out to you. What makes those parts of the book so gripping? Write down individual page numbers to enhance our discussion.
3. Read the following discussion questions before reading the book. As you read, look for answers to these issues. You will not be turning these in, but the questions will guide our discussion of the book.
Based on the first chapter, describe tenement life.
What is impoverished about tenement life?
Why do you think Riis writes this work?
What impact do the photos have on your reading of this work? What does Riis hope to achieve through images?
As you read, look for evidence of Riis’ views on assimilation. Does he seem to think assimilation is possible?

RECONSTRUCTION OUTLINE

I. Reconstruction

A. PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION
1. Lincoln
2. Johnson

B. CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION
1. RADICALS IN CONGRESS
Thaddeus Stevens & Charles Sumner
“The foundations of their institutions
must be broken up and re-laid, or all our blood and treasure will have been spent in vain.” (Stevens)

Frederick Douglass (1865):
"Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot."


2. MODERATES IN CONGRESS
Wade-Davis Bill (ironclad oath)
--passed Congress at end of 1864:
--sent to the President.
What are his options?

3. Freedmen's Bureau

C. JOHNSON'S “RESTORATION”
--Black Codes

D. RADICALS STRIKE BACK
1. First Civil Rights Bill
2. First Reconstruction Acts
3. 14th Amendment
4. Tenure of Office Act
5. Fifteenth Amendment

E. The Compromise of 1877
1. Hayes versus Tilden
2. The “End” of Reconstruction


The Souls of Black Folk (1901) W.E.B. DuBois:
"For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods...he may not leave the plantation of his birth...in the whole rural South the black farmers are...bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated and servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis...The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."

DUE THURSDAY

Simply write out your own statement that says, "I read the syllabus."
Sign it, and bring it to class.

COURSE SYLLABUS

Course Description: We will examine the political, social, and cultural foundations of American history from 1870 to the Present. We will cover Reconstruction, the problems of an increasingly urban and industrialized society, and the United States in World Affairs.

Course Reading: Course Reading:
1. Philip Caputo, Rumor of War
3. Robert McElvaine, Down and Out in the Great Depression
4. Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
5. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
6. Recommended: Paul Johnson, History of the American People, or Firsthand
America, or any textbook on U.S. history

Grading Scale:
5% Debate on Dropping of the Bomb
10% Participation
5% Two Interviews
25% Writing About Civil Rights
25% Exam #1
30% Exam #2 (final exam)

The Blog: If you have questions or comments about this class, or if you want to see the course reader or the syllabus online, just go to http://springhistory232.blogspot.com
You need to sign in to this blog this week.
You will also have short readings on the blog. I will announce these in class.

Attendance:
Just to be clear, to succeed on tests and papers you really should be in class. That’s just common sense, right? To pass this class, you may not miss more than two classes. If you miss that third class meeting, you are missing 15% of the quarter. You cannot do that and pass.

Being Prompt:
Get to class on time. Why does that matter? First, it sends the wrong message to your principal grader(that’s me). As much as we in the humanities would like you to believe that these courses are objective (at what time of day did the Battle of the Marne begin?), that is not entirely the case. If you send your principal grader the message that you don’t mind missing the first few minutes and disturbing others in the class, don’t expect to be given the benefit of the doubt when the tests and papers roll around. Does that sound mean? It’s not meant to, but just remember, your actions send signals. Being late also means that someone who already has everything out and is ready and is involved in the discussion has to stop, move everything over, get out of the chair to let you by, pick up the pencil you drop, let you borrow paper, run to the bathroom because you spilled the coffee, and so on. It’s rude. There’s an old saying: better two hours early than two minutes late. Old sayings are good.
So, what are the consequences of persistent tardiness? What do you think they should be? Remember that 10% participation? You are eligible for that grade if you are on time. And no, I’m not the jackass who watches for you to be late that one time and stands at the door and points in your face. If you are late a few (that means three) times, you will lose the entire 10% participation grade. One time tardiness is not a problem precisely because it is not persistent. It’s an accident. But if you are late several times, you will not be able to receive a participation grade above 50%.

The Unforgivable Curse:
Speaking of one time issues, there is something that is so severe, so awful, that if it happens one time, just one time, no warning, no “oh hey I noticed this and if you could stop it that’d be super,” you will automatically lose all 10 percent of the Participation grade. Any guesses? C’mon, you must have some idea. No, it’s not your telephone ringing. If that happens, it’ll just be slightly funny and we’ll move on. It’s a mistake and not intentional, and the increased heart rate and extra sweat on your brow from you diving headfirst into an overstuffed book bag to find a buried phone that is now playing that new Cristina Aguilera ringtone is punishment enough for you. So, what is it, this unforgivable crime? Texting. If you take out your phone one time to send or receive messages you will automatically lose 10% of your course grade. That means, if you receive a final grade of 85%, it will drop to 75%. If you receive a final grade of 75%, it will become a 65%. Why is that? The phone ringing is an accident. Texting is on purpose and is rude. It, in fact, is beyond rude. It wreaks of the worst of our current society. It bespeaks the absolutely vile desire we all have to never separate from our technological tether for even a moment. It sends your fellow classmates and your teacher the signal that you have better things to do. Checking your phone during class is like listening to a friend’s story and right in the middle turning away and talking to someone else. Oh, and guess what, this room is designed to give your teacher a perfect view of you with a phone beneath the table; is that text message really worth 10% of the quarter grade? Plus, the way our brains work, you need to fully immerse yourself, to tune your brain into an optimal, flowing machine (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s incredible book Flow) that can grasp and can let itself go. Students now tend to see school as a stopover on their way to a career. Brothers and sisters, that’s deadly! I wish that I could pay for you all to quit your jobs and just focus on the mind. I can’t yet do that, but if I could I would, because it’d be worth every penny. Devoting time to the mind and to thinking deeply about your world will change who you are and how you approach your future, your family, your job, and your everything. Is that overstated? I believe it to be true. So, until my stock choices really take off so that I can pay all of your bills, promise me one thing: when you are in class or preparing for class, you have to be fully here. Oh crap, now it’s going to sound like a hippy professor from the 1960s: “I mean, like, be here man, just be here.” Maybe the hippies were on to something. Devote yourself fully to your classes by unplugging from the outside world for a while.

In-Class Essay on Civil Rights:
In the later part of the quarter, we will be writing an in-class essay on some aspect of the Civil Rights movements in the 1950s and 1960s. We will have several readings, lectures, and class discussions leading up to this assignment.

Interviews:
You have the opportunity to conduct two interviews this quarter. I will give you more details in class, but basically, you should begin to consider who your two subjects will be. For the first interview, you will need to find someone who is at least 50 and decided to immigrate to this country.
For the second interview, you will be talking to someone who remembers the war in Vietnam. This is not a veteran of the war, necessarily, but anyone who was alive and thinking at that time. For both interviews, I’ll give you a handout and guidelines to direct your interview.

Participation:
You do not need to be the person who speaks out the most, asks the most questions, or comes up with the most brilliant historical arguments to receive full credit in participation. If you are in class and on time, discuss the issues that we raise, avoid the temptation to nod off, to leave early, or to text people during class (the three easiest ways to lose credit), and in general act like you care, then you will receive a good participation grade! Just being here does not guarantee a 100% participation grade, since you must be regularly actively involved for that to be possible.

Academic Integrity
The principles of truth and integrity are recognized as fundamental to a community of teachers and scholars. The University expects that both faculty and students will honor these principles and in so doing will protect the integrity of all academic work and student grades. Students are expected to do all work assigned to them without unauthorized assistance and without giving unauthorized assistance. Faculty have the responsibility of exercising care in the planning and supervision of academic work so that honest effort will be encouraged and positively reinforced.
http://www.csub.edu/studentconduct/documents/academicintegrity.pdf

Course Schedule:
4/3 Intro/Intro to Reconstruction/Jourdan Anderson
4/5 Reconstruction/HOMEWORK DUE TODAY: SIGNED STATEMENT

4/10 Industrialism
4/12 New Imperialism/1890s/How the Other Half Lives Reading Due

4/17 Progressivism/Interview #1 Due
4/19 World War I/Prohibition

4/24 Woman Suffrage/ Harlem Renaissance
4/26 Exam #1/More on the 1920s

5/1 The Great Depression
5/3 The New Deal/McElvaine must be read by today

5/8 From Quarantine to War
5/10 Bomb Debate/Post War Conformity

5/15 The Cold War
5/17 Civil Rights/Coming of Age in Mississippi Reading Due

5/22 New Rights Movements/Writing About Civil Rights Prep.
5/24 Writing About Civil Rights(in class essay)

5/29 Political life from Ike to LBJ/Interview #2 Due
5/31 War in Vietnam/Rumor of War Reading Due

6/5 Student Unrest and Vietnam
6/7 Watergate and the Turbulent 70s

FINAL EXAM Thursday, June 14, 5-7:30

REMEMBER, although this syllabus is the “law” of the class, I reserve the right to change it at any time to suit the particular needs of our class. If I must do so, it will always be in your best interest, and I’ll always advise you as soon as possible.