This course is an introduction to American Studies life stories as presented by the individuals involved to give us insights into "America." By looking closely at these American lives, students will meet people of various periods and backgrounds and become familiar with important developments, influential ideas, conflicting images, and realities in American society.

A broad perspective of men and women on their jobs. Discussion of the ways in which Americans have been told they can "make it," looking at their actual experience at work and their prospects for the next decade or so. Writings by ordinary working people are discussed, commentaries by historians and sociologists of business and work examined, and several films used

Students will be introduced to the development of the city of Philadelphia as seen from a neighborhood perspective. From Colonial times to the present, neighborhood and community are the primary means by which the city's residents experienced the growth and change of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Using archival resources over the World Wide Web, as well as the rich historical legacy of the region's museums, students will explore the development of the city's neighborhoods.

Cross-listed with Geography and Urban Studies 0065.

This class is designed as a survey course which looks at the cultural, historical, technological, industrial, artistic, and mythic attributes of American Music, primarily from after the Civil War until the present. The 20th century is highlighted, with special emphasis from the "Tin Pan Alley" era to today by investigating recorded popular music beginning in 1908 and by looking at genres and styles. Definitions of "American" music and "Popular" music will be discussed and analyzed. Movie musicals, soundies, concert films, and videos will be studied as well as purely audio recordings. Attention will be paid to socio-historical ramifications of American popular music as a cultural force and cultural expression.

Honors section of American Studies C051.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparations.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparations.

A special topics course, used for material and approaches to American Studies that are either experimental in nature or not yet a regular part of the curriculum. Course content varies each year and students can obtain a description of the current version at the American Studies office.

Technology has been called the dominant force in American civilization, a part of our everyday material lives, work, beliefs, and behavior. Explores the way American values have shaped technology and how technology has shaped American life, placing contemporary problems in a historical perspective. Materials drawn from social history, literature, visual arts, film, advertising, and polemical prose.

This course explores the importance of place in determining the character of American culture. A variety of materials, visual and textual, are used to examine the way our lives are shaped by the home, the design of the city, and the suburban and regional areas beyond the city. The extent to which places hold their identities in the face of mass culture and megalopolis is also explored.

Cross-listed with Geography and Urban Studies 0274.

Themes include the effect of the arts in America; their importance as part of culture; what different art forms at the same time have in common and how they influence each other. Examines how being an artist in America has changed over the last 100 or more years through representative figures within an interdisciplinary context including literature, photography, music, architecture, and painting.

A study of major texts, fiction and non-fiction, which had a significant impact on public discourse and on the civilization of the United States. The social and historical contexts of the books will be discussed and major issues--for example, efforts to define freedom and democracy, the status of the individual, the role of the larger community--will be stressed.

A study of major issues concerning immigrant experiences in the U.S., such as legislation regarding immigration, anti-immigrant social and political movements, immigrant efforts to assimilate (or to resist assimilation, or to accommodate to one degree or another). Students will be provided with basic history of the subject. They will also read accounts of life in the U.S. by immigrants and fiction about immigrant experiences. Most of the course will stress twentieth-century immigration. The main goal is to have students develop a sound knowledge of this crucial, complex subject.

This course will examine the relationship between our legal system and American society. Does the law shape social mores or is it merely a reflection of them? What role should the court play in protecting individual rights? We will study the evolution of American jurisprudence in the area of abortion, affirmative action, freedom of expression, separation of church and state, and examine emerging areas of legal debate including the right to same sex marriage, the legalization of prostitution and the constitutionality of Megan’s law.

Honors section of American Studies 0109.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparations.

A summary of historical, social, political, and cultural developments with regard to African American experience in the U.S. Various themes, such as the enslavement, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Harlem Renaissance, Garveyism, the great migration, depression and labor unions, the New Deal and the WPA, African-American involvement in the nation's wars, Civil Rights, Black Power, black arts movement, and Black Panthers are examined in an interdisciplinary context.

American society's reaction to the UFO phenomenon. Analyzes UFOs and the controversy that has surrounded them by studying the attitudes of various groups toward the phenomenon, including the military, the scientific community, the national UFO organizations, the "lunatic fringe," cult groups, charlatans, the entertainment industry, and the press.

An examination of images and roles of women in American culture. Using fiction, poetry, and autobiography, we develop an understanding of stereotypes and myths and we relate these images to the real-life experiences of American women. The readings include all classes and many ethnic groups, and focus primarily on the twentieth century. Cross-listed with Women’s Studies W206.

This course explores the effects of McCarthyism and the Cold War on American intellectual and cultural life in the 1950s. It will also examine dissents from the consensus that gave rise to the rebellions and counterculture of the 1960s. Special attention will be paid to McCarthyism and the origins of the civil rights movement. Renewed stirrings of discontent amongst women will be considered, as well as the start of a new left and counterculture represented by the Beat Generation.

Many see the 1960s as a time America fell apart—drugs, sex, anti-Americanism, and the loss of the work ethic. Yet the 60s produced the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War Movement, Vatican II, and the Counterculture. And then there was the music! Martin Luther King, the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, and the astronauts—fame and untimely death. What was it like when America still had hope ? Today, no politician runs as a "sixties person" (though they run away from it). But the world of your mother and father, and of all of us, is a product of those times. This course will explore this forbidden decade in a critical, curious, and friendly fashion. What happened? How did it change us as a society? and not change us? Why are so many still so angry about all that or miss it! What was the energy back then that forty years later still burns?

An overview of photography in America from 1850, emphasizing its relation to society and the arts. Photography in factual and artistic forms explored through representative photographers and movements, including: Civil War and frontier photography; the work of Muybridge, Riis and Hine, and Walker Evans and the F SA photographers of the 1930s; Alfred Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand; and portrait, street, and snapshot photography, abstraction, narrative, and fantasy (Frank, Arbus, Winogrand, Michals, etc.). Slides and readings on photography and American culture, and on how the camera affects our seeing and thinking. May be cross-listed with Anthropology 0332 or Art History 0108.

An examination of the place of documentary films within American culture, beginning with the early efforts of Robert Flaherty and continuing to the present. Topics include: the documentary of the 1930s and the New Deal; the evolution of documentary styles: the social power of documentary film; the subject in documentary; the self-conscious documentary.

This course will explore the role of media in the development of American popular culture, with particular emphasis on the cultural transformations brought about by mass medic after 1880. Historical analysis will demonstrate the profound shift in media roles within the past century; from media expressions of popular culture before 1889, to media as generators of popular culture after that point. A by-product of this analysis will be the formulation of a critical definition of mass media in terms of a specific relationship between the media and the audience. Cross-listed with History 0174.

Students will be introduced to the development of the city of Philadelphia as seen from a neighborhood perspective. From Colonial times to the present, neighborhood and community are the primary means by which the city's residents experienced the growth and change of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Using archival resources over the World Wide Web, as well as the rich historical legacy of the region's museums, students will explore the development of the city's neighborhoods.

An exploration of ways U.S. cities have been physically shaped over the past 100 years, paying special attention to the leading movements and theories concerning the growth and design of urban space. Readings are from topics such as: Olmstead and the park movement; the city beautiful movement; the modern city and the skyscraper; Lewis Mumford and the garden city movement; the organic city of Jane Jacobs; the postmodern city of Robert Venturi; the dystopian city. In addition to studying the literature of cities, the class explores Philadelphia as a case study, with students developing techniques of observation and analysis, in an effort to understand the city of Philadelphia within the broader framework of thinking about American cities.

Reexamined from the perspective of the late twentieth-century, the American frontier becomes contested terrain between diverse groups of settlers and natives. With a geographic focus on America west of the Mississippi, this course looks at elements that were used to construct the myth of the frontier and the many elements that were left out. It incorporates Euro-American women, and persons of Latin American heritage, Asians, African Americans, and especially Native Americans into the story of the frontier of the 19th century and the west of the 20th.

In this course we will examine versions and varieties of American life that have become a part of Japanese society and culture. We have seen a tremendous curiosity for "things American" in Japanese daily life—but how is American culture in Japan? What kinds of transformations, reformulations and re-inventions have taken place? We will review Japanese adoptions and adaptations of language, "American" settings, architecture and design, foods and restaurants, clothing and fashions, popular films, television and advertising, and even holidays. Students will review and critically evaluate such films as: The Japanese Version, Mr. Baseball, Black Rain, The Barbarian and the Geisha, Tokyo Pop, The Colonel Comes to Japan.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparation.

R134. The Literature of American Slavery (3 s.h.) S Core: RS

Slaves, slave owners, and abolitionists, men and women, perceived slavery in distinctive ways and recorded those perceptions in songs and poems, folk tales, autobiographical narratives and novels, speeches and tracts, travel accounts, journals, diaries, and letters. Through an examination of this rich oral and written literature, themes such as the character of slave culture, the relations between slaves and masters, the oppression of women under slavery, and the connection between abolitionism and feminism are explored. Lectures provide historical background and a context in which to read the selections.

An introduction to the varied historical and contemporary experiences of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, South, and South Asian immigrants and their descendants in the United States. Explores economic, social, political, and cultural developments, beginning with the arrival of the Chinese in the 1830s and ending with the experiences of Asian-American immigrants and their communities today.

Cross-listed with Asian Studies R190 and History R163.

Between the earliest memoirs of Italian immigrants passing through Ellis Island and post-modern best sellers of Don De Lillo, Italian American literature and culture have undergone developments not unlike those of other ethnic groups. The focus of this course—which will also incorporate Italian - American films—is the evolution of narrative and lyrical forms and contents over the generations: the first, that wrote in various dialects of Italian with Old World rhetoric; the semi-Americanized second that, in its filial piety honored fathers and mothers in style and substance; the third and fourth that, now American, have embraced innumerable tendencies (schools?) and modes of imagining and writing: Beat, italianitá, modernist, feminist, post-modernist. Students will get to meet with a good number of the writers studied.

This course uses Philadelphia as a case study to show how history can be read from the fabric of a city and why and how we go about preserving these buildings and structures. We will trace Philadelphia history from the counting houses and markets of the Colonial period through the factories of the 19^th century, up to the automobile-oriented architecture of today. Students will become familiar with the battles to save our built history with the use of tax credits, easements, and the historic registers. The class will include several walking tours of Philadelphia.

A study of issues and traditions in the history of radical thought and behavior. Emphasizing the twentieth century, the course focuses on major social contexts and ideologies such as anarchism, militant unionism, socialism, and communism each of which has had a long and vibrant history in the U.S.

This course looks at the migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States in the 20th century, a group that is the second largest Hispanic group in the country. It examines the specific community of Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia and its relationship with other racial and ethnic groups and the social, political, and economic situation of Puerto Ricans in the city. Cross-listed with Latin American Studies 0148.

An attempt to probe in-depth one of the most significant and controversial episodes of recent American history. The history of Vietnam since the 19^th century with equal emphasis on the First and Second Indochina Wars. The impact of the war on the domestic and international scenes and its multiple legacies. Television and film from the period and guest speakers.

Cross-listed with Asian Studies 0256 and History 0183.

Honors section of American Studies W140.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparation.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparation.

Honors section of American Studies W118.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparation.

Honors section of American Studies 0102.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparation.

The Field Study internship offers students the opportunity to relate academic interests to a variety of cultural and civic institutions in the Philadelphia area. Each three credits earned normally require ten hours work per week (during the summer sessions the number of hours is doubled) under faculty and institutional supervision. Individual readings and a final report or research paper provide a perspective of American culture.

Honors section of American Studies 0104.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparation.

Honors section of American Studies 0103.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparation.

Honors section of American Studies 0131.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparation.

We study this quest, i.e, the migrant phenomena that shaped and disfigured the USA, by looking at the Native American nightmare, the forced migration of Africans, and the immigration of the Chinese, the Italians, and the Puerto Ricans. Members of all these ethnic groups will be interviewed to try to understand their perspectives. We will take trips to Ellis Island and ethnic neighborhoods of New York and Philadelphia.

Honors section of American Studies 0108.

Requirements, arranged with the instructor, include additional readings and preparation.

The student devises a program for independent study with his adviser and an instructor. Designed for those students whose research interests are not met in any established course.

The capstone class required of all American Studies majors. Open to others with permission of instructor. A single topic is explored in an interdisciplinary context. Students write a major paper.

Note: This is a Capstone W course.

Prerequisite: American Studies majors only.

Provides option of writing a senior essay on a theme or topic related to student's program of study.