Professor David L. Carlton. For contact information, click here.

Notice! This course is not currently being offered. This site is maintained solely for information purposes.

From the very beginning of this nation's history Americans have been a self-conscious people. As settlers lacking deep historical roots in the land (or as indigenous peoples largely dispossessed of them), having to create a sense of community from scratch, the first settlers and the Founders of the Republic had to address first principles; the Revolutionary origins of what has been called the "First New Nation" gave its inhabitants a sense that the United States of America was as much a social movement as an ordinary country.

But "What is this new man, this American?" The answer to that has been anything but simple. On the one hand, we stand at the end of a long tradition of theorizing about the American "national character," and of fretting about the creation of an appropriate American culture (the "Great American Novel," etc.). On the other hand, the nature of "American identity" has been contested terrain. From the beginning American territory has been the meeting place for people from a variety of cultures, European, African, and Indigenous. Many of these groups, most notably blacks and women, have related at best problematically to the single identity implied by the quote ("new man"?). Even the white males clearly embraced by the notion of the American "national character" have quarreled violently and sometimes murderously over just what it is. Whole regions, above all the South, have found themselves estranged from the American "mainstream" in important respects. Finally, throughout its history American "identity" has been complicated by massive waves of social change. Industrialization, urbanization (and suburbanization), immigration, and the rise of modern consumer culture have raised troubling issues about what it means to be American and introduced new and different kinds of Americans to be accommodated. Thus American "identity" has been under constant renegotiation, most recently in our so-called "culture wars," and many, especially in our own "multicultural" age, have questioned the very notion of a unitary American culture.

This course is designed to be an introduction to these issues. It will be organized historically, but will reach out to disciplines other than history, especially those dealing in one way or another with what is sometimes called "cultural studies."

Grading policy will be as follows:

• One Midterm Exam (25 percent of final grade)
• Final Exam (30 percent of final grade)
• Two Paper Options:
  1. Three papers on any of the principal readings in the course (3-5 pp. apiece)(15 per cent each of final grade). These papers will address a question to be handed out in advance, and will be due the day of the appropriate discussion section as marked with an asterisk (*) below.
  2. One of the papers described in Option (1), plus a research paper dealing with some aspect of American identity, exceptions to it, problems with the whole concept, etc. The topic must be described in a one-paragraph proposal with brief bibliography, and must be approved by the instructor no later than Friday, February 28 (6-10 pp., 30 percent of final grade). It will be due Monday, April 14.

The attention of the student is called to Chapter 2 of the Vanderbilt University Student Handbook, dealing with the honor system. The standards prescribed therein are the adopted standards for this course.

Thursday, April 24--ALTERNATIVE FINAL EXAMINATION, NOON

Tuesday, April 29--PRIMARY FINAL EXAMINATION, 9:00 AM

• J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters From an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Viking Penguin, 1981).

• Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

• J. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1991).

• Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: NAL/Dutton, 1981).

• Twelve Southerners, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976).

• Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992).