Week 10:Civil Rights

Voices: Hermina Hendricks, Professor of Music
Seminar: Triangle: the Fire that Changed America by David Von Drehle
Images: Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

Professor Hendricks spoke to us about growing up in Civil Rights era Lynchburg: what it felt like to live under segregation and how the Civil Rights Movement came to Lynchburg.

Triangle: the Fire that Changed America, provides a detailed account of the blaze at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911 which is set in the context of the Labor Reform Movement in the United States. Von Drehle says the deaths of almost 150 workers, mostly poor immigrant women, eventually led to improvements in the lives of millions of working people.

Mumbo Jumbo was written in 1972 but takes place in 1920’s New York City. The book reflects on the Harlem Renaissance – a period of African-American cultural movement that is part of the larger Civil Rights struggle.

Week 9 - Sports and Gay Rights

Images: Not the Triumph But the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete by Amy Bass
Seminar: Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter
Voices: Mel White - gay activist and founder of Soulforce

This week brings us to the realm of social movements. We spoke to Mel White founder of Soulforce whose purpose is "freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from religious and political oppression through the practice of relentless nonviolent resistance."

Mel White’s organization owes much to the Stonewall riots in 1969 Greenwich Village which sparked the national Gay Rights Movement. Stonewall details the context for and aftermath of the clash between gays and the police: “for Carter, the most audacious, energetic and enterprising of riot participants were the drag queens, homeless queer youths and other gender transgressors whose position on the farthest margins of society enabled their radical response to oppression. He ends appropriately with the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, as well as the first gay pride parade, held in June 1970. (From Amazon.com)

Through Not the Triumph But the Struggle, we touch on the Civil Rights Movement in the United States through the story of African Americans in sports.

Week 7: History of Transportation: Part II

Voices: Al Soltis, Vice President of Roadway Maintenance Division of Lanford Brothers
Images: Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith by Timothy Beal
Seminar: The National Road (The Road and American Culture) edited by Professor Karl B. Raitz


…motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it … This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising…
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

This week we explored the great American roads that connect us.

In Images we looked at the usually gawked- at roadside oddities that are, after all, odd; plowing through layers of kitsch to get at the real religious spirit they might obscure. These ignored moments of the roadside begins to show the hazy line between American roads and American evangelicalism.

Seminar looked at the history of the National Road and how that road changed the American landscape as well as how it changed American Culture.
We also spoke to Al Soltis about the physical effort and planning it takes to build a road as well as maintaining our road system into the future.

Week 6: History of Transportation: Part I

Images: Inside Rikers: Stories From the World's Largest Penal Colony
by Jennifer Wynn
Seminar: Selections Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York ed. Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson
Voices: Ellis Island play at EC Glass High School

Here [in New York City] the skeptic finds chaos and the believer further evidence that the hand that made us is divine. - Robert Moses

In images we read Inside Rikers which explains not only the historical but the sociological conditions of America’s most famed prison. With more than 2,319,258 Americans behind bars, understanding our system is an important issue of immobility.

In seminar we discussed master builder Robert Moses who “played a larger role in shaping the physical environment of New York State than any other figure in the 20th century… He built 658 playgrounds in New York City, 416 miles of parkways and 13 bridges. But he was more than just a builder. Although he disdained theories, he was a major theoretical influence on the shape of the American city, because the works he created in New York proved a model for the nation at large.” (NYT)

We also visited EC Glass High School to see the students production of Ellis Island: The Dream of America. The musical told the story of the American immigrant experience that we have been discussing in the classroom using texts from the Ellis Island Oral History Project, photographs from the Ellis Island Immigration Museum Library, as well as dance and music through collaboration Peter Boyer, the creator and composer.

Trip 3: Philadelphia

Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and with what you are. He who would be great anywhere must first be great in his own Philadelphia.
-Russel H. Conwell

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Friday, February 27

Central Headquarters of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Harrisburg, PA

Welcoming Center in Philadelphia, PA

Saturday, February 28

Eastern State Penitentiary Tour

Fairmount Water Works

Trip 2: Washington DC

Most of the people who live in Washington come from other places and you can learn something from them. - Sally Quinn

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We traveled to Washington DC to explore the Smithsonian Institution exhibit called America on the Move at the National Museum of American History, Behring Center, in Washington, D.C.

Week 5 - Immobility and Disposal

Images: Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte
Seminar: Eastern State Penitentiary: A History by Paul Kahan
Voices: Eric Schrader, Utilities Engineer for Lynchburg.

“People say I'm extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?”
-Imelda Marcos

This week we looked at the movement of objects and natural resources above and below the ground. We also thought about the concept of immobility in American culture through a discussion of prisons.

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The New York Times describes Garbage Land author as “a garbage detective, she follows the used plastic bags, drink containers, old newspapers and, yes, bodily excretions that disappear into the trash can or down the toilet, only to reappear somewhere else, out of sight and out of mind.”
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Eastern State Penitentiary: A History tells the story of one of America’s best known prisons in Philadelphia, PA. With 2,319,258 people in American jails the history of how we have punished criminals in the past understates how we handle criminals now.
Eric Schrader spoke to us about the waste water treatment system in Lynchburg.

Week 4: Move to Suburbs and Gentrification

Images: End of Suburbia and Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and Their Passage from India to America By S. Mitra Kalita

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Seminar: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States By Kenneth T. Jackson

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Voices: Hal Craddock – Lynchburg Architect involved in ‘non-suburban’ design ideas: revitalizing downtown and the New Urbanist community, Wyndhurst.

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The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

--Marshall McLuhan

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Crabgrass Frontier, achieved the rare feat of winning both the Bancroft Award, given by Columbia University for the year's best work of history, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians. The book is a critical work in the history of American Suburbs.

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Suburban Sahibs traces the lives of three immigrant families that make their way from various parts of India to the suburbs of New Jersey, giving us a closer look at the American Dream for immigrants, as well as suburbia. At the same time we watched the documentary End of Suburbia which documents how the changing oil issues may end an American institution.

Week 3: Immigration and Immigrant Experience, part II

American Voices: Arturo Fernandez – a member of the Lynchburg community who shared his experiences emmigrating from Venezuela and working with the local Hispanic community.

American Seminar: watched New York: A Documentary Film, Episode Four: The Power and the People, 1898-1918. Students began reading Crabgrass Frontier for next week.

American Images: The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art, an Oral History By Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Allen

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrations and revolutionists. - FDR

After having our eyes opened by our trip to Jamestown we begin to look at the Frontier and immigration in a different light.
The documentary on New York complimented last week’s book, Ellis Island to JFK, by providing striking visual imagery of immigration through Ellis Island. The film also foreshadowed topics to be covered later in the semester: the labor movement and transporation.
The Quilters looks at the lives of women in the nineteenth century and the quilts they made as they moved west.
“The women who speak through the book shared a vision, a strength, and a spirit that few of us will ever know or understand.”—Christian Science Monitor

Trip 1: Jamestown

Human progress rarely comes without cost. And those early years in Jamestown, when three great civilizations came together for the first time, Western European, Native American and African, released a train of events which continues to have a profound social impact, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom and Europe. - Queen Elizabeth II

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January 20

Meet with Mary Anna Richardson, American Culture Program alumna and archaeologist at Historic Jamestown

January 31

Tour Jamestown Settlement and Museum followed by Group Disscussion

Week 2: Immigration and the Immigrant Experience

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. - Jame

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American Images: The Frontier in American History by Fredrick Jackson Turner and Lecture and Western Films clips.
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American Voices: Carolyn Sue Elliott - member of the Monacan Nation.

American Seminar: From Ellis Island to JFK: New York`s Two Great Waves of Immigration by Nancy Foner

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. - James Madison

Last week we looked at the beginnings of the expansion in to the frontier this week we have deepen into that search in to the heart of America. Ms. Elliott discussed how the movement of settlers into Virginia impacted Native American life and culture, as well as the movement of Native Americans before and after European settlement (or lack of movement as the case may be!).Images forced us to really look closely at the American mythology Seminar discussed how Immigration changed one of America’s greatest city.

Week One: Immigration: The Frontier and the Movement West

American Voices: Satuday Night Fever

American Images: Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative by Robert S. Tilton

American Seminar: Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement by David Hackett Fischer

Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier - Charles F. Kettering

In the American Culture Program, we learn how to open our minds. This week we have also learned about the physical American frontier.

We used Pocahontas as a manifestation of these changes in Images.

We continued on this path as we read Bound Away which “celebrates[s] the frontier as the source of American freedom and democracy…which is best understood not only through the writings of intellectual elites, but also through the physical artifacts and folkways of ordinary people.” When we see the changes, we expand how we see ourselves.

What does Saturday Night Fever have to do with the Frontier? Well… nothing. The movie was meant to frame many of the topics of the semester: immigration, upward mobility, and transportation.

Students found connections between discussions of the Frontier and Saturday Night Fever: "A common theme in the movie is movement as escape. As we discussed in Bound Away the idea of movement, as Americans have conceived of it, has always been a push from a mediocre present into something better, symbolized in some place better. The characters in Saturday Night Fever are enacting the same patterns." - Anne Kane

Introduction: Moving America: Transportation, (Im)migration, and Inspiration

We are a nation of movers. From the settlers of Jamestown, to the frontier cowboy, to the suburban commuter, movement and mobility shape much of the history and culture of the United States. The 2009 Program is a semester-long exploration of this central, distinctly American concept. We will explore the movement of people into and throughout the United Sates: European colonization of the New World, the idea and ‘reality’ of the Frontier, immigrant experiences, and the mass movement of people from cities to suburbs.

Transportation is an important theme for the semester: the history of transportation in the United States, from canals to cars, with a special emphasis on America’s love affair with the automobile and this affair’s impact on the how we live, shop, and interact. We hope to stretch and challenge our understanding of movement and mobility by examining social movements, such as gay rights, workers rights, and sports as well as cultural movements such as modern art and architecture, historic preservation, music, and dance. Within these categories the concept of movement is taken to the level of ideas and thought and the scale of analysis expands and contracts from the public to individual bodies.

We will also examine immobility as a way of highlighting our assumptions about movement and complicating our image of America as perpetually on the move. An eclectic mix of topics fall under this category: first, trash landfill – the end-of-the-line for the movement of goods in our consumer society; second, prisons – a vast segment of the population that is not free to move; and third, cemeteries – our attempt to come to terms with the end of life.

The American Culture Program students will be analyzing and integrating these topics throughout the semester through readings, class discussion, interaction with members of the community, and field trips to Jamestown, Virginia, Philadelphia, and New York City. This website provides insight into how the Program works on a weekly basis and will share what we learn in the coming months.