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.