History 547: Art, Race, and Nation: Citizenship and Identity in the United States

Professor Tracy Teslow

Spring 2010
11:00–12:20 p.m., Tuesday & Thursday

354 McMicken

310D McMicken Hall tel: 556-2557 email: tracy.teslow@uc.edu

Course Description

Required Readings

• 
  Matthew Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Harvard University Press, 1998.
  
• 
  Jane Kramer, Whose Art Is It?, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994.
  
• 
  Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in 19th Century America, Princeton University Press, 1997.
  
• 
  Additional readings posted on Blackboard [http://blackboard.uc.edu]
  

Course Structure, Assignments, Grading

2 Papers (20% each) 40%

Final (take home essay + in-class exam) 50%

100%

• 
  Plagiarism is not allowed allowed and will result in a failing grade for the assignment or exam on which the student is guilty of plagiarism. A second infraction will result in an automatic failing grade for the course. This is History Department policy. Plagiarism entails presenting others’ work as your own—whether that of your roommate, work obtained on the internet, or material from a book or article. You need not copy an entire paper or article to commit plagiarism—any identifiable portion of text that you include in your essay without proper attribution constitutes plagiarism and is grounds for action. If you are unclear about what constitutes plagiarism, please consult the guidelines in the Student Code of Conduct or talk to me.
  
• 
  Late papers—including papers turned in after the beginning of class—will be penalized. Exceptions will be made only in the case of hardship or illness. Every effort should be made to notify me in advance.
  
• 
  Email. Papers may not be sent as email attachments, except with permission.
  

Introduction (Mar. 30)

Review of syllabus, discussion of class themes, aims.

Constructing and Deconstructing Race (Apr. 1 & 6)

• 
  Barbara Jean Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 143-177.  
  

• 
  Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998: “Introduction: The Fabrication of Race;” “‘Free White Persons’ in the Republic, 1790-1840,” p. 1-38.
  

• 
  Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: “Anglo-Saxons and Others, 1840-1924;” “Becoming Caucasian, 1924-1965,” p. 39-136.
  

• 
  Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University Press, 1988: “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” p. 28-50.
  

• 
  Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, University of Chicago Press, [1985] 1986, p. 223-261.
  

Defining freedom, citizenship and a new nation in early America.

1: Allegories of Freedom

• 
  Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998: “The Birth of American Freedom,” p. 3-28; “To Call It Freedom,” p. 29-46; “An Empire of Liberty,” p. 47-68.
  

2: Depicting Emancipation

• 
  Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in 19th Century America, Princeton University Press, 1997: “Exposing Slavery” and “Imagining Emancipation,” p. 21-88.
  

3: Race, Gender and Slavery: The Greek Slave

• 
  Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998: “The Boundaries of Freedom in the Young Republic,” p. 69-94.
  

• 
  Joy S. Kasson, “Narratives of the Female Body: The Greek Slave” in Reading American Art, Marianne Doezema, Elizabeth Milroy, eds., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998: p. 163-189.
  

Civil War and Memory (Apr. 22)

• 
  Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: “Freedom’s Memorial,” “Slavery’s Memorial” and “Common Soldiers” p. 89-208.
  

Cowboys and Indians: Race and The Frontier (Apr. 27 & 29)

1: Cowboys

• 
  Alex Nemerov, “"Doing the 'Old America'": the image of the American West, 1880-1920,” in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, ed. William H. Truettner; with contributions by Nancy K. Anderson [et al.], Washington: Published for the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991: p. 285-343.
  

• 
  Sweeney, J. Gray, “Racism, nationalism, and nostalgia in cowboy art.” Oxford Art Journal Vol. 15 No. 1 ('92) p. 67-80.
  

• 
  Julie Schimmel, “Inventing ‘the Indian’,” The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, ed. William H. Truettner, Washington: Published for the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991: p. 149-189.
  

• 
  Mick Gidley, Edward Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated, Cambridge University Press, 1998: “Representing the Indian,” p. 257-283.
  

• 
  On Reserve: Christopher Cardozo, Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Simon & Schuster, 2000. [reproduces Curtis’s photos]
  
• 
  American Memory website: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html
  

Primtivism, Exoticism, Realism: African-Americans in Art, African-Americans as Artists (May 4 & 6, 11)

• 
  Marianne Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990: “Defining the Primitive/Reimagining Modernity,” p. 3-41.
  

• 
  Karen C. C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry, Summer 1998, Vol. 24, No. 4, p. 903-934.
  

• 
  Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and Visual Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University, 2004: “The Art of Scientific Propaganda,” and “‘Families of Undoubted Respectability,’” p. 43-112.
  

• 
  W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Terri Hume Oliver, eds., New York: W.W. Norton & Company, [1903] 1999: “Forethought,” “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” p. 5-6, 9-16.
  

• 
  Amy M. Mooney, “Representing Race: Disjunctures in the Work of Archibald J. Motley, Jr.,” The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Studies, vol. 24, no. 2., p. 162-179.
  

Depression Era America (May 13, 18 & 20)

• 
  Wanda M. Corn, “The Birth of a National Icon: Grant Wood's American Gothic” in Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, eds., Reading American Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 387-408.
  

• 
  Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography, Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1992: “The Photo-Series: Russell Lee, Chicago, and the 1940s,” p. 142-202.
  

• 
  FSA photographs: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html
  

• 
  Stacy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004: “Articulating History to the Radical Present: Murals,” 42-105.
  

• 
  Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880-1935, Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999: “Icons of Labor: Capitalism, Communism, and the politics of Sculpture, 1917-1935,” p. 174-211.
  

American Heroes (May 25)

• 
  Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Sept. 1991), p. 376-420.
  

• 
  Karal Ann Marling and Robert Silberman, “The Statue Near the Wall, The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Art of Remembering,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1987), p. 4-29.
  

Multicultural America (May. 27, June 1 & 3)

• 
  The Family of Man, created by Edward Steichen, prologue by Carl Sandburg, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1955 [1983].
  

• 
  John Beardsley, “And/Or: Hispanic Art, American Culture,” in Writings About Art, Carole Gold Calo, ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994: p. 248-261.
  

• 
  Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino, “Space, Power, and Youth Culture: Mexican American Graffiti and Chicano Murals in East Los Angeles, 1972-1978,” in Looking High and Low: Art and Cultural Identity, Brenda Jo Bright and Liza Bakewell, eds., Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1995: p. 55-88.
  

• 
  http://latinoartcommunity.org/community/Gallery/Millennium/index.html
  

• 
  Donaldson, Jeff, “The rise, fall and legacy of the Wall of Respect movement.” International Review of African American Art v. 15 no1 (1998) p. 22-6.
  

• 
  Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, W.W. Norton & Company, 1998: “Sixties Freedom,” p. 274-303.
  

• 
  Jane Kramer, Whose Art Is It?, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994.
  

In-class exam; take-home essay due at beginning of exam.