Race and Reunion: American Memory and the Civil War

Syllabus

Syllabus for Race and Reunion, Fall 2008-2009

Text selections

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (film)
Toni Morrison, Beloved

Selected paintings, photographs and works of art by William Sydney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Henry Lane, Frederic E. Church, Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Winslow Homer, Henry Tanner, Kara Walker, Robert Colescott, Willie Cole and others

Course Description

What can we learn about ourselves from the stories we tell about slavery and Civil War?  How do we understand the ways in which ideas of race have shaped Americans' sense of who we are as a nation? How does art imbue the past with meaning? How do literature, photography, painting, and film shape our sense of personal and national identity? These are some of the questions we will explore in "Race and Reunion: American Memory and The Civil War."

The peace treaty signed at Appomattox in 1865 ended the Civil War, and the Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865, ended slavery. But the battle over memory had just begun. What had it all meant? How should it be remembered? Battles over these questions have been re-fought ever since: in high art and popular culture, in literature, music, and film.

Our focus in this class will not be on the military history of the war, or the political and economic forces that helped precipitate it.  Instead, we will examine the place of slavery and the war in American cultural memory--how both have been represented in literature, the visual arts and music.  We will weave our story around several recurring themes: competing ideas of race and nationhood; different perspectives on freedom and citizenship; changing notions of individual and collective identity.  Central to all of our discussions and readings will be the idea that the stories we tell about the past shape our understanding of the present and of the future, and that each generation's lived experience indelibly shapes its understanding of the past.

This is a course in critical thinking and interpretation.  Our goal is to develop students' abilities to read texts, images and cultural artifacts closely; to attend to the historical debates embedded in texts and objects; to think critically about different methods of interpreting cultural objects; and to translate their insights in sustained intellectual discussion and lucid analytical prose.  Our assumption in this course is that history is not available to us as a set of events -- fixed, past, and unchanging -- but rather that history is known through each generation's interpretations of those events. We encounter the past through the stories we tell about it in the present, stories that reflect the values, needs and anxieties of the world that produces them.

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