22 December 2008

Although the class was cancelled for Spring 09 and so is now on hold, I haven’t stopped thinking about it and working on it in my spare time. I will offer it in Spring 2010 instead, maybe with a name change? Anyway -

This morning I caught an episode of NPR’s radio program “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook. His guest was Jay Parini (professor of English at Middlebury College), who’s just written a book called Promised Land about thirteen important books that both reflected and changed the American consciousness.

Read excerpts from “Promised Land” or listen to the program here.

The list:

- Of Plymouth Plantation (1620-47), by William Bradford
- The Federalist Papers (1787-88)
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793)
- The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1803-06)
- Walden (1854), by Henry David Thoreau
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), by Mark Twain
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), by W.E.B. DuBois
- The Promised Land (1912), by Mary Antin
- How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), by Dale Carnegie
- The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), by Benjamin Spock
- On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
- The Feminine Mystique (1963), by Betty Friedan

Parini found, in reading these books as a sequence of American thought, that he saw certain particularly American themes emerging, and saw them as evidence of a “protean culture” always on the move and always changing. Food for thought. I’ll have to read both Parini’s book and Mary Antin’s that lent the project its name – that was the only one I wasn’t familiar with.

19 October 2008

We will use these books in this course. You’ll need all of them. Buying them used is fine & in fact recommended.

Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (ISBN 0-374-52849-7)

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (ISBN 978-0451529459)

David Howard-Pitney, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s (ISBN 978-0312395056)

Martha H. Patterson, The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader 1894-1930 (ISBN 978-081354296-6)

Sheila L. Skemp, Judith Sargent Murray: A Brief Biography with Documents (ISBN 0312-115067)