Monthly Archives: March 2016

Remaining Writing, Required and Optional

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I hope that everyone is enjoying the spring recess so far!

Since we didn’t meet for class today, I wanted to update you all on the remaining opportunities you have to improve or demonstrate your mastery of the Four Capabilities, which is the sole thing that I will be looking at when assessing your final grade for the course.

You have now received all of the required writing-based-on-reading assignments, which are collected under the Reading Questions category.

Over the next week, I will be catching up on giving you feedback on any assignments I have not yet read and commented on. By April 7, I will be caught up, and after that there is one more required writing assignment for you to do. You will need to write a self-assessment of your own learning progress in the course that uses (a) the principles outlined in the rubric and (b) specific evidence from your own work in the class to justify your conclusions. This final assignment will be due by April 22 (the last day of classes for the semester). This self-assessment should be written in complete sentences and paragraphs, and should be about the length of one of your usual reading responses. It needs to be guided by all the same principles of Position Taking and Effective Communication that should guide any piece of writing in this course.

In addition to that final required writing assignment (and your group’s work for our presentation), you also have some optional things you can do if you have not yet achieved mastery of the Four Capabilities and want to show me continued progress on the rubric.

First, you can revise and resubmit up to two of any of your previous assignments in the Google Doc. Just write the new version at the bottom of your Doc and clearly indicate that it is a revision. As long as I receive these by the final day of final exams, which is May 4, I can consider them when making a final assessment of your mastery of the rubric. Keep in mind that these revisions only help you on that score if they in fact show improvement in the areas that you and I have already flagged as needing improvement, so I’d encourage you to talk with me about planned revisions, but that talk, too, is optional.

Second, you can write an optional position-driven essay based on material in one of the "extra" posts I have published on this blog—that is, posts that were not about the assigned weekly readings. These include a post about a controversial children’s book on Washington and slavery, about controversies over Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, about Presidents’ Day and the use of Presidents in election cycles, about some news items on figures we’ve studied, and about my four-year-old daughter’s perceptions of two legendary Americans. (By the way, I swear she picked out that John Henry book from the library on her own. I didn’t put her up to it!)

I’m giving you considerable flexibility with this assignment, but you need to tell me the scenario you are writing in (the form of writing, the audience, etc.) yourself and make sure that you are taking a position. The audience could, of course, just be me, and you can treat this essay much like a standard reading response. But if one of the areas you need to work on is audience awareness, it might be in your interest to think about how you could use the assignment creatively to show progress on that skill.

Because of these optional assignments, you have no shortage of ways to show that you have mastered the Four Capabilities by the end of the semester. But remember that because of the way your grade will be assigned, simply doing these optional assignments doesn’t immediately give you extra credit. The optional assignments help you improve your grade only insofar as they help to demonstrate your mastery of the rubric.

Timeline for Presentation

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The final presentation for our class has been scheduled. It will be between 7:30 and 9 a.m. on April 21. We will be presenting to a group of area students, at least some of whom will be coming from Yates High School.

I have divided you into three teams to help facilitate our collaborative work on this presentation. The point of these teams is not to free you from having to think about what the other teams are doing, but instead to focus our efforts so as to ensure that we put together a good presentation in the short time we have.

On April 14, by the end of class, we will select the people we want to represent the whole group by speaking to the students on the 21st. I’ll say more about this in class.

For this to work, we need to keep communication between the teams open. Here are two ways to help with that: First, each team should select two representatives who are able to meet briefly with me either in my office hours (Fridays, 2 to 4 p.m.) on April 8 and April 15, or before class on April 7 and April 14 around 1:30 p.m. or 2 p.m. (Make sure your representatives are available at all of those times, and once I know who they are, I will coordinate with the six representatives to schedule two specific meetings.) These brief, touch-base meetings will allow information to be more easily shared between the teams. Second, all of the work that you do as a team should be recorded in Google Docs or slideshows that are shared with me, so that I can then share them with everyone in the class.

Below each team below, I have listed a series of deadlines for your team to meet.
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John Henry According to a 4-Year-Old

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IMHO, she already was showing the promise of the budding historian who would one day make a pretty awesome Harriet Tubman diorama.

I remembered this video partly because of our discussion today about the age at which kids should learn the more complex stories of legendary Americans like John Henry and Sacagawea.

Legends in the News

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Today, I noticed two different opinion pieces mentioning “Legendary Americans” we have studied (or will soon discuss).

First, in tomorrow’s New York Times, the founders of the Women on 20s campaign argue that Harriet Tubman still deserves a spot on a bill, despite a statement released today that says Hamilton will stay. They write:

If, as Mr. Lew states, the images on our currency reflect what we value as a nation, then Jackson, a slave trader and Native American oppressor, should be removed from the ubiquitous $20 bill and replaced by the freed slave and freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, the choice in our online survey that polled more than half a million people. And we should continue to preserve and celebrate the legacy of Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant who did so much to shape our democracy, not to mention the monetary system that Andrew Jackson worked so hard to discredit.

Also today on The Atlantic blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses recent controversy over the movie Nina Simone, in which the actress playing the lead character was asked by producers to darken her skin. Critics of the move have argued that the film ignores the fact that Simone herself often lamented the unique oppression suffered by dark-skinned, as opposed to lighter-skinned, black women. The biopic’s distributor replied by citing someone we will be reading about next week: “You think Rosa Parks’ pain was less than Nina’s when she had to endure not sitting on a bus?”

Finally, today I saw a spoken poem called “History Reconsidered” that touched on some of the topics that we’ve discussed the last two weeks. It begins: “Letter to Five of the President who Owned Slaves when They Held Office.”

Just more evidence of the ways that contemporary Americans continue to find “usable pasts” in the lives of legendary Americans.

Rosa Parks Questions

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This week, your reading assignment is from Danielle McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street. Read through Page 134 of the book, and also read an article by Jeanne Theoharis about Parks in the Washington Post. (Optionally, you may also be interested in listening to this interview with Claudette Colvin in which she cites another of our “legendary Americans” as an inspiration for her decision not to give up her bus seat.)

Montgomery Branch of the NAACP, 1947

Please be forewarned that this week’s readings contain often disturbing and graphic descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Because of the nature of history, studying the past often means confronting painful and distressing subjects and events. In this case, remembering incidents of rape and anti-rape activism in the American South, as well as talking about why those incidents have been forgotten, are crucial to the scholarly arguments that Danielle McGuire and Jeanne Theoharis are making.

After you’ve done the reading, choose one of the following prompts and respond to it in your Google Doc. Before writing, you may want to have a look at the Google Doc we created to help you focus on the rubric. Remember to use specific evidence to support your positions, and also to think broadly about which of our previous readings might also help you to make your case.

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This Wednesday: Workshop on Style

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Andrew Klein, a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Communication, is going to be holding a workshop this Wednesday from 7 to 9 p.m. in the CWOVC (Fondren Library 201). The workshop is on improving the clarity of your written work. Klein says, “It will address aspects of academic writing at the sentence, paragraph, and text levels so as to enable students to produce smooth, readable prose that takes the reader from sentence to sentence in a coherent manner.”

I would strongly encourage all of you to attend, as I think it could be of benefit to anyone! But I would especially encourage any of you who have been getting comments from me about Effective Communication to consider going. Remember that Self-Reflection, in terms of our rubric, means you can “honestly identify areas for improvement in your own understanding, and then execute and evaluate strategies for addressing them.” Attending a workshop like this is one such strategy, and by going to the workshop, you’ll learn other strategies for improving your work!

Slavery in Children’s Literature

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In class last Thursday, one of questions we discussed had to do with how slavery itself is often depicted in children’s books about Harriet Tubman. One book described the young Tubman as “happy” even though she was a slave, which reminded me (I suggested) of the idea of “paternalism” discussed in Furstenberg’s book. On the other hand, as one of you pointed out, the books about Tubman do at least spotlight the brutality of slavery by focusing on the injuries she sustained and the separations from family she endured.

cake-for-washington

This discussion made me think of another recent controversy in the publishing world over a children’s book called A Birthday Cake for George Washington, which was published by Scholastic. The book, which tells the story of the President’s enslaved chef named Hercules, is summarized with screen shots here.

After several prominent school library journals criticized the book for giving a misleading, “even dishonest” picture of slavery, Scholastic ultimately decided to withdraw the book from circulation, though not before publishing a response from the author and editor. You can follow the whole debate by following the links at the end of this blog post, which also includes some interesting points about the ways that Native Americans are portrayed in children’s books on Thanksgiving.

Since I was familiar with Furstenberg’s book already when this controversy broke, the whole debate made me immediately think of his discussion of paternalism and the myth of Washington’s happy slaves. I wonder if the fact that Washington himself was portrayed in this book as a strong admirer—even a friend—of Hercules contributed to the controversy. (On the last page of the book, Washington throws his arm around Hercules and delivers this line: “‘Hercules,’ the president says in his soft voice that is like a whisper…’You are a magician, a master chef. You have outdone yourself again. Good man.'”)

On the other hand, this book—like the Tubman literature we discussed—also raises the broader question of how books aimed at children should treat slavery. Columnist and culinary historian Michael W. Twitty argued that what is desperately needed is complex children’s literature that makes space for the humanity—and even the smiles—of the enslaved, but without sugar-coating slavery and its brutal dangers. The real Hercules, Twitty notes, eventually ran away from George Washington—an act of explicit dissent that mystified and angered the president.

What do you think about the debate over A Birthday Cake for George Washington? If Sernett is right that our children’s literature reflects what an adult society wants to remember, then what do books like this reflect? I’d be interested in your thoughts, either here or in class.

John Henry Reading Questions

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While you’re working through Scott Reynolds Nelson’s book this week, you may enjoy listening to some versions of the John Henry ballad available at NPR, including the earliest recorded version by Fiddlin’ John Carson, which is discussed in the book on pp. 138-141. You can also see one of the earliest printed versions of the lyrics here. For your reading response this week, use ONE of the following questions. But also be prepared to talk about all of these questions this Thursday.

  1. This is one of the first books we’ve read that relies heavily on songs, which Nelson calls “documents without paper” (p. 27), as primary sources. Are songs reliable historical sources?
  2. The short Disney film that we watched depicts Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation as a dramatic turning point, after which John Henry is freed from his chains, able to marry, and work for the promise of his own land. After reading the Nelson book, is this an accurate representation of the post-emancipation South?
  3. Are you convinced that Nelson found the real John Henry in “John Wm. Henry”? Does it matter to his larger story whether he did or not?
  4. The John Henry story is now often remembered as a heroic triumph of a hard-working man over machine that saved workers’ jobs and showed that human beings can accomplish anything. (Or, as James Earl Jones put it in the video, it shows that the American spirit is “indomitable.”) Based on evidence presented in the book, would the earliest keepers of the John Henry story would have viewed the story this way?

Though I don’t want you to use them for your writing response, here a couple of other things to think about:

  • Nelson argues that different groups of people–miners, prison convicts, railroad workers, twentieth-century “folk” musicians, and white Southern mill workers–all developed their own distinctive versions of the John Henry story and song. What were the key differences between the versions of these different groups? Can their versions of the song shed light on the way these various groups viewed the world?
  • Why did the John Henry ballad appeal to Communists in the 1930s? Why would he appeal to liberals and official American propagandists in the 1940s? Were the reasons for John Henry’s appeal the same in both cases?

If you want some more music, why not head over to YouTube to listen to Bruce Springsteen, Mississippi John, and Woody Guthrie singing about John Henry?

Image credit: “John Henry Building a Railroad,” by Fred Becker (1935), available at Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Writing Aids for This Class

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Over the last several weeks, we’ve developed some documents in class that will help you as you complete assignments for the rest of the semester. If you’re concerned that your writing isn’t improving or you aren’t sure how to do better, one of my first recommendations would be to revisit these resources and make sure you understand them! Here’s a list:

I will add any other documents of this sort created this semester to this list.

Tubman Reading Questions

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Hope you all had a good Spring Break! This week’s reading, listed on the schedule, is about Harriet Tubman. Be sure that you download both of the Sernett PDFs from OWL-Space. (Please note that I’ve slightly amended the syllabus, so you are only required to read the Sernett articles.)

Here are the reading prompts: pick ONE and write a response to it in your Google Doc for this week. I’d encourage you to revisit the Learning Rubric and the Google Doc we made collaboratively before the break (see links in the sidebar) to refresh your memory of what to work on in your responses!

  1. Milton Sernett argues that what a society chooses to tell its children about the past offers one of the best measures of what that society values and/or thinks worth remembering. Do you agree? If so, what does children’s literature about Tubman reveal about us?
  2. Sernett quotes Michael Kammen as saying that “what history and memory share in common is that both merit our mistrust, yet both must be nevertheless nourished” (p. 8). Do you agree with that generalization? If so, what parts of the histories that have been written about Tubman or her times merit mistrust? Which parts of the public memories of her merit mistrust? Which parts of the history or memory about her must nevertheless be nourished?
  3. How much influence did Tubman have over the making of her own legend?
  4. How many excursions did Tubman make back into the South to rescue slaves, and how many slaves did she ultimately help to escape North? Does getting the figures exactly right matter?
  5. Which image of Tubman do you think is more well-known today: Tubman as “Moses” or “General Tubman” the rifle-toting Civil War scout? Based on your reading of the material in Sernett, what accounts for the relative popularity or prevalence of these images?

Image credit: Photograph of Harriet Tubman, 1860s-1870s, from the Documented Rights exhibit at the National Archives.