Given how often we’ve talked about the debates over whether to put Harriet Tubman on the $10 bill, I though you would all be interested in today’s news!
Kali Gross Lecture This Friday
AP History, Wilson, and Tubman
A few things have come across my desk recently that may interest you:
- A committee appointed by Princeton University released a report on whether to rename buildings on campus named after Woodrow Wilson. (They said no.)
- A story in the New York Times considers the effect of politics on the AP U.S. History course.
- I wrote something about that fake Harriet Tubman quote for my website that was picked up by Historians Against Slavery.
- A new book by historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf considers the contested legacy of Thomas Jefferson, especially in the age of the Broadway hit musical Hamilton.
- A critic of the new Broadway hit Hamilton argues that the musical “silences” black history, despite its multiracial cast.
Any one of those things might be good fodder for one of the optional assignments you could do if you want more opportunities to demonstrate mastery of the rubric.
Remaining Writing, Required and Optional
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
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.
Continue reading
John Henry According to a 4-Year-Old
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
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
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.)
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.
This Wednesday: Workshop on Style
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
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.
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.