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	300 Steele Building CB# 3504 UNC-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3504 email: fys@unc.edu phone: (919)843-7773

American Studies

AMST 050 [006I]: American Culture in the Era of Ragtime
Communication Intensive (CI), North Atlantic World (NA), U.S. Diversity (US), Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Other Western History]
Joy Kasson
This course will examine American culture at the turn of the twentieth century as seen through various lenses. We will begin with E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, a novel written in the 1970s but set in the early twentieth century. The author mingles fact and
fiction, introduces historical figures such as Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, and J.P. Morgan, and focuses on three groups of Americans: an affluent family from New Rochelle, New York; an African-American couple; and a Jewish immigrant and his young daughter. The course will proceed to investigate each area touched by the novel. We will read autobiographies and literature, and explore photography, film, music, and popular culture. In the spirit of American Studies, we will attempt to assemble a well-rounded portrait of a pivotal era in American life. Course requirements include short papers, a biographical paper, and oral reports. This course will emphasize the connections between the performing arts and literary texts.

AMST 051 [006E]: Navigating America: Journeys, Voices, and Transportation
Communication Intensive (CI); Experiential Education (EE); Field Work; North Atlantic World (NA); Social and Behavioral Science/Other (SS) [GC Social Science]
Rachel Willis
This seminar is designed to teach students how to navigate new intellectual terrains and process unfamiliar information from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The seminar emphasizes discussion and field study.  We will plan, implement, and document a common journey during the first half of the semester and then each student will execute their own individual journey during the second half of the term.  This voyage of discovery on the campus or in the surrounding community can be either physical or intellectual, but must be chronicled with a documentary journal and presented to the class in a multi-media format that conveys the individual's perspective, journey, and discoveries.  These assignments will enable students to appreciate the views of others as well as integrate learning inside and outside the classroom. The first 2 weeks of the seminar will be used to develop our focus through introductory overviews and a number of class exercises designed to promote intellectual community and student participation. The next 12 weeks will be spent reading, viewing, and discussing the accounts of journeys in America and executing our common journey. The remaining class meetings will be devoted to the student presentations of their own journeys.

AMST 052 [006E]: The Folk Revival: The Singing Left in Mid-Century America
Humanities & Fine Arts/Literary Arts (LA); US Diversity (US) [GC Social Science]
Robert Cantwell
In the context of the mid-twentieth century folk revival and today's "roots music" movement, this course will join several vernacular musics of the south—minstrelsy, bluegrass, blues, Cajun, and country—to novels about the cultures in which they originated, including Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory, Lee Smith's Devil's Dream; Gautreaux's The Next Step in the Dance, and Wesley Brown's Darktown Strutters. With the PBS "Roots Music" series and other films as a backdrop, students will explore the Southern Folklife Collection, the local folk music scene, and the folk origins of their own favorite music.
Students will research the musical and scholarly resources of the Southern Folklife Collection, make presentations of musical recordings, attend at least one "roots music" event in the Chapel Hill area, and, where possible, explore, as practitioners or as listeners, folk music performance.

AMST 053 [006I]: The Family and Social Change in America
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Robert Allen
This course uses changes in the American family over the past century as a way of understanding larger processes of social change. Through reading, film viewing, and discussion, we will consider the complex of changes that, taken together, produced "modern" American society over the 19th and 20th centuries: industrialization and the rise of corporate capitalism, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture and mass media, and the civil rights movements that extended full citizenship beyond white males. We will then consider how changes in the family as a social institution reflect and contribute to these social changes. We will examine changing notions of romance, marriage, parenting, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood. We will examine scholarly histories of the family, along with diaries and memoirs in the Southern Historical Collection, oral history interviews, and court cases. Finally, we will examine the representation of family life in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Participants will research their own family histories and produce a family "album" that documents and reflects upon the ways that links can be made between change at the level of "society" and change at the level of the family.

AMST/ANTH 054 [006E]: The Indians' New Worlds: Southeastern Indian Histories from 1200 to 1800
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA); The World Before 1750 (WB); US Diversity (US) [GC Social Science & Cultural Diversity]
Michael Green
By AD 1200, most Southeastern Indians were farmers who lived in societies ruled by hereditary chiefs. After 1500, encounters between Indians and Europeans changed the lives of all concerned, but the changes took place in and were shaped by existing cultures. This seminar uses reading, discussion, and lecture to examine the cultures of Southern Indians and to understand how European exploration and colonization changed those cultures. Students will learn how archaeologists and historians work, both separately and together, to study the past of Native societies. Students will study and analyze archaeological artifacts, Spanish accounts of Southeastern Indians, and other primary materials in class. These activities, along with various role-playing exercises, will directly involve the students in the study of Native people in the period of Mississippian transition. Grades will be awarded for class participation, two short papers and a final essay exam.

AMST 055 [006I]: Birth and Death in the United States
Communication Intensive (CI); North Atlantic World (NA); Philosophical and Moral Reasoning (PH); US Diversity (US) [GC Other Western History]
Timothy Marr
This course explores birth and death as essential human rites of passage impacted by changing American historical and cultural contexts. Since both remain defining life events beyond experiential recall, studying them in interdisciplinary ways opens powerful insights into how culture mediates the construction of bodies and social identity. Readings and assignments are designed to study changing anthropological rituals, medical procedures, scientific technologies, and ethical quandaries. We will also explore a variety of representations of birth and death in literary expression, film, and material culture as well as in hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries.

AMST 056 [006I]: American Memory
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA); US Diversity (US) [GC Other Western History]
Timothy Marr
This course examines the contested role of memory in constructing historical meaning and imagining cultural communities. We will analyze the symbolic expression that Americans have developed to celebrate regional and national difference by looking at popular legends, monuments, narratives, rituals, and films. Themes we will explore include the invention of tradition, the politics of commemoration, the violence to history of selective remembering, and the problem of recovered memory. Requirements for the course begin with attendance at all class meetings, thorough preparation of course readings, and regular contribution to class discussion. You will be asked to write two two-page preliminary responses on a personal memory and the distinction between memory and history. You will write two four-page papers on your choice of two of the four units in the course. Two oral presentations are required: one will be a five-minute synopsis of an article or chapter supplementing the readings for one of the class meetings, the other a full-class presentation in collaboration with another classmate on an issue of cultural memory after World War II. There will also be a final exam.

AMST 057 [006E]: Access to Higher Education
Social & Behavioral Science/Other (SS) [GC Social Science]
Rachel Willis
Access to higher education requires ability, experience, and skills. Success in application, admission, matriculation, and graduation is a function of numerous other advantages as well. This course explores barriers to access to American colleges and universities with a particular focus on disadvantages created through differences in three linked dimensions: socioeconomic circumstances, the increasing role of digital technologies in higher education, and barriers for students with physical disabilities.
A broad survey of the college admissions process and policies concerning equitable access to higher education will be supplemented each term with a range of resources that focus on a specific disadvantage. As a Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative offering, this FYS has an additional goal of developing the social entrepreneurial skills of seminar students. An active service-learning pedagogy will facilitate the development, implementation, and documentation of a team project to improve access to schools in the UNC system with respect to the current focus.

AMST 058 001 [006I]: Cultures of Dissent
Historical Analysis (HS), Communication Intensive (CI)
Jay Garcia
This course examines the history of radical social thought in American history, focusing in particular on examples from "leftist" and "collectivist" traditions. The course emphasizes the many forms radicalism has taken by exploring different radical thinkers' dissenting critiques of dominant political, economic and social arrangements. The course also attempts to reconstruct the social visions that animated radical movements by investigating uses of language, imagery and rhetorical styles. Among the topics the course will address are feminism, African American radical thought, the origins of the "Old Left," the emergence of the "New Left," anti-fascism, internationalism and environmentalism. The course content - speeches, novels, short stories, songs, films, among other forms - emphasizes the wide range of sources that offer historical insights into traditions of radical thought in American society.

AMST 058 002: Cultures of Dissent: The American Indian Experience
Historical Analysis (HS), North Atlantic World (NA)
Tol Foster
Through weekly case studies, drawing heavily from legal documents, histories, documentaries, and critical scholarship – including guest speakers from NC tribes and from the UNC academic community -- this course will focus on three major areas that dramatize the distinct status of American Indians in the U.S.: the land, tribal sovereignty, and American Indian personhood. We will consider how it is that Indians came to “lose” the land. Utilizing NC tribes, among others, we will trace how tribes are, and are not, like other governments, such that some can build casinos but none can build nuclear weapons, for example. We will also consider the gradual emancipation of American Indian individuals from their status as enemies, wards of the state and objects of scientific study, de-tribalized and racially quantified citizens, and finally as dual citizens of the U.S.. In a number of assignments, both individual and group, students will create wikis on the internet that share their understanding of these issues with the larger world. No prior knowledge about American Indians is expected, but upon completion, students will gain a powerful new understanding of the country we all share.