When I was thinking back over civ I and II, a continuing theme, we were told, was how many people confronted the problem of creating the United States and how to find a model a new nation. To this point, we looked at efforts to use memory (like the alamo), collections and displays of American culture and material culture (Volcano Lover, World Fair, Carson), models of science, taxonomy, nature, (Emerson, Moby-Dick… )and we looked at accounts of what it was to be an American (Crevecoeur, Franklin).
On the whole, I think I can look back at these classes as representations of how, in general, an intellectual class of citizens in the 18th and 19th centuries set out to create a new national identity and experimented with all these examples of expression. Segueing into CivIII and the idea of “inbetween peoples,” we looked at a slew of people, certainly a majority of Americans all together, who didn’t fit into these various models of Americanism. What is more, as Bederman shows, narratives of Americanism also began to shift. The models that we explored last year were largely outdated by advances in Darwinian science, for example, or a ‘crisis in masculinity,’ and the changing national demographics and the “new immigrant.” One thing that is interesting, on this level, is to see how any model or blueprint for society will most likely become exclusive. Then of course, we also saw instances, such as in Enstad, where oppressed groups outside of a WASP model of Americanism were able to create their own space and alternate identity. By looking at race, gender, Southern culture, etc… We can see that even by the first half of the 20th century, the efforts to create or select a guidelines for Americanism were often futile, in many respects changing, and perhaps more divisive than ever.
Claire mentioned the theme of the law in her post. I think this is a really interesting topic in terms of how laws were used and interpreted. In Typhoid Mary, the law was used as a way of oppressing a person who had little recourse. Ngai showed how the law could be used as a top-down way of influencing ideas about race and defining Americanism. Also, Light in August showed us how the culture of the rural South, the practice of lynching, etc… meant that the law often was abandoned or carried out by mobs. In Summer of the Gods, we saw how the law/courtroom became more of an event or circus, a place of public display that really had nothing to do with the implementation of justice. Finally, outside of the legal system itself, the various customs and dogmas that Joe Christmas, for example, runs into, show a complex web of social laws, definitions, and ways of transgressing societal norms and designating inbetweenness. In a way, social assumptions also create a system of social laws.
Speaking in generalities, one shift between the courses was to look at the more intellectual efforts of people like Melville or Franklin try to understand America, to the work of historians and academics who are looking at inbetween people. We certainly saw a more patrician world view in the first two semesters, simply from reading people like Thoreau and Jefferson, people who were educated and borrowed models for society from their intellectual milieu. In CivIII, we look at the people whose existence wasn’t represented at the world fair or in Emerson. A more modern, nitty gritty look at society from the bottom-up in many ways. both perspectives are important.
I think what is interesting is that the approach of first two semesters raised a lot of big questions but didn’t really give any answers (at least that as I understood it). Perhaps civIII gives us a chance to answer some questions about what America was during this time period, but mostly, I think it just served to shake up even more of what we took for granted.