What is culture and how does it inform our understanding and interpretation of history?  As we explore this question, students will study works of fiction, film, visual art and history to determine how our culture shapes our ideas about past and present realities.  Each quarter students will incorporate quantitative methods to enrich and explain aspects of American culture.  We’ll look at cultural products, from high art to popular culture with a particular focus on film and literature, to see how they reflect and shape our ideas about who and what we are. Our study will be organized around three turbulent decades in American history.

During Fall Quarter, we considered the post-Civil War years, including Reconstruction and western expansion.  From dime novels to Hollywood westerns, we examined how deeply we are shaped by 19^th and 20^th century frontier ideology.  Money and technology—capitalism and the railroads—also drove westward migration.  We analyzed the tensions around race and class as they figure in film, novels, and popular culture.

Winter quarter, we will move to the 1930s.  How did the Great Depression and the policy created to deal with that crisis change the way we see government?  What was the impact of two great migrations—from the dust bowl states to the West, and from the agricultural South to the industrial north—on American society?  In such a time of hardship and deprivation, how did the Golden Age of Hollywood reflect our cultural realities through genre films, such as the screwball comedy, the musical, and the gangster film?

In the spring, we’ll focus on the 1950s and ‘60s and how upward—and outward—mobility informed who and where we are today.  The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War transformed the country.  Cars, freeways, and the rise of the suburbs re-shaped the cultural landscape, and television expanded the scope of mass media and popular culture.

Our work will include critical reading of books and films. Students will be expected to learn about schools of cultural criticism, using different approaches to enrich their analyses. They will be expected to participate in seminar, lectures, workshops, and library research and to attend field trips to local museums and live theater performances.

The thread of mathematics runs through the tapestry of everything we’ll study in Culture as History.  Often times, in a non-math/science interdisciplinary program, even though the threads are there, they are never seen but lay hidden.  In Culture as History, we’ll work to pull some of these threads forward – to brighten the image and sharpen the focus of the topics we’ll study.  The mathematical threads that we choose to pull forward will be carefully chosen to gently enhance the image. Through collaborative learning, the mathematical topics we’ll engage with include quantitative literacy (reading and interpreting information), graph theory (How far is it to New York?), and other topics as appropriate. 

Credits may be awarded in American studies (literature, art and history), moving image, and mathematics.