Roadside America

For the next three class sessions we are discussing Kerouac’s iconic road trip novel, On the Road.

Thurs 10/22 – Part One
Tues 10/27 – Part Two
Thurs 10/29 – Parts Three & Four – see revised schedule, above

You’ll be analyzing the novel as a historical (not just a fictional / literary) text, and [possibly] choosing some aspect of it to write about for your History Lab #4

Some helpful links:

Music mentioned in the text: Lullaby of Birdland, Slim Gaillard, 1940s “bebop jazz” e.g. Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon & Wardell Gray “The Hunt.”

Gilbert Millstein’s book review of On the Road in the New York Times, 5 Sept 1957

Various NPR stories about the novel & its mystique

Interactive maps for the novel

A “beat-obsessed” blog called The Daily Beat

“In the Kerouac Archive,” Atlantic, Nov 1998

Excerpts from JK’s journals, edited by Douglas Brinkley, published in the New Yorker, June 1998

Local interest in Lowell – Kerouac memorial walks and events in his own hometown

(photo of Jack Kerouac’s Underwood typewriter courtesy of The Lone Cypress blog)

Tues 10/13 – we will be screening (most of) the 1971 road film Two Lane Blacktop in class. Prepare by reading the Film Quarterly review posted on Blackboard.

Thurs 10/15 – The Golden Age of Family Vacations. Reading: make a first pass through the entire (short, picture-heavy) book Family Vacation. Dr. Rugh is a scholar of 20th-century tourism who wrote a scholarly book titled Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of Family Vacations (University of Kansas, 2008) and in her research she encountered many of these nostalgic images (maps, photographs, postcards, advertisements) and compiled them into the volume we’ll be reading. For Thursday’s class, choose a few images to discuss with your classmates.

Tues 10/20 – Golden Age of Family Vacations, Part II. Reading: Make a second pass through the Rugh book. Design and conduct a STUDY of some dimension of her primary sources: quantitative, aesthetic, ideological, iconographic, rhetorical, or any other creative method you can devise. Be ready to report on your METHOD and FINDINGS in Tuesday’s class – I will call on some people to present, but everyone should be ready to be called on.

This week, we’re tackling a particular genre of college-level reading: scholarly articles.

On Tuesday 10/6, please meet (with your laptops) in the Student Center Blue Lounge, instead of in our regular classroom. I’ll collect your History Lab #2 paper there. We will learn about some of the online library resources from the library director, Matt Bejune, and you’ll choose one on a course-related topic for the History Lab #3 assignment. Note that you are able to print your articles for free in the library itself from the terminals installed there.

For Thursday 10/8, please bring a PRINTOUT of your article with you to class, where we will be working with how to tackle, deconstruct, understand, and write about them.

Links for today:

Migrant Mother

HC video

NEH

American Memory search terms
Dust Bowl
Refugee families
Holtville, Imperial Valley California
Metal shelters
Migrant workers
Migrant pickers
On the road
Oklahoma migrant
Refugee camp
Squatter camp
Auto camp

Slight modification to the syllabus:

For Tues 9/29 Reading: 1) Brown, “Route 66” (PDF on Blackboard) and 2) Hamilton’s Itinerarium (PDF on Blackboard). Try applying the techniques, questions, and critical thinking skills to Hamilton’s document from the handout I provided on Thursday. For those who missed Thursday’s class, the handout was the text slides from this presentation:

Thurs 10/1 Workshop Day: How to Read a Photograph, using Okies on the Mother Road as a case study

Some of the most iconic American images of traveling and roadside life come from displaced migrants of the Great Depression in the 1930s, in part because of the efforts of New Deal documentarians from the Works Progress Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and (a little later) the Office of Wartime Information. We’ll use some of this material to explore how to read a photograph or a visual image (such as posters or advertisements) as a historical text. Our online sources are the photographs from the New Deal Network, and the Library Of Congress/FSA-OWI. During this workshop, take a look at these two collections and get familiar with how to use them and search within them. We’ll be using some of the images that display roadside culture of migrants, refugees, and Okies in the 1930s as the primary sources for History Lab #2.

This week we will look at two travel narratives from early America. The first is the famous journals of Lewis and Clark‘s Corps of Discovery and their 2-year journey across the continent in search of a Northwest water passage (1804-1806). The second is is the 1744 trip–by boat, and by rather primitive roads–of Dr. Alexander Hamilton (not to be confused with the Alexander Hamilton, man on the $20 bill, Jefferson’s Secretary of Treasury, who was killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804. That’s a completely different guy), a young physician rambling alone with a keen eye to the Eastern seaboard world and a keen ear for the many accents and languages he encounters there.

We’ll use both of these as case studies for how to approach a primary source: the raw material of historical analysis. Also we consider the literary conventions in travel writing, and how these writers (and many others) narrate journeys across America–and how we remember, memorialize and mythologize such journeys.

Tues 9/22 Bring laptops – you’ll get assigned a portion of the Lewis and Clark journals in class, and we’ll talk about how to search within and analyze these sources. [H-Lab #1 due – email it by classtime]

Lewis and Clark homework document for Thurs 9/24

Thurs 9/24 Read Hamilton’s Itinerarium of 1744 (PDF – also posted on Blackboard) and bring it to class either as a printout or on your laptop/device. The word “Itinerarium” recalls ancient Roman road schemas, e.g. the Peutinger Table.

Just for fun, I mapped the Hamilton Itinerarium excerpts we have onto Google maps so you can see where his travels took him. Surprisingly, most of the place names he mentions have survived to the present. Notice anything about his route?

This week we explore the origins of a distinctive American cultural landscape, the “roadside” – how & when it came to be, how Worcester’s history connects, and where we can find examples and legacies in our own locality today.

Tues 9/15 Workshop: How to Read Wikipedia.
Reading: Raitz, “American Roads” (PDF on Blackboard). Bring laptops to class.

Thurs 9/17 Road Food.
Explore these links:
Worcester Historical Museum / Diner

“Ten Diners Stamped ‘Worcester’” Boston Globe 3/7/2010

Diner Lingo (lots of places on the web, try here or here or here)

Fri 9/18 or Sat 9/19 (we will plan / decide the details of this in class) – we’ll take a field “research” trip to a classic Worcester diner for dinner or breakfast (pay your own way)

For Thursday’s class on 9/10, we’ll tap into some of the learning resources we can find in the university library (aka Learning Resource Center). In preparation, please listen to this 14-minute public radio call-in show interview with Ken Bain, author of the book What the Best College Students Do. Take some notes on his success tips, and think about how his advice might be relevant to your approach to college learning & making this year something much more than “13th grade.”

Making A Success of College

For class, we’ll meet in the library cafe at our usual class time. You will find your laptop and/or a cell phone handy to have.

PS – here’s the list of tools and tricks we talked about in Tuesday’s class

Helpful or May Be Required on Campus: Blackboard, Aplia, DineOnCampus, free download of Microsoft Office

Campus Gmail: add a nice photo, try Priority Inbox (here’s why), and Settings –> Labs –> enable “Canned Responses” and also “Undo Send”

Back Up Your Work! And/or use Dropbox

Notetaking: OneNote (pre-installed w/ Microsoft Office Suite), Evernote, or Google docs

Bibliography: EasyBib

For more advanced students: Zotero (notetaking + research management + archiving from online research + bibliographies integrated with Word = total genius)

General College Advice: HackCollege

Stay Informed: BBC, NPR

Save Stuff You Find: (Evernote, Zotero, see above) and Pocket, Pinboard

Organize a Group: Group.Me

Keep Track of Long Term Projects and To-Do’s: Trello, Any.Do, Remember the Milk (integrates w/ Evernote)

Bring your laptops on Tuesday – we will be exploring some tools, resources and other cool techie stuff.

In preparation, take a look at your assigned website below, and apply the web page evaluation criteria in this link… be ready to talk about your findings with the class! Continue reading →

I look forward to meeting all of you in the fall – welcome to your first-year seminar and to the Honors Progam at Worcester State. This website, along with the course Blackboard, will be your roadmap for the fall semester. If you’d like a head start over the summer (as many honors students do…)

List of books we’ll read
Meet your professor

About this course: College has a lot in common with a road trip along the lesser-known highways of America’s past. It’s familiar and foreign at the same time; you’re embarking on a grand adventure into the unknown. “Roadside America” takes a semester-long tour of the USA through history, literature, popular culture and kitsch, while introducing you to the joys and rigors of university life and the honors program through inquiry, writing and seminar-style discussion. We’ll explore history and scholarship about the US interstate highway system and America’s collective love affair with cars and consider tourism, pilgrimage, memory, truckers, diners and being “on the road.” From the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters… this land is your land, so embrace it!