HI 460 Cross-Cultural Encounters

Thursday’s class will introduce a new book, George Packer’s The Unwinding, a literary nonfiction book about America’s recent past. He’s making an overall argument (that the American promise has begun to unwind, and that we can date the start of that process to about the late 1970s), but it’s certainly not a scholarly book. Rather, The Unwinding is written by a talented journalist (he’s a New Yorker staff writer) for a popular audience through interwoven biographies of both famous and ordinary Americans. I think Packer captures well the zeitgeist of the era and it makes for compelling reading and is a lovely model of innovative “recent history” writing; don’t just take my word for it, the book won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2013 (PS: you can also find him visiting The Daily Show and the Colbert Report to pitch the book’s release).

For Thursday 9/18, please read the Prologue, and bring the book with you to class.

Also due by classtime on Thursday: your second research journal post. Take one of the following options, and please write a polished, well-crafted 600-700 word post. Feel free to incorporate your responses or insight regarding Romano’s essay “Not Dead Yet” into either option.

Option 1 (if you do not have a topic or have not started any research yet): Consider the source you brought to class on Tuesday. How had you imagined incorporating it into your eventual research project? How did your classmate suggest it could be used? Suppose this were to be one of your sources: what are its pros and cons? What opportunities or challenges could you foresee in using this source to write recent history? What problems or questions do you have at this point?

Option 2 (only if you have actually started researching one of your topic ideas): Provide an initial prospectus or proposal about your project (or your current project ideas, if there are more than one), and which team might make the most sense for you to be on. What kind of sources have you already looked at? What’s the state of the historiography (aka “the literature”), as you understand it at this point? Which of Romano’s challenges (and remember, she tends to cast those as freedoms in disguise) might apply to you? What problems or questions do you have at this point?