Seminar: America's Greatest and Gravest Generation, 1939-1955 Return to main page

Michael Trotti History Department 412 Muller  (607)274-1591

Readings
Writing
Research
External Sites
 

During and just after World War II, the United States remade itself and the world order in ways that have defined our history ever since. This seminar explores that process and its effects as we pulled out of the deepest depression the nation has ever known, fought the largest war in human history, and became the most powerful nation on earth. In the process, we changed the nature of our economy, our politics, our environment, our place in the world, and the role the military plays in our lives. We became important to world affairs all over the globe for the first time, and we devleoped whole new industries, along with wholly new sets of problems for ourselves and mankind.

This seminar has two overlapping goals: to familiarize you with the history of this crucial era, and also to familiarize you with the nature of historical inquiry itself: how historians do their work. It is in a seminar like this one that you come closest (as an undergraduate) to becoming a historian yourself, and we will spend a number of class periods through the course focusing not only on the subject matter of this period, but also on practical issues - sources, reviewing, writing, methodologies. Much of the course will be oriented toward your writing a high-quality seminar paper on a topic of your interest in this period. The precise subject of that paper will depend upon your interest (in consultation with me).

Below are some of the readings, and an idea about what the written work is for the class. At the end are some very interesting websites I've found relevant to this course and its themes. Contact me if you have any questions!

Readings:

• Benjamin, Jules, A Student's Guide to History (2010). This slim volume contains a host of helpful guidelines for success as a student of history. If you have an older edition, that will serve. This is not required, but recommended highly.

• Brokaw, Tom, The Greatest Generation (2001). A book of narratives/interviews with those who experienced this era.

• Cohen, Lizabeth, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2004). An influential study by a prize-winning historian, this will center us upon one of the most important themes of postwar America's experience.

• Levering, Ralph, et. al., Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives (2002). Presents the views of both sides as the world slides into Cold War.

• Rose, Kenneth, Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II (2008). World War II as actually experienced, rather than how it was remembered through the hazy glow of nostalgia and later, failed wars. I'm very much looking forward to our discussion of this one.

• Wall, Wendy, Inventing the "American Way:" The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (2008). Along with Cohen's Consumers' Republic, this should spark some very interesting discussion about the ways we shaped our postwar world.

• Wills, Garry, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010). One of those wonderful small books that provoke big discussions. I'm very much looking forward to talking about this take on the transformation of the Executive and all of its implications.

Additional readings available on the web -- you can get to them by clicking here. . .

. . . if you have access to the JSTOR database:

• Korstad, Robert, and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" Journal of American History 75 (1988): 786-811.

. . . or access to the History Cooperative:

• Nick Cullather, "Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State" Journal of American History, 25pp.

. . if you have access to the Proquest Historical New York Times database:

• Jacob Weisberg, "Cold War Without End" New York Times Magazine (28 November 1999).

[note: computers on the IC network -- which has a paid subscription to these services -- will all arrive there. Home computers for IC faculty and students will not, because these databases will not recognize you as a subscriber. Sadly, this also now applies to those on ResNet, despite assurances to the library that their new software would allow ResNet to do this. You can get to them, but you have to go to the IC library website, enter your password to gain access to these databases, then search the databases for the articles. Others not tied to IC will not be able to open these documents unless you have also paid a subscription to these services.]

Recommended Reading for all my classes:

• Strunk and White, The Elements of Style. This is not required, and I did not specifically order copies for the course.  It is, however, the most concise and helpful guide to strong writing, and I suggest that you purchase and read a copy.  The student bookstore always has a stockpile of them, as do most used bookstores in town.  It is cheap, short, and extremely helpful -- what a deal!

Writing:
 
Most of the writing in this course will be geared toward a thoroughly researched, gracefully written seminar paper on a topic concerning this period of American history that students and I will agree upon together.

Once we decide on a topic for your final project, students will write a book review on an important secondary source for their paper (again, more instructions will be forthcoming).

The lion's share of the writing in the course will be a research paper, based in primary and secondary sources, of approximately 25 pages. We will take on this project in stages - first defining a topic, then developing a bibliography of sources for students to explore (one secondary source of which will be the subject of the book review). The class will begin writing the paper with a one-paragraph statement of the argument accompanied by an outline of the paper, followed by a writing sample, a rough draft, and, in the last week, the final draft.

At the end, I will ask students to present their findings to the class and to critique the work of a fellow student. That brief critique will be the final written assignment.

Research:

Ithaca College and Cornell offer a tremendous number of opportunities for researching the history of the United States in the Depression, World War II, and after. Here follow some sources that will be of help to you in your projects.

Journals:
there are a number of helpful Journals: The Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, Journal of Social History, Journal of Southern History, and American Quarterly all might be of help. They are searchable through the web database "America: History and Life" mentioned below.

Books:
a few in the reference collection and hundreds in the stacks, generally in the general American History sections: "E" and "F". When you find a good title for your project, take the time to look around the shelves in its neighborhood -- you might find many others that for some reason did not come up on your computer search.

Web:
several very helpful resources are connected to the IC Library webpage. "America: History and Life" offers a terrific way to get to scholarly works by historians. It is searchable by subject and will connect you to the full-text articles in JSTOR and Project Muse. This is a wonderful asset, allowing you direct access to a wealth of scholarship which you can then simply print out or read on your screen. Other options for similar sources: "ProQuest" or Infotrac's"Expanded Academic Index". All of these web sources are databases for articles -- this is one of the two ways the web is useful for historical research (the other way is when primary sources are put on the web: the "historical New York Times" by itself is a wealth of primary material). There are thousands of sites out there with "stuff" having historical content. But because no one is checking them for accuracy, they cannot be depended upon and are not acceptable for this course.

Interlibrary Loan:
our library is actually much bigger than you might think. We have books and journals, but through "JSTOR" in particular, the web offers us much more. We are also able to use the holdings of all sorts of libraries across the country. If there is a book or journal article that you want and we don't have it, go to the Interlibrary Loan Form on the IC Library's Catalog page, and ask our library to get it for you. They are very good about getting things, although it takes time to do so. Ask early in the semester, and you could get all sorts of material that our own library does not offer. Ask late, and you won't.

Cornell's Research Libraries:
IC is a college focused on undergraduate education, and our library reflects that orientation. Cornell is a university with a number of graduate-level programs, and therefore it has accumulated library collections many times the size of ours. It has, in fact, 19 separate libraries, although most everything of interest to you would be in the Uris and Olin libraries. I do not require you to research at Cornell, but research libraries offer so many opportunities to expand your understanding of both the potentials of research and what is "out there" on a particular topic, that I highly recommend it. As you research at IC, flip over to the Cornell Library catalog and see what is available there as well.

External Links to Sites Relevant to this Course:

Depression

• Photographs from the Depression and WWII
• Voices from the Dustbowl
• The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theater Project, 1935-39
• A New Deal for the Arts
• By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-43

World War II:

• Washed ashore on a Newfoundland beach in World War II, Lanier Phillips, a black man from Georgia, was treated by white Canandians like he was human, the first white people to do so in his life. Listen to the last segment of the This American Life episode called "Them" (episode #201): Act III: Newfies. An amazing and wonderful story; an amazing and wonderful radio show. The whole expisode is interesting, but if you want to zoom in on Lanier Phillips's story, go to minute 32; this segment is about 20 minutes long.
• The website of the Holocaust Museum.  See in particular the exhibit of the voyage of the St. Louis, which ties the plight of European Jews to contemporary prejudice in the US
• World War II posters: from the Smithsonian, and from the National Archives
• A People at War
• Japanese Americans and the Constitution
• The "Special Relationship": Churchill, Roosevelt and the Emergence of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1939-45

    Also of Interest:

• Voting America: U.S. Politics, 1840-2008 -- interesting site with all sorts of political information throughout our history, particularly political maps that show sweeping changes over time.

  [under revision and development]

This website is occasionally maintained by Michael Trotti. (Last update: 13 July 2011).