THE SIXTIES

Professor Daniel Segal

dsegal@pitzer.edu

office hours: T 9-11 & F 1:30-2:30 in

Bernard 225

 

COURSE OVERVIEW

 

My goal is for this course to be run as a "workshop" in which we collectively investigate key questions about "the sixties."  This means I expect students not just to participate in the seminar, but beyond this, to take a significant share of responsibility for the seminar. 

 

In a perfect world, I would from the outset assign primary documents or artifacts for each week, and then we would analyze and interpret them during our seminar.  That's what I mean by a "workshop."  However, before proceeding in this way, I want to be sure that everyone in the seminar has both a core of historical knowledge about "the sixties" and some grounding in relevant theoretical questions about "the sixties."  Thus, during the first third of the course, roughly speaking, the bulk of the readings will be texts that provide some combination of historical overview and analytic arguments, though these "secondary texts" will be accompanied by some "primary documents" (most notably, weekly film assignments).

 

During the middle third of the course, the balance will shift: most of the assignments will be primary documents or artifacts, though I will also continue to assign secondary works that foreground analytic arguments, in order to suggest approaches to the primary documents.  During this middle section of the course, moreover, I will assign some documents and artifacts to the entire class and, as a supplement to the shared assignment, I will assign other documents and artifacts to subsets of the entire class.  For example, when the entire class is reading a big chunk of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique (1963), I might assign some students portions of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962), while other students might be assigned portions of Hugh Hefner's The Playboy Philosophy (1963), Margaret Mead's Male and Female (1955) or Sisterhood is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan (1970).  Here, the goal will be that our collective discussion will be enriched by the connections that different students make between the shared assignments and their supplemental assignment.

 

Finally, each student will be responsible for producing a 20-30 page research paper, which is due Friday, 15 December (I will accept the papers without penalty up to noon on Wednesday, 20 December, however).  During the final third of the semester, our seminars will be devoted to these student research projects.  During these weeks, each of you will select, as an assignment for the rest of the class, a primary document or artifact (or a set of primary materials) that is central to your research.  Each student will then be responsible for leading a portion of one weekly seminar in a discussion of their chosen material(s).  I will meet with each of you individually to help you prepare for this. Please note that a 2-5 page research proposal is due by noon on Sunday, October 1.

 

Your course grade will be based equally on your seminar participation and your final paper.

 

 

 

COURSE SCHEDULE

 

Section 1 (week 1): Collecting Collective Memories; and Some Thoughts on (i) What Went Before and (ii) How to do History (of a decade, for example)

 

Section 2 (weeks 2 - 5): Historical Overview and Interpretive Orientations

 

Sept 6

Farber, David, The Age of Great Dreams, pp. 1-116.

Collins, Robert, "Growth Liberalism in the Sixties," pp. 11-44 in D. Farber, ed. The Sixties: From Memory to History (1994).

Rybczynski, Witbold, "Shipping News," The New York Review of Books, 10 August 2006.

Ginsberg, Alan, "America" (1956).  Click here for the text.

Morris, Errol, director. Fog of War (2003).  Please note: all films will be shown at 3 p.m. on the Sunday before our seminar; so for this film, Sunday the 3rd of September.  If you cannot make that showing, you are responsible for contacting the Pitzer audio-visual department to arrange to see the film or otherwise finding some way to see it.  For the films, you are strongly encouraged to find and read reviews, many of which are available at www.rottentomatoes.com.  I particularly recommend the film reviews from The New York Times and The New Yorker (though reviews from the latter are not available at the Rotten Tomatoes website).  

 

Sept 13

Farber, David, The Age of Great Dreams, pp. 117-211.

Graham, Hugh Davis, "Left Turn, Right Turn: Legacies of the 1960s," Reviews in American History (1995).

Ellis, Richard J., Review of  The Age of Great Dreams, The Journal of American History 82, no. 1 (Jun., 1995): 360-361.

Pollenberg, Richard, "The Age of Reform," ch. 5 in One Nation Divisible (1980).

Lee, Spike, director, Malcolm X  (1992).

 

Sept 20

Farber, David, The Age of Great Dreams, pp. 212-262.

Anderson, Terry, "The New American Revolution: The Movement and Business," in D. Farber, ed. The Sixties from Memory to History (1994).

Cmiel, Kenneth, "The Politics of Civility," in D. Farber, ed. The Sixties form Memory to History (1994).

Ginsberg, Alan, "America" (1956).  Click here for the text.

Green, Sam and Bill Spiegel, director, The Weather Underground (2002).

 

Sept 27

Judt, Tony, Postwar, chs. xii-xiii (2005).

Hollinger, David, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, ch. 1 (1996)

Spence, Jonathan, The Search for Modern China, pp. 574-633 (1990).

Sherry, Ortner, "Generation X: Anthropology in a Media Saturated World," Cultural Anthropology (1998).

 

Section 3 (weeks 6-10): Thematic Workshops

 

Oct 4:  Feminism and Sexuality

Common Readings

Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, selected chapters (1963).

Echols, Alice, "Women's Liberation and Sixties Radicalism" in Farber, D. ed., The Sixties.

Bailey, Beth, "Sexual Revolution(s)," in Farber, D. ed., The Sixties.

Jigsaw Readings

Group A: Heffner, Hugh, The Playboy Philosophy (1963).

Group B: Brown, Helen G., Sex and the Single Girl (1963).

Group C: Morgan, Robin, Sisterhood is Powerful, excerpts (1970).

Group D: Mead, Mead, Male and Female, excerpts (1949).

 

Oct 11: The Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, and some from Woodstock

Readings

George, Lipsitz, "Who'll Stop the Rain," in D. Farber, ed. The Sixties.

Leonard, John, "Liaisons Dangeureuses," New York Review of Books (2001).

Listening

The Beatles

"Love Me Do" (1962)
"From Me To You" (1963)
"I Want To Hold Your Hand" (1963)
"Can't Buy Me Love" (1964)

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Revolver (1966)

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band (1967)

The Beatles (the white album; 1968)

Dylan (for lyrics, see www.bobdylan.com/moderntimes/music/albumsMain.html)

    "Blowin in the Wind" (1963)

    The Times They Are-a-Changin (1964)

    Bringing it All Back Home (1965)

    Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

The Stones

    "Time is on My Side" (1964)

    "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (1965)

    "Get Off My Cloud" (1965)

    "As Tears Go By" (1965)

    "19th Nervous Breakdown" (1966)

    "Mother's Little Helper" (1966)

    "Let's Spend the Night Together" (1967)

    "Jumping Jack Flash" (1968)

Various Artists

    Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music (live recordings from Woodstock in 1969)  


 

Oct 18: Music and Research Proposals

 

 

Oct 25: The New Left

Mills, C. Wright, "Letter to the New Left" (1960).

The Port Huron Statement (1962).  Click here for part 1; and click here for part 2.

Marcuse, H. One Dimensional Man (1964).  For a photo, click here.

Savio, Mario, "An End to History" (1964)

Davidson, Carl, "Student Power: A Radical View" (1966; this is in the same pdf file as the next reading).

Calvert, Gregory, "In White America: Radical Consciousness and Social Change" (1967).

 

 

Nov. 1: The Reception and Social Meanings of the Assassination of President Kennedy

Greenberg, B.S., and E.B. Parker, editors. The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public: Social Communication in Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (1965).  Selected chapters.

Wolfenstein, Martha and Gilbert Kilman, eds. Children and the Death of a President (1965).  Selected excerpts.

Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky, What Really Happened to the Class of '65 (1976), pp. 3-13.

Berkeley Barb, "Kennedy's Killers Can Kill You, Too," (1966) V. 2(3), p. 2 and 6.

 

 

Section 4 (weeks 11-15): Student Research Projects

 

Nov. 8: Feminism, Higher Education & Pedagogy (Annaka Blomfeld) and Insurgencies in Vietnam (Max Lehman)

 

Assigned by Annaka Blomfeld:

Assigned by Max Lehman:  

 

Nov. 19: Gender, Language, and Cosmo (Julia Longenecker) and Communes (Gregory Saunders)

 

Assigned by Julia Longenecker

Assigned by Gregory Saunders

 

Nov. 29: Lesbian and Gay Movements in and from the Sixties (Lindsey Healey), Comparing Black and White Radicals (Marisol Khalifa), and Nicole Cowan

 

Assigned by Marisol Khalifa

Assigned by Lindsey Healey

 

Dec. 6

 

Assigned by Michael de La Paz

 

Assigned by Amelia Whitcomb

Assigned by Nicole Cowan