History 1661: Social Thought in Modern America
Instructor: James Kloppenberg
Semester: Fall 2007
Blogger: educatedforwhat
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History 1661: Social Thought in Modern America
This blog was inspired by History 1661: Social Thought in Modern America by James Kloppenberg

ON AVANT-GARDES AND IDEAS
September 27th, 2007
Readings: Charles Eliot Norton, “American Political Ideas” Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (selections) Stephen Crane, “An Episode of War” I mistakenly ordered a pamphlet on the avant-garde from the literary magazine n+1 over the summer. Having nothing better to do, I finally decided to...
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WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
October 3rd, 2007
For some reason, every class even remotely related to twentieth century American history at Harvard, from art classes to social science classes, decides to focus on the 1893 World’s Columbian Expo. While Professor Kloppenberg claims this is because world’s expositions show “a culture at its most...
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CONSPICUOUS (UNDER)CONSUMPTION
October 6th, 2007
Readings: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class “The Populist Party Platform of 1892” Conspicuous consumption. Super-sweet sixteens, gaz-guzzling SUVs, McMansions—the phrase brings to mind more examples that the mind can grasp. Daily, we’re bombarded with proof of our over-consuming...
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PLEASE DON’T TOUCH
October 10th, 2007
Readings: William James, “The Will to Believe” William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” William James, “Robert Gould Shaw, an Oration” William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” William James, “What Makes a Life Significant” William James, Pragmatism,...
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THE THIRD SELF
October 13th, 2007
Readings: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” and selection from Women and Economics Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self” and selection from The Woman’s Bible Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (chapters...
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TO BE SHUT FROM THE WORLD BY A VAST VEIL
October 18th, 2007
Readings: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America” At times, the list of William James’s students seems remarkable, like a who’s who of early twentieth century America. Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann, George Santayana—even Theodore Roosevelt spent...
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THE SNARE OF PREPARATION
October 21st, 2007
Readings: Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, selection At the turn of the century, many Americans and Europeans were asking a strange question. Why, they wondered, was it that there was no socialism in the United States? Theories abounded,...
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FAITH IN THE UNCERTAIN
October 27th, 2007
In his September article for Harper’s, “Flies in Amber,” Lewis Lapham cynically states, “I quote Holmes at some length it's because he allows me to understand George W. Bush's war on terror not as an act of criminal stupidity but as the work of a man imprisoned in a past tense.” What Lapham...
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DO A LITTLE DANCE
November 8th, 2007
Readings: Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper, Chapter 1 T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Hollow Men” Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, selections H.L Mencken, Notes on Democracy, selections Warning: this post may seem a bit scattered. Full disclosure: this is...
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YOU CAN’T GET OUT BACKWARDS
November 9th, 2007
Readings: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams Gertrude Stein, Selections from The Making of Americans “What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth?” questioned Henry Adams...
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WATCH THEIR FACES CHANGE
November 13th, 2007
Readings: John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, selection Liberalism and Social Action “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Pathos of Liberalism” Henry Wallace, The Century of the Common Man (selections) Franklin D. Roosevelt, “1944 State of the...
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A CIRCLE, NOT A LINE
November 15th, 2007
Readings: Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness” Whittaker Chambers, Witness, selections John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths, selection Daniel Bell, “The End of Ideology in the West” Friederich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, chapter 1 “The rise of...
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AN AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
November 20th, 2007
Readings: Gunmar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, selections Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” “America, compared to every other country in Western civilization, large or small, has the most explicitly expressed system of general...
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ON AVANT GARDES AND A LACK OF IDEAS
November 29th, 2007
Readings: Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead” Allen Ginsburg, “A Supermarket in California” “In death as in life, then, the Fifty-fourth bore witness to the brotherhood of Man. The lover of heroic history could wish for no more fitting sepulcher...
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A HANDFUL OF TURTLES
December 6th, 2007
Readings: T.S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, selection Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, selection Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Towards the end of the middle half of the twentieth century, many professors of philosophy and even those just generally part...
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THE PROBLEM THAT HAS A NAME: CHOICE
December 11th, 2007
Readings: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, excerpts Joan Williams, Unbending Gender, excerpts In a January 8th editorial in the New York Times, feminist Gloria Steinem argued that it was worrying that Barack Obama was seen as unifying by his race whereas Hilary Clinton was seen as divisive...
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