Editor's Note
For nearly two decades, I’ve taught an undergraduate Honors Course at the University of Oklahoma built around the readings in Hollinger & Capper’s The American Intellectual Tradition. As part of LD Burnett’s series of posts rereading Hollinger & Capper, I’m doing a series of posts exploring what it’s like to teach the volumes in an undergraduate, honors setting. In my first post, I said a few general things about Perspectives on the American Experience: American Social Thought, the course (or actually courses) in which I use The American Intellectual Tradition. When I began this course, The American Intellectual Tradition was in its 3rd edition. Unless otherwise noted, I’ll be blogging about the most recent edition of the books, the 7th. In this seventh post in my series, I discuss teaching Volume II, Part One, entitled “Toward a Secular Culture.” For more on Volume II, Part One, see LD’s post on it. I’ll be blogging about a new section every two weeks as LD works her way through the book, though this particular post arrives a week late. In these posts, I am generally am not attempting to provide a comprehensive description of what I do with Hollinger & Capper in the classroom. Instead, I will usually be highlighting an aspect or two of my approach to each section. Please feel free to use the discussion thread for more general comments or questions about teaching this particular part of The American Intellectual Tradition.
As I wrote about in my first post on teaching Hollinger and Capper’s American Intellectual Tradition, in the spring of 2016, I split my American Social Thought course in two. Rather than teach most of both volumes of The American Intellectual Tradition in one semester, as I had for over a decade, I decided to teach only one volume per semester. Up until now in this series, I’ve written largely about how that has changed my approach to the material in Volume I. But in many ways my approach to Volume II changed much more when I split the course in two.
When I used to begin Volume II in the middle of a semester, the big themes of the course had already been well established. Students encountered the seismic intellectual changes that LD wrote about in her most recent post on Hollinger and Capper after they had gotten through Volume I. So my approach to the material in Volume II, Part One (“Toward a Secular Culture”) was to continue considering the questions we had been addressing for the first half the semester while encouraging my students to attend to certain aspects of modernity emerging in the readings.
Now, when I spend an entire semester on Volume II, this material falls at the beginning of the course. Far from seeing modernity slowly emerging out of intellectual worlds we had encountered in Volume I, my students now instead find themselves thrust into a strange and, for many of them, fairly distant past. The changes taking place in texts covered by Volume II, Part One are less clear to students who have not studied in detail what came before. They might even miss that sense of rapid change.
So when I first taught what was once the second half of my American Social Thought course as a standalone class, I decided to begin the semester with a supplemental primary source: Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward. This proved to be a very fruitful starting point for the class.
I’d taught Bellamy many times in the past, at least once in the overstuffed, two-volume, team-taught early version of this course. Looking Backward does a wonderful job setting out some of the anxieties that middle-class Americans felt in the late 1880s, especially concerning the new American working class, that haunts both Bellamy’s book and some of the readings of Volume II, Part One. Bellamy’s portrait of the United States at the turn of the 21st century also forms an interesting contrast with the actual America of the 21st century my students know. And the book nicely sets the table for many questions that will be raised in Volume II of The American Intellectual Tradition.
I’ll close this post with one other note about how I teach Volume II. Like the readings in Volume I, the readings in Volume II are arranged chronologically. But the four parts of Volume II are longer and their readings more heterogeneous than the five parts of Volume I. Readings in Volume II are frequently in most direct conversation with readings that they do not immediately precede or follow. For example: in between William Graham Sumner’s “Sociology” (1881) and Lester Frank Ward’s “Mind as a Social Factor,” which responds to Sumner, lies a selection from Charles Augustus Brigg’s Biblical Study (1883), which concerns entirely different things.
Though I divide my course into four sections built around the four parts of Volume II, within each section, I teach the readings somewhat out of order, rearranging them to emphasize thematic continuities.
After spending the first two weeks of the semester on Looking Backward, about which every student has to write a paper, we spend three weeks on Part One of Volume II. During the first week we read Asa Gray’s “Review of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species” (1860), William Graham Sumner’s “Sociology” (1881), Lester Frank Ward’s “Mind as a Social Factor” (1884), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self” (1892), and the selection from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898). I focus on the first three of these readings on the first day of class that week. Though Sumner is a classic “social Darwinist,” Darwinian evolutionary thought is just as important to the thinking of the anti-“social Darwinist” Ward. During the second day of class that week, I focus on Stanton and Gilman, as two contrasting arguments for feminism. Not having read Volume I, my students no longer catch the strong echoes of Transcendentalism in Stanton’s essay. But the contrast with Gilman is still interesting. And, of course, Gilman provides them with yet another social scientist using Darwinian ideas to still different argumentative ends.
The following week we largely focus on pragmatism and read Charles Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), the selection from Charles Augustus Briggs, Biblical Study (1883), William James’s “The Will to Believe” (1897), and Josiah Royce’s “The Problem of Job” (1898). Briggs is the odd thinker out here, but he is a nice contrast to Royce, who in turn is in conversation with James.
And in the fifth week of the semester, we finish up Part One of Volume II, reading the selection from Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s “A Plea for Culture” (1867), Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895), Henry Adams’s “The Dynamo and the Virgin” (1907), and George Santayana’s “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1913). This is a more disparate set of readings, but they cluster around questions of culture, America, modernity, and the relationship among them.
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Thanks for these, Ben. I’m still following. I’ve never taught, nor been taught, these two volumes. As observe your march through the selections, the authors, at least, appear familiar and canonical to me. It seems there should be selections from Washington and Du Bois in the part 1 of Volume 2. Perhaps they are upcoming? – TL
Update: Based on LD’s recent post on the series, it appears that Du Bois, at least, is there.