Consumption: From Wedgewood to Walmart

Description

Whether buying at a general store or shopping at a mall, consumption has always formed an essential part of the American experience. More than just commodities bought and sold, consumption is also about the institutions, social practices, cultural meanings and economic functions that surround the merchandise. Bringing together business, labor and cultural history, this SDG will look at the changing meanings consumption has had for life, politics and the economy in the US. And what better time to consider the effects on consumption of the recent tariffs and the shift in consumption patterns during the Covid-10 pandemic!

Weekly Topics

1. Why study consumption?

2. Retail Distribution evolution: Sears and Montgomery Ward Catalogues, Department Stores, and Retail Premiums

3. The Stupid Experiment: Temperance, Saloons and NIckelodeons

4. A & P and Piggly Wiggly: Progressive Era Models of Retail

5. Premiums and Spectacles

6. Installment Credit

7. Television; The Mall

8. Afro-American Consumption

9. The Discount Retailer Revolution

10. Tariff's and Plagues.  Where does consumerism go from here?

Bibliography

Core books:

Borrow, The American Way of Debt, Louis Hyman, Vintage Books 2012

Consumer Society in American History,  edited by Lawrence Glickman, Cornell University 1999 (Articles noted as CS in list above)

Land of Desire, Merchants, Power and the Rise of A New American Culture, William Leach, Vintage Books 1993 (Articles noted as LD in list above - if you do not wish to purchase/borrow this book, I will be happy to scan the pages for you)

Cheap Amusements, Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Kathy Peiss, Temple University 1986 (Articles noted as CA in list above - if you do not wish to purchase/borrow this book, I will be happy to scan the pages for you)

We Have No Idea-A Guide to the Unknown Universe

Description

Our understanding of the Physical World and Universe has many gaps, some small and some very large. The latter  put into questions many of the current hypothesis that try to explain the Universe, how it formed and to some degree our relationship within it. Some of the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th century have tried to fill these gaps of knowledge, but many still remain and actually grow larger!

The authors of the core book have put together a humorous explanation of what we know and understand of the universe and what the gaps in our knowledge are. Since the book was published in 2017, some recent experiments have brought answers, partial answers or more questions relating to the various topics.

The book is written for those who have little or no knowledge about the Universe, but would like to know how it affects our existence directly and indirectly on this watery sphere. Can you live a comfortable life not knowing about these problems? Does resolving them help civilization? Maybe we will find some answers to these momentous questions.

Weekly Topics

1. What is the Universe made of? (Chap. 1)

2. What is Dark Matter (Chap. 2)

3. What is dark Energy?  (Chap 3)

4. What is the most Basic Element of Matter? (Chap. 4)

5. The Mysteries of Mass?    (Chap. 5)

6. Why is Gravity so Different from the other Forces? (Chap. 6)

7. What is Space? What is Time? (Chap. 7&8)

8. How Many Dimensions are There? (Chap. 9)

9. Can We Travel Faster than Light? (Chap. 10)

10. Who is Shooting Superfast Particles at the Earth (Chap. 11)

11. Why are we made of Matter, Not Antimatter? (Chap. 12)

12. What Happened During the Big bang? (Chap. 14)

13. How Big is the Universe? Is There a Theory of Everything? (Chap 15 & 16)

14. Are We Alone in the Universe? (Chap. 17)

Bibliography

• Core Book: We have No Idea-John Cham and Daniel Whitman. Riverrhead Books, NY 2017. Available from Amazon in all formats.

• 13 Things that don't make sense - Michael Brooks- Doubleday, 2008

• One, Two Three Infinity - George Gamow - Dover  Edition, 1988

• A brief History of time - Stephen Hawkins - Bantam Books, 1988

• The Mystery of Antimatter - Helen Quinn & Yossi Nir - Princeton University Press, 1988

• Antimatter - Frank Close - Oxford Press, 2010

• A Universe of 10 Dimensions - https://phys.org/news/2014-12-universe-dimensions.html

• What is the Big Bang Theory - https://www.space.com/25126-big-bang-theory.html

• God and the Atom - Victor Stenger - Prometheus Books, 2013

• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Theories of the Universe

• Massive, The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science - Ian Sample, Basic Books, 2010

• The Ambidextrous Universe - Martin Gardner - W.H. Freeman & Co. 1990

Native America from 1890 to Present

Description

This SDG seeks to examine the history of Native America after the massacre at Wounded Knee to the present. The core book is The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present written by David Treuer. The book has been widely praised and was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. It tells a comprehensive story of Indian survival, resilience, adaptability and pride. It does so in a readable manner combining reportage, memoir and historical scholarship. The book shatters one myth after another and moves seamlessly from the big story to the tales of Native American lives. A beautifully written book telling a story that must be read, studied and understood.

Weekly Topics

1. Prologue; Part 1 Narrating the Apocalypse; Early Tribes and Homelands; The Southeast; The Seminole Wars; The Northeast; The Northwest; The Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley.

2. The Southwest; California; The Pacific Northwest; The Great Basin; The Southern Great Plains; The Northern Plains; 1890.

3. Part 2 Purgatory 1891-1934; The End of the Treaty Era; Chief Joseph and Chief Standing Bear; The Beginning of the Indian Rights Movement; The Indian Boarding Schools; Allotment.

4. Indian Offenses; The Seeds of Tribal Resistance; Part 3 Fighting Life 1914-1945; The Meriam Report.

5. Emergence of Tribal Governments; John Collier and the Indian Reorganization; War and Migration; Entering the Cage; Part 4 Moving On Up; Migration; The Kansas Act.

6. Termination; The Indian Claims Commission; Relocation; Part 5 Becoming Indian 1970-1990; The Rise of Red Power; National Indian Youth Council; Panthers and Red Power.

7. The Rise of the American Indian Movement; AIM at  Pine Ridge; War on Poverty; The Indian Education Act; Jumping Bull.

8. Anna Mae Aquash; Part 6 Boom City-Tribal Capitalism; Blood Quantum and Disenrollment.

9. Part 7 Digital Indians 1990-2018; Epilogue. 

Bibliography

David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, New York, Riverhead Books, 2019.

Economics and Ideology

Description

Robert Reich’s new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is a highly readable discussion of how the elite in our country, the “oligarchy,” control the political system by lobbying and hiring government officials, congressmen, and senators with large salaries after they leave the government. While some corporations state they have liberal goals, those statements hid significant abuses, such as violating laws and paying fines that are less than the profits those abuses generate. This SDG will discuss the validity of those claims and the practicality of the solutions he suggests, and try to balance the discussion with outside articles that have a different point of view. (Note: This is a revision of the original SDG proposal.)

Weekly Topics

1. Overview

2. The Obsolescence of Right and Left

3. Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase: Patriot First? 

4. Socialism for the Rich, Harsh Capitalism for the Rest

5. The System of Corruption

6. The Silence of the CEOs

7. The Core Contradiction

8. The Vicious Cycle and From Stakeholder to Shareholder Capitalism

9. The Power Shift

10. The Last Coping Mechanism

11. The Triumph of the Oligarchy

12. The Furies: Reaction to The System

13. How Oligarchies Retain Power

14. Why Democracy Will Prevail and a Final Word

Bibliography

Robert Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It (2020)

Best American Short Stories of the 20th Century

Description

Since the series' inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature. THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY, published in 2000 brings together the best of the best - fifty-five extraordinary stories that represent a century's worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner,  F. Scott Fitzgerald,  Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates,  and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us in the twenty-first century.

In this SDG we will read all of these stories and discuss what makes them the best, how each explored aspects of the human condition, and whether each story continues to speak to us in the first 20 years of the 21st Century.

Weekly Topics

1. Week 1: Zelig by Benjamin Rosenblatt, The Silver Dish by Saul Bellow, My Dead Brother Comes to America by Alexander Godin, and Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers by Stanley Elkin.

2. Week 2: A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell, Christmas Gift by Robert Penn Warren, The Hitch Hikers by Eudora Welty, and Miami-New York by Martha Gelhorn.

3. Week 3: Here We Are by Dorothy Parker, That in Allepppo Once... by Vladimir Nabokov, Crazy Sunday by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Golden Honeymoon by Ring Lardner.

4. Week 4: That Evening Sun Go Down by William Faulkner, Verona: A Young Woman Speaks by Harold Brodkey, Roses, Rhododendron by Alice Adams, and Wild Plums by Grace Stone Coates

5. Week 5: Little Selves by Mary Lerner, Double Birthday by Willa Cather, Resurrection of a Life by William Saroyan, and The German Refugee by Bernard Malamud

6. Week 6: The Other Woman by Sherwood Anderson, Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver, Gestering by John Updike, Janus by Ann Beattie.

7. Week 7: The Farmer's Children by Elizabeth Bishop, The Ledge by Lawrence Sargent Hall, The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick and In the Gloaming by Alice Elliott Dark

8. Week 8: Birth Mates by Gish Jen, The Killers by Ernest Hemingway, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates, and Theft by Katherine Anne Porter.

9. Week 9: Blood-Burning Moon by Jean Tomer, Bright and Morning Star by Richard Wright, Proper Library by Carolyn Ferrell, Gold Coast by James Alan McPherson

10. Week 10: Soon by Pam Durban, The Half-skinned Steer by Annie Proulx, The Interior Castle by Jean Stafford, The Second Tree From the Corner by E.B. White

11. Week 11: The Peach Stone by Paul Horgan, The Resemblance Between a Violin Case ad a Coffin by Tennessee Williams, The Country Husband by John Cheever, You're Ugly, Too by Laurie Moore

12. Week 12: I Want to Live by Thom Jones, Greenleaf by Flannery O'Connor, The Rotifer by Mary Ladd Gavell and How We Live Now by Susan Sontag

13. Week 13: Defender of the Faith by Philip Roth, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Death of a Favorite by J.F. Powers and The Best Girlfriend You Never Had by Sam Houston

14. Week 14: The Key by Isaac Beshevis Singer, City of Churches by Donald Barthelme, How to Win by Rosellen Brown and Meneseteung by Alice Munro

Bibliography

The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000) Edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison

Memoirs: Classics and Classics-To-Be

Description

What makes memoirs tick? How is it that one memoir moves us more than another? How revealing is a memoir of the author as well as of the "characters"? How do memoirists draw us into the eventfullness of their inner lives? How do their personal trajectories say something about their social milieu? 

We omit political memoirs. We treat writers who, famous or not, focus on their personal lives—their intimate and their professional relationships and, especially, the linkages between the two.  For all their diversity, the memoirs selected here have a common thread: how adventitious happenings shape lives into something like a coherent venture. 

In a nutshell, the rationale of this SDG is comparison-and-contrast. We are less concerned with singular, recurrent themes. We are on the lookout for divergent stories and sensibilities, and for the mix of rawness and artfulness, that the best of the genre draws forth. We do not reach for an over-arching perspective.

Weekly Topics

1. Maya Angelou [1951 -2014], I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Chapters 1 - 19.

2. Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Chapters 20 - 36.

3. F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896 – 1940], The Crack-Up (Penguin, 1965), 54 pp. The book includes "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (pp. 9 - 19), "My Lost City" (pp. 20 - 31) "Ring" (pp. 32 - 38), "The Crack-Up" (pp. 39 -  56), and "Early Success," (pp. 57 - 63).

4. Jill Ker Conway [1934 - 2018], The Road from Coorain.  Conway grew up on a sheep farm in Australia and finally became President of Smith College. Chapters 1 - 5.

5. Conway, The Road from Coorain, Chapter 6 – 9.

6. Philip Roth [1933 - 2018], Patrimony: A True Story (1991), pp. 3 -110. This account of the aging and final illness of Roth's father won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

7. Roth, Patrimony, pp. 111 - 240.

8. Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates [1975 - ], Between the World and Me (2015), pp. 3 - 176. Written in the form of letters to his teenage son, this memoir of growing up in West Baltimore, education at Howard University and beyond, is a follow-up to The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and the Unlikely Road to Manhood (2005), Part I, pp. 1-71.

9. Coates. Between the World and Me, Part II, pp. 72-152.

10. Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (2010) pp. 1- 110.

11. Judt, The Memory Chalet, pp. 111-226

12. James Baldwin [1924 – 1987], Notes Of A Native Son (1955).

13. Eve Babitz [1943-], Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (1977), records her "life-long love affair with the cultural milieu of Los Angeles."  Gossip and creativity on steroids. pp.  3-90.

14. Babitz,  Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A., pp. 91-178.

Bibliography

See the list of readings, with full bibliography, under weekly topics above.

A Fresh Look at the New Deal Era and its Impact

Description

We invite you to join us to look at the US between 1933 and 1950.  The standard narratives, which we have all read, view the events of the period through a national lens, as if the country was isolated from all other countries. What these narratives overlook is that the US was one of many players in a global economy; what happened in the US affected in the rest of the world, and what happened outside the US affected the Roosevelt administration.   

For the people who lived at the time, there was no pre-ordained outcome, and the entire period is permeated with uncertainty and fear about the future. Studying this period of American history presents us with themes that will thread throughout the SDG: (1) the immense societal changes wrought by the crises in the period; (2) how the United States’ “original sin” continued to shape governance in both the New Deal and WWII legislation; (3) the exchanges between the US and other countries in crafting the New Deal; (4) the change in the US international standing, as by the late 1930s as it became the shining example of preserving and reconciling democracy and capitalism; (5) how the New Deal built the scaffolding for the new world order that emerged from WWII.

By 1950, the US had authored a new world order that created a stable and prosperous world (in the west). In the process, Americans had changed radically since 1933, especially with regard of their relationship to the state and with regard to the country’s role in the new world.  

Join us as we explore familiar territory with fresh eyes.  

Weekly Topics

1. Overview of the period

2. The US in the world – part 1

3. The first hundred days

4. The US in the world – part 2

5. A different America: The South

6. The Second New Deal

7. A different look at the Second New Deal

8. Isolation

9. Inching to war

10. The US at War: Overview

11. US Production at War

12. The Home Front

13. Post War

14. Legacy

Bibliography

Core Books: 

• Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson, 2013.  

• The New Deal: A Global History by Kirin Klaus Patel, 2016.

• Freedom from Fear: The Americans in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy, 1998.

Short Stories on the Wild Side: George Saunders

Description

George Saunders is a contemporary writer offering piercing insight into our modern culture and our private longings. We will explore his world of funny, scary, subversive, magical, surreal, sometimes sad, unforgettable short stories. Saunders has written more than twenty short stories for The New Yorker and won the 2017 Man-Booker prize. He is a Professor at Syracuse University.

Weekly Topics

1. Sea Oak, and Winky, both from Pastoralia, and Sticks, from Tenth of December.

2. Pastoralia, from Pastoralia, and Al Roosten, from Tenth of December.

3. Victory Lap, and Escape from Spiderhead, from Tenth of December.

4. The Semplica Girl Diaries, and Puppy, from Tenth of December.

5. Tenth of December and Home, from Tenth of December.

6. Jon, from The New Yorker, Jan 27, 2003, and Mother’s Day, from The New Yorker, Feb 1, 2016.

7. Who are All These Trump Voters, from The New Yorker, July 4, 2016, and Love Letter, from The New Yorker, March 30, 2020.

Bibliography

• Jon, The New Yorker Jan 27, 2003, available free online at Openculture.com

• Mothers day, The New Yorker, Feb 1, 2016, and Love Letter, The New Yorker, March 30, 2020

• Pastoralia by George Saunders, Riverhead Books, 2000.

• The Tenth of December by George Saunders, Random House, 2013.

Five Female Abstract Expressionists and Their World

Description

Gabriel focuses on five of the female abstract expressionist painters who helped introduce a revolutionary international school of painting located in New York City. Immersing them in their milieu, limning a vivid cultural history, Gabriel reminds us that male superiority infected every aspect of the post-World War II United States. Determined to be painters in their own right, Krasner, De Kooning, Hartigan, Mitchell, and Frankenthaler refused to play second fiddle to their husbands and lovers, and they fought tenaciously for their identities as artists. In doing so, they altered art and society. Gabriel's in-depth look at these women and their struggles provides a wonderful new look at the United States, 1928-59.

Weekly Topics

1. Introduction, Prologue, and "Lee" (chapters 1-3)

2. "Elaine" (chapters 4-5) and "Art in War" (chapters 6-8)

3. "Art in War" (chapters 9-12)

4. "The Turning Point" (chapters 13-18)

5. "The Turning Point" (chapter 19) and "Grace" (chapters 20-23)

6. "Grace" (chapters 24-25) and "Helen" (chapters 26-27)

7. "Helen" (chapter 28) and "Joan" (chapters 29-31)

8. "Oh, to Leave a Trace" (chapters (32-35)

9. "Discoveries of Heart and Hand" (chapters 36-39)

10. "Discoveries of Heart and Hand" (chapters 40-42)

11. "Five Women"{ (chapters 43-45)

12. "The Rise and the Unraveling" (chapters 46-48)

13. "The Rise and Unraveling" (chapters 49-51)

14. "The Rise and Unraveling" (chapters 52-53) and Epilogue

Bibliography

Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women -- Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art