Thursday, September 29, 2011

“Suffering for the Vote”

I. Introduction:
Why were people against Woman Suffrage?

Considering arguments against giving women the vote, if you were an advocate of the vote for women, how would you craft your case?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVrlLKAR1S0 (6:00 is the scene)

II. Suffering for the Vote
A. The Seneca Falls Convention

B. Women’s Christian Temperance Union

C. National Am. Woman Suffrage Assoc.
(Carrie Catt and Florence Kelley)

D. The Great War and the Vote

E. The National Women’s Party
(Alice Paul)
(NWP being more direct)

F. Impact of The Nineteenth Amendment
1. Sheppard-Towner

2. Birth Control

III. Conclusion/Significance:

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

--The Great War--

I. Introduction: Wm Jennings Bryan and War:
II. Origins of War:
--The Presidents--
1. T.R.
2. Taft and Dollar Diplomacy
3. Wilson
--Bloody Alliances—
Triple Alliance(France, GB, Russia)
Triple Entente (GR, Austro-Hungary, Italy)

III. The Great War:
A. The Trenches
B. Trenches in the Sea (Lusitania, Sussex)
C. Peace and Preparedness
D. WAR

IV. The End of War:
A. Wilson's 14 Points:
B. Versailles:
C. Spanish Flu of 1918
V. Significance:

Thursday, September 22, 2011

PROGRESSIVISM

ARE THESE 2 QUOTES CONTRADICTORY?

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus"

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism...The one absolutely certain way of bringing the nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
Theodore Roosevelt, 1915

The Progressive Era:
I. Origins

A. Populism:
Farmers' Alliance
Omaha Platform:
--inflationary currency policy
--graduated income tax
--direct government ownership of railroad and telegraph industries
--redistribution of railroad owned lands

B. Hull House—1889
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/10870.html

II. A New Mindset:
Progressivism Defined:
Progressivism was a series of movements designed to combat the ills of industrialism. Some progressives also wanted to control the behavior of the working classes.

Stanley Schultz, Univ. of Wisconsin:
• Government should be more active
• Social problems are susceptible to government legislation and action
• Throw money at the problem
• The world is “perfectible”

III. Progressive Movements:
A. Anti-Trust
Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890
“Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.”

B. Anti-Lynching (Ida B. Wells-Barnett)

C. Good Government Movement
--17th Amendment=direct election of senators
--referendums and recalls

D. Consumer Protection: The Jungle
Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906

IV. Progressivism in Practice:

TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FIRE OF 1911

A. The ILGWU Strike:
B. Fire on the Factory Floor
C. Reporters and the Visibility of Triangle
1. "Love Affair in Mid-Air"
2. Mortillalo and Zito
D. The Public Response

V. Progressivism Abroad:

As a Progressive, you believe that you have the correct way to live and that through the proper use of government you can help others live that way. What are the boundaries, the frontiers of your belief? In other words, how far are you willing to go with this belief?
(does your conviction stop at the border?)

A. Foreign Policy Community
--T.R., Henry Cabot Lodge
--“large policy”
B. Capitalism
C. "Yellow" Journalism
Pulitzer: New York World
Hearst: New York Journal

Rudyard Kipling, “White Man’s Burden” (1899)

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

READING DUE ON TUESDAY, 9/27: Three Excerpts from Upton Sinclar, The Jungle

Section 1-Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss- crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails, – they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the "hoisters," as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham's architects had not built the killing room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor, – for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting, – sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

Section 2-There was meat that was taken out of pickle and would often be found sour, and they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant – a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor – a process known to the workers as "giving them thirty per cent." Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade – there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes – they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "California hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them – that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"

Section 3-Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions- a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one – there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water – and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage – but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatin to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.

Post Civil War Industrial Boom

I. Why was there such vast growth so rapidly in the U.S.?

1. War: Why would war encourage industrial growth?

Example #1: Morrill Act (1862)

Example #2: Railroads:
1860: 30,000 miles of r.r.
1864: Congress grants 131 million acres
1910: 240,000 miles of railway

2. Resources: land, raw materials, people,
ideas=booooooom!

1864: 872,000 tons of iron and steel
1919: more than 24 million tons

1860: 20 million tons of coal
1910: 500 million tons of coal

1860: 500,000 barrels of petroleum
1910: 209 million barrels of petroleum

3. Integration:

a. Horizontal Integration:
--monopolize one part of the productive process

Example: meatpacking plants

b. Vertical Integration:
--monopolize all elements of productive process

Example: Andrew Carnegie: mining iron ore, own blast furnaces (factories), own shops, own ships, own railroad and rail lines

4. Mindset:

a. Small Government is Best:
Laissez faire: “let it do”

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

b. Aggressive Business Mentality:
The Robber Barons

Andrew Carnegie

J.P. Morgan

Jay Gould: “Mephistopheles of Wall Street”
(bribed Grant’s brother in law for gold secrets)

Cornelius Van Derbilt:
(steamships and railroads: $100 million)

Gentlemen:
You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you.
Sincerely,
CVD
c. Justifying the New World:
How do you justify the world when fabulous wealth and wretched poverty exist so closely together?

William Graham Sumner: Social Darwinism

The New Impoverished City

Rapid Urbanization:
1860: 25 million Americans lived in rural areas

6.2 million in what the Bureau of the Census
called "urban territory" (2500 or more)

1910: 42 million of the 92 million in urban areas

Tenement Buildings:
1879 NYC law declared that every room must have a window and every floor must have a bathroom

Contamination:
1877-Philadelphia: 82,000 privies

Boston Harbor was “one vast cesspool, a threat to all
the towns it washed.”

Crime-Filled:
Murder Rate: 1266 in 1881
7340 in 1898
(an increase of 25 per million people, to 107 per million people)

Women in Workforce:
1/7th of the Paid workforce
(2.6 million of the 17.4 million)
500,000 married, yet they were paid less than
men, especially after 1900 when the “family wage” idea spread.

Immigration:
Newspaper in 1900: "It is well known that nearly every foreigner…goes armed. Some carry revolvers, while many others hide huge ugly knives upon their person."

Senator William Bruce (Maryland):
Immigrants are “indigestible lumps in
the national stomach.”

1890-1900: 3.5 million
1900-1910: 7 million
Ellis Island:

“Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day. The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit-stands, while his black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in which a few years ago he was an intruder.”
Jacob Riis on social fluidity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVUXA9ZW0Bw
Ragtime to Jazz

Child Labor:
1900: 700,000 10 and 15 year olds in workforce.

--Monangah, West Virginia, 1907:
Martin Honick

Children Working in the cotton mills (Tennessee Valley)
"They were children only in age…little, solemn pygmy people, whom poverty had canned up and compressed…the juices of childhood had been pressed our…no talking in the mill…no singing…they were more dead than alive when at seven o clock, the Steam Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home…in a speechless, haggard, over-worked procession."


What if you do not want to justify the disparity between rich and poor? What could you do?

II. Progressivism:

Mulberry Bend (so dangerous and impoverished, it was destroyed to make the park below)

Reconstruction

I. Reconstruction:
Jourdon Anderson

II. Political Reconstruction:
A. LINCOLN’S PLAN FOR RECONSTRUCTION


B. CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION
Both Radicals and Moderates had plans:

1. RADICALS:

Thaddeus Stevens & Charles Sumner

“The foundations of their institutions
must be broken up and re-laid, or all our blood and treasure will have been spent in vain.” (Stevens)

“40 Acres and a Mule”

Was redistribution of land a real option?
Was redistribution of land a good option?


2. MODERATES:
Wade-Davis Bill (“ironclad oath”)
--passed Congress at end of 1864:
--sent to the President and…

C. JOHNSON'S RESTORATION
1. Freedmen's Bureau
2. Black Codes

D. RADICALS STRIKE BACK
1. First Civil Rights Bill (1866)
2. 14th Amendment (1867)
3. First Reconstruction Acts (1867)
4. Tenure of Office Act
5. Fifteenth Amendment

E. The Compromise of 1877
Hayes versus Tilden

III. Why does Reconstruction Matter?

Frederick Douglass (1865):
"Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot."

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Reading Due Thursday: WEB DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (excerpt)

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emanci- pation, the black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,--it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan--on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde-- could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice- told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,--has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain--Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,--suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:--

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song--soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacri- fice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,--we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?

Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below--swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my little children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing:

Let us cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler,
Cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler, Let us
cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler A-
-long the heav-en-ly way.

And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and goes his way.

The Afterthought
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed

THE END

COURSE SYLLABUS

History 232—TuTh 3:10PM - 5:15PM
Fall 2011
Section 002 CRN 80497
DDH 103K
Office: Faculty Towers 201A
Instructor: Dr. Brett Schmoll
Office Hours: Tues and Thu 1:30-3
…OR MAKE AN APPOINTMENT!!!
Email: bschmoll@csub.edu
Office Phone: 654-6549
Course Description: We will examine the political, social, and cultural foundations of American history from 1870 to the Present. We will cover Reconstruction, the problems of an increasingly urban and industrialized society, and the United States in World Affairs.

Course Reading: Course Reading:
1. Philip Caputo, Rumor of War
3. Robert McElvaine, Down and Out in the Great Depression
4. Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
4. Recommended: Paul Johnson, History of the American People

Grading Scale:
5% Debate on Dropping of the Bomb
10% Participation
25% Writing About Civil Rights
30% Midterm Exam
30% Final Examination

The Blog: If you have questions or comments about this class, or if you want to see the course reader or the syllabus online, just go to http://history232fall2011.blogspot.com/
You need to sign in to this blog this week.
You will also have short readings on the blog. I will announce these in class.

Attendance:
Just to be clear, to succeed on tests and papers you really should be in class. That’s just common sense, right? To pass this class, you may not miss more than two classes. If you miss that third class meeting, you are missing 15% of the quarter. You cannot do that and pass.

Being Prompt:
Get to class on time. Why does that matter? First, it sends the wrong message to your principal grader(that’s me). As much as we in the humanities would like you to believe that these courses are objective (at what time of day did the Battle of the Marne begin?), that is not entirely the case. If you send your principal grader the message that you don’t mind missing the first few minutes and disturbing others in the class, don’t expect to be given the benefit of the doubt when the tests and papers roll around. Does that sound mean? It’s not meant to, but just remember, your actions send signals. Being late also means that someone who already has everything out and is ready and is involved in the discussion has to stop, move everything over, get out of the chair to let you by, pick up the pencil you drop, let you borrow paper, run to the bathroom because you spilled the coffee, and so on. It’s rude. There’s an old saying: better two hours early than two minutes late. Old sayings are good.
So, what are the consequences of persistent tardiness? What do you think they should be? Remember that 10% participation? You are eligible for that grade if you are on time. And no, I’m not the jackass who watches for you to be late that one time and stands at the door and points in your face. If you are late a few (that means three) times, you will lose the entire 10% participation grade. One time tardiness is not a problem precisely because it is not persistent. It’s an accident. But if you are late several times, you will not be able to receive a participation grade above 50%.

The Unforgivable Curse:
Speaking of one time issues, there is something that is so severe, so awful, that if it happens one time, just one time, no warning, no “oh hey I noticed this and if you could stop it that’d be super,” you will automatically lose all 10 percent of the Participation grade. Any guesses? C’mon, you must have some idea. No, it’s not your telephone ringing. If that happens, it’ll just be slightly funny and we’ll move on. It’s a mistake and not intentional, and the increased heart rate and extra sweat on your brow from you diving headfirst into an overstuffed book bag to find a buried phone that is now playing that new Cristina Aguilera ringtone is punishment enough for you. So, what is it, this unforgivable crime? Texting. If you take out your phone one time to send or receive messages you will automatically lose 10% of your course grade. That means, if you receive a final grade of 85%, it will drop to 75%. If you receive a final grade of 75%, it will become a 65%. Why is that? The phone ringing is an accident. Texting is on purpose and is rude. It, in fact, is beyond rude. It wreaks of the worst of our current society. It bespeaks the absolutely vile desire we all have to never separate from our technological tether for even a moment. It sends your fellow classmates and your teacher the signal that you have better things to do. Checking your phone during class is like listening to a friend’s story and right in the middle turning away and talking to someone else. Plus, the way our brains work, you need to fully immerse yourself, to tune your brain into an optimal, flowing machine (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s incredible book Flow) that can grasp and can let itself go. Students now tend to see school as a stopover on their way to a career. Brothers and sisters, that’s deadly! I wish that I could pay for you all to quit your jobs and just focus on the mind. I can’t yet do that, but if I could I would, because it’d be worth every penny. Devoting time to the mind and to thinking deeply about your world will change who you are and how you approach your future, your family, your job, and your everything. Is that overstated? I believe it to be true. So, until my stock choices really take off so that I can pay all of your bills, promise me one thing. When you are in class or preparing for class, you have to be fully here. Oh crap, now it’s going to sound like a hippy professor from the 1960s: “I mean, like, be here man, just be here.” Maybe the hippies were on to something. Devote yourself fully to your classes by unplugging from the outside world for awhile.

Participation:
You do not need to be the person who speaks out the most, asks the most questions, or comes up with the most brilliant historical arguments to receive full credit in participation. If you are in class and on time, discuss the issues that we raise, avoid the temptation to nod off, to leave early, or to text people during class (the three easiest ways to lose credit), and in general act like you care, then you will receive a good participation grade! Just being here does not guarantee a 100% participation grade, since you must be regularly actively involved for that to be possible.

Academic Honesty
You are responsible for knowing all college policies about academic honesty. Any student who plagiarizes any part of his or her papers may receive an “F” in the course and a letter to the Dean.

Academic Integrity
The principles of truth and integrity are recognized as fundamental to a community of teachers and scholars. The University expects that both faculty and students will honor these principles and in so doing will protect the integrity of all academic work and student grades. Students are expected to do all work assigned to them without unauthorized assistance and without giving unauthorized assistance. Faculty have the responsibility of exercising care in the planning and supervision of academic work so that honest effort will be encouraged and positively reinforced.
http://www.csub.edu/studentconduct/documents/academicintegrity.pdf


REMEMBER, although this syllabus is the “law” of the class, I reserve the right to change it at any time to suit the particular needs of our class. If I must do so, it will always be in your best interest, and I’ll always advise you as soon as possible.