This is a syllabus for The Evolution Debates, a course offered for four units of credit in spring 2017 as HIST 255g at the University of Southern California. This course will explore the history of ideas about evolution and human origins from about 1800 to the present. We’ll focus on debates and controversies, both within biology and geology and at intersections of science, religion, and politics, as well as famous incidents like Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and the Scopes Monkey Trial. More broadly, we’ll study the development of evolutionary theory, the histories of creationism and theistic evolutionism, and the roles of debates about human evolution’s political consequences in the histories of eugenics and scientific racism.

This is a General Education course in the category of Humanistic Inquiry. We’ll use the history of evolutionary thought to understand how scientists, theologians, and others have thought about what it means to be human and to live together in organized societies—and about how we became such social animals. In the process, we’ll interpret not only scientific texts for both professional and popular audiences, but also novels, visual art, film, and works of philosophy and theology. We’ll read carefully in order both to understand how arguments work and how the ideas of evolutionary thinkers have been shaped by the particular times, places, and experiences in which they lived, as well as by changing media and systems of publishing and scientific communication.

The course will meet for lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, 9 to 9:50, from January 9 to April 28, in Von Kleinsmid Center room 102. I will be available for office hours on Mondays from 10:00 to 12:00 in Social Sciences Building room 281, and encourage you to come by and talk.

Assignments

This course is organized around substantial reading assignments of primary sources, which is to say texts written by biologists, geologists, philosophers, theologians, and other participants in the evolution debates. We’ll discuss readings during every class, so please read everything assigned before the class meeting it’s listed under. Each week I will expect you post a short reaction to the reading by Sunday (or by Tuesday on weeks when the class doesn’t meet on Monday) using Blackboard’s blog feature. You can use this as an opportunity to raise questions, to comment on arguments you found particularly surprising or compelling, or to suggest ways the reading might relate to previous readings or forthcoming assignments.

You are required to buy two books, both of which are also available at the USC Bookstore. Please buy these specific editions, so we can refer to the same page numbers and editor’s notes:

• Selections from Darwin’s Origin of Species: The Shape of the Argument, edited by Nicholas Maistrellis, Green Cat Books edition (2009).
• H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, edited by Stephen Arata, Norton Critical Edition (2008).

All other required readings for the course will be available online; for the first half of the semester, we’ll mostly be reading texts available through the web repository HathiTrust (and linked to below). When we get to more recent texts, I’ll make scanned copies of the excerpts we’re reading available to you.

My lectures will provide historical context for these readings, introduce you to debates between historians about their significance, and describe the roles of historical figures beyond those whose work you’re reading. You’re therefore not required to read a textbook for the course, but if you’d like one to refer to or to follow along in for an additional perspective on this history, I’ve included page numbers below for relevant sections of Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, third edition (2003), which is available from the USC Bookstore and on reserve at Leavey Library’s circulation desk, and listed with them some other books for further reading or as sources for writing papers. Two other useful reference sources will be the Dictionary of Scientific Biography and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, each of which is useful for finding introductory information on particular scientists and philosophers and citations for books and articles that provide more detailed information.

Your first substantial writing assignment, due February 10, will be a paper approximately five pages long in which you develop your own analysis of a review of The Origin of Species, contextualizing it in the life of its author, with attention to their other scientific, religious, political, and philosophical interests and commitments, and in the editorial agenda of the publication in which it appears. We’ll spend some time in class looking at different ways you might find such reviews and research their authors and publications.

Your second writing assignment, due April 7, will be an online exhibit on a particular book in the evolution debates as a material text. In this exhibit, you’ll demonstrate what you can learn from looking at a physical book about its intended audience and how it was meant to be read. We’ll spend some time in class in advance of this assignment thinking about books in precisely this way, and will visit the USC Libraries’ Special Collections to look at original editions of books on evolution including some of those we’ve read ourselves. You’ll also have an opportunity to present the book you’re thinking about to the class on March 3.

Your last essay assignment, of approximately five pages and due April 28, will be to analyze what was at stake in a particular controversy about evolution. What did the people involved care about? What did they want to persuade others of? How did they use the idea of evolution to do so?

Additionally, there will be a midterm exam during class on March 10 and a final exam on May 5. These exams may involve short answer questions, longer essay questions, or a combination. In any case, the purpose will be more to evaluate your understanding of how ideas about evolution and its scientific, social, and religious consequences have changed over time, and less to test your memory of specific names or dates.

Your grade for the course will be based 15% on each of the two essays, 15% on the online exhibit, 15% on each of the two exams, 10% on reading responses, and 15% on your engaged and insightful participation in class.

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

• Monday, January 9: What Are the Evolution Debates?

  • Reference: Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, third edition (2003), 1–26.

Is Nature Stable or Changing?

• Wednesday, January 11: The Great Chain of Being and the System of Nature

  • Charles Bonnet, The Contemplation of Nature (1764), translated and abridged in John Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation (1777), volume 4, 49–51, 58–62, 87–96.
  • Carl Linnaeus, A General System of Nature (1735–1768), revised by Johann Friedrich Gmelin (1788–1793) and translated by William Turton (1800), volume 1, 1–11.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 48–71; Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966; 1970); Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History” (1993).

• Friday, January 13: Evolution in an Age of Revolutions

  • Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy (1809), translated by Hugh Elliot (1914), 1–8, 35–46, 68–70, 106–114.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 71–95; Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (1989).

• Monday, January 16: No class for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

• Wednesday, January 18: No class

• Friday, January 20: Natural Theology

  • Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), 11–17, 356–371.
  • William Paley, Natural Theology (1802), 1–21, 454–459, 467–469, 473–481.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 96–106.

• Monday, January 23: Catastrophe and Uniformity

  • Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813), translated by Robert Kerr (1815), 5–17.
  • Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, volume 1 (1830), 1–4; volume 2 (1832), 18–32; volume 3 (1833), 1–7.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 106–134; Charles Coulston Gillespie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850 (1951); Martin S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (2005) and Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (2008).

• Wednesday, January 25: Popular Evolutionism

  • Robert Chambers, The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), 113–119, 145–147, 153–161, 174–178, and 268–291.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 134–140; James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2000).

Darwin and Wallace’s Answers

• Friday, January 27: The Voyages of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace

  • Charles Darwin, Journal and Remarks (1839), 453–457, 461–465.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 141–155; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995).

• Monday, January 30: “One Long Argument”

  • Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), edited by Nicholas Maistrellis, Green Cat Books edition (2009), 5–7, 13–26, 31–42, 47–65, 71–77, 83–94, 99–105.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 155–176; Piers Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (2014), 1–65; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002).

• Wednesday, February 1: The Reception of Darwinism

  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 177–202; Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (1958); David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (1973); The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, edited by Thomas F. Glick (1974); Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, edited by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (1999); The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, edited by Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (2008).

• Friday, February 3: Introduction to Special Collections

  • Meet in USC Special Collections, Doheny Memorial Library room 206.

Is Darwinism Atheistic?

• Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 202–207; James Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (1979); Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (1988).

• Monday, February 6: Anti-Evolutionism

  • Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? (1874), 1–2, 40–48, 52–53, 168–178.

• Wednesday, February 8: Christian Darwinism

  • George Frederick Wright, “Concerning the True Doctrine of Final Cause or Design in Nature,” Bibliotheca Sacra 34 (1877): 357–385.

• Friday, February 10: The Evolution Debates in Special Collections

  • Meet in USC Special Collections.
  • Paper due contextualizing a review of The Origin of Species.

How Did Humans Evolve?

• Monday, February 13: Monogenism and Polygenism

  • Louis Agassiz, “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races,” Christian Examiner 49 (1850): 110–113, 126–128, 136–138, 141–145.
  • Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered (1854), 9–10, 12–18, 34–35.
  • Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), volume 1, 9–10, 220–227.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 207–216, 292–297.

• Wednesday, February 15: Sexual Selection

  • Darwin, Descent of Man, volume 1, 245–251, 263–266; volume 2, 301–302, 310–314.
  • Eliza Burt Gamble, The Evolution of Woman (1894), 19–31.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 313–315; Hale, Political Descent, 106–154; Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (1989); Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (2014).

• Friday, February 17: Herbert Spencer’s Universal Evolutionism

  • Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862), 146–174. (An earlier version of this chapter, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Westminster Review 67 (1857), is also available.)
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 220–223; Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (2007); Global Spencerism: The Communication and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist, edited by Bernard Lightman (2015).

• Monday, February 20: No class for Presidents Day

The Politics of Evolution: Competitive or Cooperative?

• Wednesday, February 22: Individualism

  • Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (1851), 16–38.
  • Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology (1864), volume 1, 443–445.
  • Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, volume 3 (1896), 608–611.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 274–277, 298–302; Hale, Political Descent, 66–105.

• Friday, February 24: Liberalism

  • Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence: A Programme,” Nineteenth Century, February 1888, 161–180.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 216–220; Hale, Political Descent, 155–221.

• Monday, February 27: Socialism

  • Peter Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid Among Animals,” Nineteenth Century, September 1890, 337–349, 354; November 1890, 709–719.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 305–307, 315–317; Hale, Political Descent, 222–251; Daniel Todes, Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (1989).

• Wednesday, March 1: Communism

  • Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (1877), 3–18, 551–554.
  • Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), translated by Ernest Untermann (1902), 102–103, 116–119.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 284–292.

• Friday, March 3: Presentations on Special Collections

  • Meet in USC Special Collections.

The Eclipse of Darwinism: What Are the Mechanisms of Evolution?

• Monday, March 6: Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism

  • Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation (1868), translated by Edwin Ray Lankester (1876), volume 1, 280–292.
  • Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880), excerpted in H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), edited by Stephen Arata, Norton Critical Edition (2008), 160–163.
  • H.G. Wells, “Zoological Retrogression” (1891), excerpted in Wells, Time Machine, 133–135.
  • August Weismann, The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity (1892), translated by W. Newton Parker and Harriet Rönnfeldt (1893), ix–xv.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 224–256; Hale, Political Descent, 252–353; Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (1983).

• Wednesday, March 8: “The Deathbed of Darwinism”?

  • Alexander Patterson, The Other Side of Evolution (1903), vii–xix, 120–136.
  • Vernon Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day (1907), 1–7.
  • Reference: Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (1992; 2006).

• Friday, March 10: Midterm exam

• March 12–19: No class for spring break

• Monday, March 20: Evolutionary Fiction

  • H.G. Wells, Time Machine (1895), 1–71.

• Wednesday, March 22: Genetics and Eugenics

  • Francis Galton, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Macmillan’s Magazine, June 1865, 157–166.
  • William Bateson, “Problems of Heredity as a Subject for Horticultural Investigation,” Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 25 (1900): 54–61.
  • Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), iii–vi, 1–5.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 256–273, 307–313; Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present (1995).

• Friday, March 24: No class

• Monday, March 27: Creative Evolution

  • Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), translated by Arthur Mitchell (1911), ix–xv, 84–97, 163–165, 176–185, 251–271.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 317–322; R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914 (1988).

• Wednesday, March 29: The Scopes Monkey Trial and the Revival of Creationism

  • William Jennings Bryan, In His Image (1922), 86–94, 102–109, 122–127, 132–135.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 375–381; Numbers, Creationists; Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (1997); Adam R. Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (2013).

The Evolutionary Synthesis: Is Evolution Progressive?

• Friday, March 31: Population Genetics and the Modern Synthesis

  • R.A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), vii–x, 256–258.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), 3–12.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 325–340; Vassiliki Betty Smokovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (1996); Robert D. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (1994).

• Monday, April 3: Evolutionary Progress

  • Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), 556–569, 575–578.
  • George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (1949), 240–246.
  • George Gaylord Simpson, “The Concept of Progress in Organic Evolution,” Social Research 41 (1974): 46–51.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 340–346; Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (1996).

• Wednesday, April 5: The Teilhardian Synthesis

  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1938/1955), translated by Bernard Wall (1959), 11–14, 27–28, 180–184, 237–245, 257–272, 291–299.
  • Peter Medawar, review of The Phenomenon of Man, Mind 70 (1961): 99–106.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (1967), 114–122, 133–137.

• Friday, April 7: No class

  • Online exhibit due on an evolutionary book as a material text.

• Monday, April 10: Scientific Creationism

  • John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood (1961), xix–xxii, xxv–xxix, 63–70.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” American Biology Teacher 35 (1973): 125–129.
  • Reference: Numbers, Creationists.

• Wednesday, April 12: The Evolution of Human Race

  • Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason: A Yankee View (1961), vii–viii, 1, 36–37, 40–41.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, “A Bogus ‘Science’ of Race Prejudice,” Journal of Heredity 52 (1961): 189–190.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (1962), 253–257, 266–271, 285–286.
  • Theodosius Dobzhansky, “A Debatable Account of the Origin of Races,” Scientific American, February 1963, 169–170, 172.
  • Richard Lewontin, “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972): 381–387, 396–397.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 278–284, 302–305, 353–356; Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (1998); John P. Jackson, Jr., Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education (2005).

• Friday, April 14: Periodic Extinctions and Punctuated Equilibria

  • Niles Eldridge, “‘A Battle of Words,’” in The Third Culture, edited by John Brockman (1995), 120–125.
  • Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Models in Paleobiology, edited by Thomas J.M. Schopf (1972), 83–98, 108–115.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 347–353; David Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (2012).

Adaptationism: Does Natural Selection Explain All Traits?

• Monday, April 17: Biology as an Information Science

  • George C. Williams, “‘A Package of Information,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 39–47.
  • Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), 1–11.
  • Richard Dawkins, “‘A Survival Machine,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 75–86.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 356–361.

• Wednesday, April 19: Sociobiology

  • E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology (1975), 3–6, 547–551, 559–565, 574–575.
  • Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People, “Sociobiology: Another Biological Determinism,” BioScience 26 (1976): 182, 184–186.

• Friday, April 21: The Descent of Woman

  • Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman (1972), 1–13, 26–33.
  • Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved (1981), 1–15, 189–191.
  • Reference: Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989); Erika Lorraine Milam, Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (2010).

• Monday, April 24: Critiques of Adaptationism

  • Stephen Jay Gould, “‘The Pattern of Life’s History,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 52–64.
  • Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 205 (1979): 581–597.
  • Reference: Bowler, Evolution, 361–374.

• Wednesday, April 26: The Revival of Natural Theology

  • Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), 1–9.
  • William A. Dembski, “The Logical Underpinnings of Intelligent Design,” in Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, edited by William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse (2004), 311–329.
  • Michael J. Behe, “Irreducible Complexity: Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution,” in Dembski and Ruse, Debating Design, 352–355.
  • Kenneth R. Miller, “The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of ‘Irreducible Complexity,’” in Dembski and Ruse, Debating Design, 81–95.
  • Reference: Numbers, Creationists.

• Friday, April 28: Symbiogenesis

  • Lynn Margulis, “‘Gaia Is a Tough Bitch,’” in Brockman, Third Culture, 130–140.
  • Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species (2002), xi–xvi, 11–23, 51–56, 201–205.
  • Paper due analyzing the stakes of a particular evolution controversy.

• Friday, May 5: Final exam from 8:00 to 10:00

The course will meet on Thursday afternoons, 2:00 to 4:50, from August 25 to December 1 in Verna and Peter Dauterive Hall room 107. It will be a discussion-based seminar, though I will punctuate it with occasional presentations. I will be available for office hours on Wednesdays from 3:00 to 5:00 in Social Sciences Building room 281, and encourage you to come by and talk.

Assignments

As a seminar, this course is primarily based on learning by discussing the required readings (listed below), so it’s essential that you read and think about them before each class meeting. Each week I will expect you post a short reaction to the reading the day before class using Blackboard’s blog feature. You can use this as an opportunity to raise questions, to comment on arguments you found particularly surprising or compelling, or to suggest ways the reading might relate to previous readings or forthcoming assignments.

Your first larger assignment will be to develop your own analysis of a film in the context of the Cold War, and to present it in a short paper of about five pages. Your second assignment will be a contribution to an online exhibit on America in the Cold War that we’ll produce together as a class. A final assignment will require you to develop your own historical analysis of an event, person, or cultural or political phenomenon, and to present an argument about how your subject shaped, and was shaped by, America in the Cold War world. That final project, which may build on your work for either of the earlier two assignments, may take the form of a traditional research paper of 15–20 pages, or you may speak with me about presenting it in another medium; in either case, you will have the opportunities to get feedback on a short proposal and a brief presentation as you work on your project. Your grade for the course will be based 20% on your film analysis, 20% on your contribution to the online guide, 30% on your final project, and 30% on your reading responses and engaged and insightful participation in discussions.

Reading

Please purchase the following three books, or plan to borrow them from Leavey Library’s circulation desk, where they will be on reserve. The first two are available at the USC Bookstores; The Culture of the Cold War is out of print, so please seek out a used or library copy.

• Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (2003).
• Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (2003).
• Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, second edition (1996, revised from 1991 original).

All other readings will be available through links below. If you prefer print to reading off a screen, though, you may still want to buy or borrow a few more books. The ones we’ll be reading substantial chunks of, which will also be available on reserve at Leavey, include:

• Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001).
• Michael D. Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007).
• Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (2005).
• Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, revised edition (2008, revised from 1988 original).
• Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2002).
• Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005).

Boxes like this one contain suggestions for additional reading. You might want to read beyond the assigned reading based on your curiosity, as research for an assignment, or ideally for both reasons, as you use an assignment to pursue your own interests.

Schedule

• August 25: Introduction

  • In class: George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb” (1945), Harry Truman, “Statement by the President of the United States” (1945), and Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

• September 1: The Atomic Age

  • Eric Schlosser, “Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True,” New Yorker (2014).
  • Michael D. Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007), chapters 1, 3, and 6–7.
  • Naomi Oreskes, “Science in the Origins of the Cold War,” in Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, edited by Naomi Oreskes and John Krige (2014).
  • Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985), chapters 1 and 26–27, and epilogue.
  • For more on Cold War science, see Audra J. Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (2013) and its bibliography. On nuclear weapons in the context of the U.S. military, see Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (2013), and Alex Wellerstein’s blog Restricted Data.

• September 8: Soviet and American Systems

  • Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (2003), chapters 1–2.
  • Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005), introduction and chapters 1–2.
  • Raymond Williams, “Capitalism,” “Communism,” “Democracy,” “Imperialism,” “Liberal,” and “Socialist,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary for Culture and Society, revised edition (1983, revised from 1976 original).
  • David F. Ruccio, “Capitalism,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (2014).
  • Nikhil Pal Singh, “Liberalism,” in Burgett and Hendler, Keywords for American Cultural Studies.
  • John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005) is a standard history of the Cold War as a bipolar conflict. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (2010), is an extensive, three-volume collection of essays. For more on the cultural Cold War, see Audra J. Wolfe’s introductory bibliography.

• September 15: Anticommunism and the Domestic Cold War

  • Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, second edition (1996, revised from 1991 original), chapters 1–2, 4, 6, and 8–9.
  • Starting places for additional reading include Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998); Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (2003); and David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2004).

• September 22: Nuclear Families

  • Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985), chapters 13–14.
  • Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, revised edition (2008, revised from 1988 original), introduction and chapters 1, 4, and 6–7.
  • For more on redlining and segregation, see chapter 11 of Crabgrass Frontier and Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations” (2014). Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Home is Where the Hatred Is” (2014) is a bibliography. On how experts changed cities during the Cold War, see Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (2003).

• September 29: The Global Cold War

  • McMahon, Cold War, chapters 3–5.
  • Westad, Global Cold War, chapter 3.
  • Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (2004), preface and introduction.
  • Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (2013), chapter 6.
  • There are many directions to go for additional reading, but for samples of recent essays see Environmental Histories of the Cold War, edited by J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (2010), and The Cold War in the Third World, edited by Robert J. McMahon (2013). The Korean War is conspicuously absent from cultural histories of the Cold War, but for diplomatic and military history see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (2010); Wada Haruki, The Korean War: An International History, translated by Frank Baldwin (2014); and Allan R. Millett, The Korean War, The Essential Bibliography Series (2007).

• Monday, October 3: Paper due contextualizing a film

• October 6: Black Liberation Movements I

  • Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001), prologue and chapters 2–4.

• October 13: Black Liberation Movements II

  • Borstelmann, Cold War and the Color Line, chapters 5–6, and epilogue.
  • Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (2005), chapter 9.
  • Ryan J. Kirkby, “‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’: Community Activism and the Black Panther Party, 1966–1971,” Canadian Review of American Studies (2011).
  • Chapters 4 and 9 of the bibliography of Rethinking the New Left are important starting points for further reading, as is the #blackpanthersyllabus, compiled by Keisha N. Blain, Ashley Farmer, and Dara Vance (2016). Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2012) is a detailed narrative history of the BPP.

• October 20: The Vietnam War

  • Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (2003), introduction and chapters 4–5.
  • Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015), introduction and chapter 5.
  • Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, chapter 8.
  • Even without leaving campus you can find hundreds of books on the Vietnam War, as you can see for yourself by browsing DS557 to DS559 in Doheny Library. Starting places for further reading include the rest of American Reckoning; Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2008); and A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives, edited by Michael H. Hunt (2010).

• October 27: Detente and New Radicalisms

  • McMahon, Cold War, chapter 7.
  • Suri, Power and Protest, chapter 6 and conclusion.
  • Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, chapters 10–13.
  • Again, the bibliography of Rethinking the New Left is a good starting point for further reading.

• Monday, October 31: Contribution due to online exhibit

• November 3: New Conservatisms I

  • Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2002), introduction and chapters 2–4.

• November 10: New Conservatisms II

  • McGirr, Suburban Warriors, chapters 5–6, and epilogue.
  • Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), pages 3–17.
  • Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (2011), prologue and chapter 1.
  • Other starting places for reading on Cold War conservatism include Rick Perlstein’s trilogy Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014), as well as Trump Syllabus 2.0, compiled by N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain (2016), and Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (2008).

• Monday, November 14: Final project proposal due

• November 17: Ends of the Cold War and Beyond

  • McMahon, Cold War, chapter 8.
  • Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, Summer 1989.
  • John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997), chapter 10.
  • Jon Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America (2012), introduction, chapters 1 and 21, conclusion, and epilogue.
  • Appy, American Reckoning, chapter 11.
  • Few historians have yet written extensively about the 1980s and beyond, though Age of Fracture and The Age of Reagan are important exceptions. For more historiography of the Cold War, see Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism, edited by Ellen Schrecker (2004), and Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, edited by Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (2012).

• November 24: No class for Thanksgiving

• December 1: Final project presentations

• December 8: Final project due

The course will meet on Tuesday evenings, 6:00 to 9:00, from September 2 to December 9 in Williams Hall room 219. It will be a discussion-based seminar, though I will punctuate it with occasional presentations. I will be available for office hours before class on Tuesdays from 5:00 to 6:00 in Claudia Cohen Hall room 332, and encourage you to come by and talk.

Assignments

As a seminar, this course is primarily based on learning by discussing the required readings (listed below), so it’s essential that you read and think about them before each class meeting. Your engaged and insightful participation in discussions will account for 25% of your grade for the course.

The other assignments consist of three short papers, of approximately five pages each. I’ll provide more detailed prompts, but in short the first paper should present an argument about whether and how a particular technology “has politics,” the second should describe and analyze your observation of people using technology, and the third should present a brief history of a technology of your choice. You will have an opportunity to submit a draft, get my feedback, and revise your paper before I grade it. Each paper will account for 25% of your grade for the course.

Reading

The following four books, which we’ll be reading cover-to-cover or nearly so, are available for sale at the Penn Book Center and for borrowing at Van Pelt Library’s Rosengarten Reserve Room. Medieval Technology and Social Change is also available online, and other readings will be available through links below.

• Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962).
• Thomas J. Misa, Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present, second edition (2011, revised from 2004 original).
• Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983).
• David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (2007).

Schedule

• September 2: Introduction

• September 9: Technologies of Feudalism

  • Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (1980).
  • White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, preface and chapters 1 and 2.
  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, preface and chapter 1.

• September 16: Roots of Capitalism

  • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), objectives and chapter 1.
  • Cynthia Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men, and Technical Know-How (1985), introduction and chapter 1.
  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 2.

• September 23: Print Culture

  • Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), chapters 1, 16, and 18.
  • Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, second edition (2005, abridged from The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 1979), introduction and chapters 2 and 3.
  • Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, second edition (1986, revised from 1979 original), pages 43–53.
  • Draft due on the politics of a technology.

• September 30: The Industrialization of Manufacturing

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 3.
  • Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (1995), introduction and chapters 2 and 3.
  • Judith A. McGaw, “Gender and Papermaking” (1998, abridged from Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885, 1987).

• October 7: The Industrialization of Time and Space

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 4.
  • Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (1986), chapters 1–6.
  • Paper due on the politics of a technology.

• October 14: The Industrialization of Housework

  • Cowan, More Work for Mother, chapters 1–5.

• October 21: Technological Systems

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 5.
  • Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970 (1989), introduction and chapter 5.
  • Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept” (2010, revised from 1997 original).
  • Draft due on observing technology in use.

• October 28: Modern Cities

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 6.
  • David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (1990), preface and chapters 2 and 3.

• November 4: Modern Media

  • Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999, translated from 1986 German original), pages 1–37.
  • Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (1987), introduction and chapter 6.
  • Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (1992), chapters 2 and 3.
  • Paper due on observing technology in use.

• November 11: Alternative Modernities

  • Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, introduction and chapters 1, 2, and 5.
  • Paul R. Josephson, Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917–1989 (2010), introduction and chapter 1.

• November 18: The Industrialization of Violence

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 7.
  • Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, chapters 6 and 7.
  • Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996), pages 1–27.

• November 25: No class

  • Draft due on the history of a technology.

• December 2: Globalization

  • Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, chapters 3, 4, 8 and conclusion.
  • Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology, second edition (2007, revised from 1994 original), chapter 13.
  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 8.

• December 9: Technological Systems Revisited

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapters 9 and 10.
  • Nathan Ensmenger, “The Digital Construction of Technology: Rethinking the History of Computers in Society” (2012).
  • Paolo Pedercini, “Videogames and the Spirit of Capitalism” (2014).
  • Paper due on the history of a technology.