A&H 387 From Buffalo Bill to Dr. Phil: American Culture at Home and Abroad

Content

American Culture is powerful and global. It shapes personal and national identity within and beyond the United States. This class explores the power and reach by studying the social significance of American popular culture from the 19th century appearance of “Indian Fighter” Buffalo Bill, to the 21st century rise of media made therapist, Dr. Phil. Our study of different cultural forms and icons throughout recent history addresses the following questions. How does culture shape life? How do people craft and interpret cultural expressions and icons to (re)define their daily lives?

Three convictions steer the class. First, popular culture provides a very effective means of conveying social norms and values. What a person sees in a film or on the news influences how (s)he experiences life and perceives others. Second, and on the other hand, popular culture is also a means for challenging contemporary beliefs and behaviours. Musical genres like Hip Hop, internet sites like Facebook, and pixel heroines like Lara Croft, help us see, hear and experience the challenge. Finally, popular culture perpetuates social constructs, like race, ethnicity, class, gender and age. Associations of crime with race, for example, seen in advertisements and on ‘the’ news, reinforce perceptions of racial groups as inherently criminal.

The class examines these ideas by reading old and new media, monuments and museum exhibits, and art and artefacts, as well as the pop cultural forms that touch daily life. Scholarly works in the fields of History, Film and Media, and Gender Studies, help us interpret what we read and hear. These primary and secondary sources also get at the ways people living beyond American boarders view and experience the promise, customs and institutions of the nation. Our analysis of billboards on highways suggests, for example, that “foreign” nations like the Netherlands, reinterpret American icons like the Marlboro Man, to serve their own national agendas.

By the end of the term, students will have the research and analytical skills, and intellectual curiosity and passion, to study a topic of interest. Final projects have ranged from the artistic expressions of Japanese-American citizens placed in concentration camps during World War II solely because of their ancestry; to the appeal of the Godfather in the 1970’s; to the expressions of AIDS in art in the late 1980’s; to the study of identity on the internet, in communities of colleagues like LinkedIn, and through the crafting of new identities in ‘second life’ gaming. These works have been used to gain entry into History, Gender, Psychology, Sociology, Art, and American Studies programs.

Instructor

Dr. Nancy Mykoff

Track

History - Cultural History and American Studies; History - Europe and the World; Media Studies; Anthropology

Period

Spring / 2011

Prerequisites

One needs to have followed one of the following courses in order to take this course:

• A&H 237 Life and Travel Writing
• A&H 243 Film in Context
• A&H 275 Emotions. A Social and Cultural History
• A&H 287 History of Women and Gender

Required for

This course is required in order to take the following course:

• A&H 306 The Global Artefact