In seminar format, this course offers a collective exploration of the bases, dimensions, and processes that underlay the development of what we too easily term "modern culture" whether in the U.S. or the West more generally. Specifically, we consider the transformation of urban space and place during the epochal era from the late eighteenth through the mid-to late-twentieth centuries. In the process, we critically probe the meanings of both "urban" and "culture" in concrete social and political economic contexts, evaluating alternative formulations and relationships as we search for an integrating understanding. Among the elements of the complex historical interaction we seek to understand are: social class, gender, ethnicity and race, geographic space and sociocultural space, accumulation and display, architecture, institutions, cultural hierarchies (in actuality and symbolically) and relationships, cultural politics and political economics. Among our organizing questions are those that surround notions of mass or class cultures, integration vs. fragmentation, separate spheres, private vs. public spaces, commercial cultures, control vs. freedom, and the futures of both culture and cities. Our realm is the historical; our questions, tools, and theories are interdisciplinary; the boundaries to the inquiry are those we set together in search of "urban culture".

Requirements:
Regular reading, attendance, and participation in seminar; oral reports to the class; seminar paper in consultation with the instructor.

Books Required

Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision (Kentucky, 1975, Johns Hopkins UP, 1991)
Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge, 1979)
Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions (Chicago, l99O)
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Temple, 1986)
William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham (Oxford, 1992) [Optional]
Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford, 1989)
William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square (Russell Sage, 1992)
Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (Rutgers, l99O)
Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power (California, 1993)

* Library reserve reading

Week 1. Introduction

Film: "The City" (1939; 45 mins.)

Week 2. Interpreting Urban Cultures

*Warren Susman, "The City in American Culture," in his Culture as History (Pantheon, 1984), 237-251
Neil Harris, "Four Stages of Cultural Growth: The American City," in his Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetities and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago, 199O), Ch. 1, 12-28
*Harvey J. Graff, "The City, Crisis, and Change in American Culture," in Transitions to the 21st Century, ed. Norman Glickman and Donald Hicks (JAI Press, 1983), 113-152
*Sam Bass Warner, Jr., "The Management of Multiple Urban Images," in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (Edward Arnold, 1983), 383-394
*John Kasson, "Civility and Rudeness: Urban Etiquette and the Bourgeois Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America," Prospects, 9 (1984), 143-167
*Daniel Calhoun, "The City as Teacher," History of Education Quarterly, 9 (1969), 312-325
Also: *Michel de Certeau, Ch. VII "Walking in the City" and Ch.IX "Spatial Stories," in his The Practice of Everyday Life (California, 1984), 91-11O, 115-13O
*Kathleen D. McCarthy, "Creating the American Athens: Cities, Cultural Institutions, and the Arts, 184O-1930," American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 426-439
Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford, 1992)

Week 3. Wholes and Parts?

Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision (Kentucky, 1975; Johns Hopkins, 1991)
*_____, "The Culture of Intellectual Life," and "The Erosion of Public Culture," in his Intellect and Public Life (Johns Hopkins, 1993), 3-15 and 3O-46

Week 4. Parts and Wholes: Social Foundations of Modern Cultural Formations

Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge, 1979)
*Christine Stansell, "Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets," Feminist Studies, 8 (1982), 309-335
*David Scobey, "Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York," Social History, 17 (1992), 203-227
Also: Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 176O-19OO (Cambridge UP, 1989)
Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis (Cornell, 199O)
Michael B. Katz, Michael Doucet, and Mark Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Harvard, 1983)
Film: Five Points (25 mins.)

Week 5. Cultures: High and Middle

Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetities and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago, 199O), Chs. (1), 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13
*David Scobey, "Anatomy of the Promenade" (as in Week 4)
Also: Helen Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 188Os to 1917 (Kentucky, 1976)
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard, 1988)
John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility (Hill & Wang, 199O)
Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Cornell, 1992)
Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City. Prostitution. and the Commercialization of Sex. 1790-1920 (Norton, 1992)

Week 6. Other "Spheres," Other Cultures

*Mary Ryan, "Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth Century America," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (MIT Press, 1992), 259-288
*Elizabeth Wilson, "The Invisible Flaneur," New Left Review, no. 191(1992), 9O-11O
*Hazel V. Carby, "Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Culture," Critical Inquiry 18 (1992), 738-755
Also: Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-188O (Johns Hopkins, l99O)
Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women's Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 183O-193O (Chicago, 1991)
Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (California, 1992)
Philip J. Ethington, "Recasting Urban Political History: Gender, the Public, the Household, and Political Participation in Boston and San Francisco during the Progressive Era," Social Science History 16 (1992), 301-333
Andrea Kornbluh, "City Sex: Views of American Women and Urban Culture, 1869 to 189O," Urban History Yearbook, 18 (1991), 6O-83
Sarah Deutsch, "Reconceiving the City: Women, Space, and Power in Boston, 187O-19lO," Gender and History, 6, 2 (August, 1994), 202-223

Week 7. Research time

Proposals for Seminar Papers/Projects Due: Week 7 or 8

Week 8. Other Worlds, Other Cultures

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Temple, 1986)
Select from:

• *Kathleen Conzen, "Immigrants, Immigrant Neighborhoods, and Ethnic Identity," Journal of American History, 66 (1979), 603-614
• *Roy Rosenzweig, "Middle-Class Parks and Working-Class Play," Radical History Review, 21 (1979), 31-48
• *Frank Couvares, "The Triumph of Commerce: Class Culture and Mass Culture in Pittsburgh," in Working-Class America, ed. Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz (Illinois, 1983), 123-152
• *Lisabeth Cohen, "Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 192Os," American Quarterly, 41 (1989), 6-33

Film: Coney Island (American Experience; 6O mins.)

Weeks 9 & 1O. New Worlds, New Cultures

*Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford, 1989), Introduction, Ch. 1 "Urban Women and the Emergence of Shopping," and Ch. 2 "The World of the Store," 1-12, 13-41, 42-62
*Susan Porter Benson, "Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling," Radical History Review, 21 (1979), 199-221
*William Leach, "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 189O-1925," Journal of American History, 71 (1984), 319-342
*Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 188O-193O," in The Culture of Consumption, ed. Richard W. Fox and Lears (Pantheon, 1983), 1-38
William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (Oxford UP, 1992), chs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (remainder optional)
*William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square (Russell Sage, 1991), esp. Richard W. Fox, "The Discipline of Amusement," 83-98; Jean-Christophe Agnew, "Times Square: Secularization and Sacralization," 2-13; and selections from Pts II, III, IV
*Michael Ebner, "Re-Reading Suburban America," American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 368-381
Carol O'Connor, "Sorting Out the Suburbs: Patterns of Land Use, Class, and Culture," American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 382-394
Also: William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (Pantheon, 1993)
Simon Bronner, Ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920 (Norton, 1989)
William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb? Redefining Contemporary Suburbia," in American Quarterly, 46, 1 (March, 1994), 1-3O, and responses by Robert Bruegmann, Robert Fishman, Margaret Marsh, June Manning Thomas, 31-54, and Response by Sharpe and Wallock, 55-61.
William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square (Russell Sage, 1991)
Robert Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York, 188O-193O (Oxford UP, l99O)
Lewis Ehrenberg, Steppin' Out (Greenwood, 1981)
Larry May, Screening Out the Past (Oxford UP, 198O)
John Kasson, Amusing the Million (Hill & Wang, 1978)
David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (Basic, 1993)
Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (Rutgers, l99O)
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs (Harvard, 1962)
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (Oxford, 1985)
Henry Binford, The First Suburbs (Chicago, 1984)
Carol O'Connor, A Sort of Utopia (SUNY, 1984)
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias (Basic, 1987)
Clifford Clark Jr., The American Family Home (North Carolina, 1986)
Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Mode Home (Chicago, 198O)
Barbara Kelly, Expanding the American Dream...Levittown (SUNY, 1993)
Herbert Gans, "Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life," in American Urban History, ed. A.B. Callow (Oxford, 1973, 2nd ed.), 507-521
Classic works: Herbert Gans, Robert Woods, Bennett Berger, John Seeley

Film: Proud Towers (55 mins.)

Week 12. The Private and the Public: Civic Culture(s) Past and Future

*Ada Louise Huxtable, "Inventing American Reality," New York Review, 3 Dec. 1992, 24-29
*Sam Bass Warner, Jr., "The Public Invasion of Private Space and...," in Growth and Transformation of the Modern City (Stockholm: Swedish Council for Building, 1979), 171-18O
*Nancy Fraser,"Rethinking the Public Sphere," Social Text, 25/26 (199O), 56-8O
*Joan Didion, "New York: Sentimental Journeys," New York Review, 17 Jan. 1991, 45-56
*William Gass, "The Face of the City," Harpers, March, 1986, 37-46
*Sharon Zukin, "The Hollow Center: U.S. Cities in the Global Era," in America at Century's End, ed. Alan Wolfe (California, 1991), 245 261, 526-528
"Bonus" Book: Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power (California, 1991)
Optional:

• *"Public Space: Urbanity, Streets, Costs," Dissent, Fall, 1986, 47O-494
• *"Whatever Became of the Public Square," HARPERS, July, l99O, 49-6O

Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere
Also: Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (Hill & Wang, 1992)
Michael B. Katz, ed., The Underclass Debate (Princeton, 1993)
Mike Davis, City of Quartz...Los Angeles (Verso, l99O)
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (Verso, 1989)
A. Portes and A. Stepick, City on the Edge...Miami (California, 1993)
Film: Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston (6O mins.)

Week 13. Thanksgiving/Research & Drafting time
Week 14. Drafting time
Week 15. Presenting papers/Seminar party

Papers/Projects Due
* Library reserve reading