I realized that I went this whole semester without writing about my courses from my final semester of grad school. As always I will describe each course, list the professor, and provide a book list with links to the book’s Amazon.com page. I will write a separate post in which I will discuss the past two years and my thoughts on grad school. For now, here are the courses from Spring 2012:
HIST 533
The United States, 1960 – 1980 met three times per week with a mix of grad students and undergrads. As with all 500 level courses, we have a separate fourth hour meeting with the professor to discuss our addition work/readings. For this course, we used fourth hour to watch various documentaries and for grad-only book reviews. The course had 12 books, but they were optional. We took a midterm and a final, both of which could be easily taken as long as you attended the lectures. The course is taught by Dr. Steve Guerrier, who was recently named one of the 300 best professors in the country by The Princeton Review. His teaching style centers around lectures, a skill at which he is highly adept. His lectures are extraordinary detailed. A course that was supposed to cover events through 1980 only got through the 1968 election, but I learned more in his class than in most seminar style classes. I took this class because I had worked with him on History Day last year and had heard he is a great professor. I certainly recommend Dr. Guerrier to any JMU student with an interest in History.
Books: The Movement an the Sixties, ‘Takin’ it to the Streets:’ A Sixties Reader, Dispatches, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945-1995, The Struggle for Black Equality, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, The Presidency of Richard M. Nixon, The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford, and The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr.
HIST 605
The Seminar in Recent American History. HIST 605 changes from year-to-year depending on who teaches it. This year the course was taught by Dr. Kevin Borg and focused on his area, industry, consumption, and the environment. The reading list for this course was pretty extensive with one book per week. A few weeks we had breakout books where the class was divided in half, or, for one week, into fourths. The course began with the Industrial Revolution and trace the development of American business, environmentalism, and Liberalism. The course was setup in a seminar style with each of us taking turns leading class discussion. I led the discussion for Nancy Cohen’s The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914. For this course we had to write a book and a synthetic book review in which we compared and reviewed two to three books. We also wrote two 7-10 page historiographical essays on a topic of our choosing. I really enjoyed the discussions in this course. The strength of this course was certainly its reading list.
Books: The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940, Mass Destruction the Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, and Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies.
HIST 700
For my thesis, this semester was the most stressful. I wrote chapters 1, 2, and 3 before the beginning of the semester. In fact, I wrote chapter 2 while I was at home over Christmas break. The only things I had to finish after Christmas break was chapter 4, my introduction and conclusion, the abstract, table of contents, and I had to think of a title for the damn thing. My thesis adviser, Dr. Christopher Versen, was very helpful and very detailed in his feedback and was very helpful. I finished the rough draft of my a week before spring break. Dr. Versen read and commented on the draft, and I spent Spring Break rewriting, revising, and conducting some additional research. It was a nightmare! But I submitted the thesis to my committee before the deadline.
As with last semester, I meet weekly with Dr. Versen, and we discuss what I had read, what I had written, and where the project was going. The members of my thesis committee, Dr. Chris Arndt and Dr. John Butt, provided excellent feedback, and I submitted my thesis to the graduate school a week before the due date.
