Text Box: American Pluralism Professor Robert Newman TTh 11:00 - 12:20 Reg. No. 185217 Text Box: 211 Text Box: This course examines particular issues which arise from a commitment to pluralism in American life--i.e., to specific instances in which the ideals of liberty, equality, and tolerance are brought to a conflictful head. I try to avoid the clichéd and “correct” response (political or not), so I encourage students to locate positions and arguments which may go against the conventional grain (however you define the conventional!). We will spend a good deal of time discussing particular matters associated with the common pluralistic areas of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion--for example, whether racial prejudice has abated or not in recent years, whether Title IX is a blessing or a curse, whether social class is the real monster in America not racial prejudice, or whether (Islamic) fundamentalism is a danger to the pluralistic ideal itself. In addition to an argumentative concern, I also put much stress on the way stories from our own lives are often the most convincing way to persuade someone to accept our arguments (or at least win a hearing for them) and illustrate the fruits of our research and argumentative commitments. What you can expect then are classroom debates and discussions, short position or response papers to those debates, possibly a journal in which you record responses to classroom discussions, and a final research essay in which you survey the pros and cons of a particular issue and then mount a case of your own. Some films and documentaries will alleviate the abstract nature of the course, but basically we’ll do two or three essay readings per class and discuss them. I will also be ordering an Opposing Viewpoints text on either terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism. Text Box: American Pluralism Professor Nathan Grant TTh 2:00 - 3:20 Reg. No. 111833 Text Box: 211

Text Box: Perhaps you’ve wondered whether American democracy, called by many the “grand human experiment,” actually works for all Americans, or perhaps it has occurred to you that the laboratory itself is a colossal mess. The history of group success and survival in the United States has been one in which power and influence have been negotiated, legislated, and appropriated; groups have had to come to terms with the various forms of resistance to their claims to social access and their right to alter institutions to ensure their proper accommodation. The greatest guarantors of this success have been the interdependency between the disenfranchised and its adversary, and the recognition of that interdependency by both sides. In this class, a largely historical approach, supplemented by sociological and literary works, we will seek to examine the tensions in American economics, justice, politics, and power, and mediating and appropriative strategies used even today by ethnic groups and by women to fashion and occupy their particular places at the frontiers of American enterprise. We’ll start with readings from The Federalist (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay) and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835); other authors include Black Elk, Anna Julia Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Ray Stannard Baker, Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-sa), Mary White Ovington, Randolph Bourne, William James, Horace Kallen, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sui Sin Far, Jacob Riis, Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Gloria Steinem, Leon Higginbotham, Evelyn Higginbotham, Maxine Hong Kingston, C. Wright Mills, and Toni Morrison. Participants are expected to keep pace with the schedule of readings and contribute regularly to class discussion. Regular quizzes and response papers will apply.