SYLLABUS
Books | Class Schedule

Students will learn about and experiment with a wide range of methods for studying the city. They will explore what can be learned through various historical records, from novels and films, from the physical city itself, and from observing and interviewing city dwellers, and will read analyses of urban life that use these different methods.

Requirements
The primary requirement of the course is participation: doing the reading, coming to class, and participating in discussion. You will write short, informal weekly reaction papers to each set of readings, which you will circulate to the class. These informal papers are not graded, but are required, and will help you fully engage in discussion. Because this class is about methods of research, most weeks you will be doing a short exercise exploring a method or source. As we will be discussing these in class, it is essential that they be done on time. At the end of the semester, you will write a proposal for your thesis (as you imagine it now), explaining what methods you anticipate using and what you will learn from these methods.

Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana DiZerega Wall

Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City   (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)

Mark Monmonier

How to Lie with Maps   (University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Raymond Williams

The Country and the City  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1973])
See also the related Review (H-Albion: 23 October 2000) "The View from Nowhere"by Michael Mascuch, Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley of Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward, eds. The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

T.J. Clark

The Painting of Modern Life   (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)

David B. Clarke

The Cinematic City  (London: Routledge, 1997)
See also the Review (H-PCAACA: 2 May 1999) by Bianca Freire-Medeiros, Binghamton University.

William Cronon

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West  (New York: Norton, 1991)

David Henkin

City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York  (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)
See also the Review (H-Urban: 6 January 2000) "Understanding the Birth of Visual Cacophony" by Thorin Tritter, Columbia University.

Setha M. Low

On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture  (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000)

Carlo Rotella

October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
See also the Review (H-Urban: 27 October 1998) "Mapping the City of Feeling and the City of Fact" by William J. Savage, Northwestern University.

Mary P. Ryan

Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)

William H. Whyte

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces  (Washington, DC: Conservation Foundation, 1980)

Introductions
Week 1: Jan 23

Mapping
Week 2: Jan 30

• Mark Monmonier
  How to Lie with Maps
• William Cronon
  "Gateway City" in Nature's Metropolis

Assignment
Draw a map of a neighborhood of New York City.

Archaeology
Week 3: Feb 6

• Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana DiZerega Wall
  "The Archaeology of New York City," "Urban Space in the Colonial and Post-Revolutionary City," "Daily Life in the Nineteenth-Century City," and "We Were Here: The African Presence in Colonial New York" in Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City
• Bernard Herman
  "Multiple Materials, Multiple Meanings: The Fortunes of Thomas Mendenhall" Winterthur Portfolio 19:1 (Spring 1984): 67-86

Assignment
Visit the "New York Unearthed" museum.

Using Historic Maps and Peopling Them
Week 4: Feb 13

• David Cobb
  "Windows to Our Past: Mapping in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond" (R) in Alex Krieger and David Cobb, eds., Mapping Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)
• Richard Harris
  "Reading Sanborns for the Spoor of the Owner/Builder, 1890s-1950s" in Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurry, eds, Exploring Everyday Landscapes (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 251-267

Assignment
Find at least one year of Sanborn maps for a neighborhood. Analyze the maps. What was this neighborhood like? Find the manuscript census for the same neighborhood for a year close to your maps. What does this add to your understanding of this place? How does it back up or contradict what you thought from interpreting the maps?

Newspapers
Week 5: Feb 20

• David Henkin
  "Print in Public, Public in Print: The Rise of the Daily Paper" in City Reading
• Mary Ryan
  "Ceremonial Space: Public Celebration and Private Women" in Women in Public

Assignment:
Compare the coverage given to an event in two different newspapers.

Guide Books
Week 6: Feb 27

• Catherine Cocks
  "'An Individuality All Its Own': Tourist City and Tourist Citizens, 1876-1915" in Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
• Jessica Sewell
  "Gender, Imagination, and Experience in the Early Twentieth Century American Downtown," (R) in Paul Groth and Christopher Wilson, eds., Expanding Cultural Landscapes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)

Assignment:
Find two or more different guidebooks to the same city (not New York). How do these books present the city? What are the important categories of spaces? Of activities? Who is the audience for these books? How do they differ?

First-Person Accounts
Week 7: March 6

• Elaine S. Abelson
  "Urban Women and the Emergence of Shopping" in When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
• Joanne J. Meyerowitz
  "Friends to Help Them" in Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)

Assignment:
Find and read a diary or memoir set in a city. What does this source teach you about the city? How is it different from or similar to novels or other accounts of cities you have encountered?

Spring Break
March 13

Literature
Week 8: March 20

• Raymond Williams
  "Change in the City," "People of the City" "Cities of Darkness and of Light," and "The Figure in the City" in The Country and the City
• Carlo Rotella
  "Part 2: The Neighborhood Novel and the Transformation of the Inner City" in October Cities

Assignment:
Start the assignment for week 9.

Film
Week 9: March 27

• Anke Gleber
  "Female Flanerie and the Symphony of the City" in Von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis
• Frank Krutnik
  "Something More than Night: Tales of the Noir City" in Clarke, ed. The Cinematic City
• Will Straw
  "Urban Confidential: The Lurid Cities of the 1950s" in Clarke, ed. The Cinematic City

Assignment:
Find and read/watch a novel, film, or other literary depiction of a city (each of you will choose a different city) and bring it to class to give to another student. For April 2 you will also read or watch the choice of one other student.

City Depictions
Week 10: April 3

Assignment:
Analyze the literary depiction of a city you have read or watched (see week 9). How could this potentially be used for research on that city? What questions for further research or themes for further examination does it suggest?

Images
Week 11: April 10

• T.J. Clark
  "The View from Notre Dame" in The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)
• Alex Potts
  "Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Images of London in the Nineteenth Century" History Workshop Journal 26 (Autumn 1988): 28-56
• Jacqueline Leavitt, Teresa Lingafelter, and Claudia Morello
  "Through Their Eyes: Young Women Look at Their Los Angeles Neighborhood" in Rosa Ainley, ed. New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender (London: Routledge, 1998)

Assignment:
Find several photos, paintings, or other visual representations of the same city (try one of the many museums in the NYC area as a source, rather than books). What story do these images tell you? Do they agree with each other? If you are using images in more than one medium, are there differences in what they tell you or how you interpret them?

Observation
Week 12: April 17

• Louise Mozingo
  "Women and Downtown Open Spaces" Places v.6, no.1 (1989): 38-47
• Setha Low
  "Constructing Difference" in On the Plaza
• Recommended:  William Whyte
  The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

Assignment:
Observe the activity in an urban space of your choosing on at least 2 occasions, and at least an hour each time. Record your observations in notes and on a map. What patterns do you see emerging? What explanation might you give for these patterns?

Interviews
Week 13: April 24

• Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis
  "Maybe 'Cause Things were Harder . . . You Had to be More Friendly: Race and Class in the Lesbian Community of the 1950s" in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (London: Routledge, 1993)
• Setha Low
  "The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear" American Anthropologist 103:1 (March 2001): 45-58

Assignment:
Interview at least 2 people who participate in the same (urban) activity. Write a summary of the interviews and what you learned from them about the activity, who participates in it, the meanings it has to its participants, and any discrepancies or differences between the pictures given in the different interviews.

Participant Observation
Week 14: May 1

• Elijah Anderson
  "Street Etiquette and Street Wisdom" in Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990)
• Mitchell Duneier
  "Appendix A: A Statement on Method" in Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999)

Assignment:
Engage in an urban activity (preferably one you studied in one of the last 2 assignments) as a participant observer and write up your experience. What are the categories of participants? How do you learn to participate and to fit in? What is involved in participation?