Scranton, Honors Program Seminar, Technology in American Life Fall 1999, RUCamden
Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:20-2:40 pm. Honors seminar room, Robeson Library
COURSE OUTLINE
This seminar is intended to be a participatory introduction to the historically rich and complex interactions between technologies and America's people, politics, institutions, and economy, from the 1700s through recent times. "Participatory" is the key word, at the outset and throughout the semester ahead. All classes will be active learning opportunities; there will be no standard lectures, no quizzes, no exams. Rather we will meet twice weekly, on most occasions to discuss a wide array of readings which offer insights, puzzles, and problems about the intersection of technological and social developments. Some classes will be devoted to student presentations, and one will offer a guest researcher's overview of a key area industry, shipbuilding, followed by a class visit to (and guided tour of) a massive, but abandoned shipbuilding site along the Delaware River. By the semester's close you each will have developed a deepened understanding of how technologies have been crucial to the American story, the difficulties they have solved and created, and the reasons why debates about technology have continuing importance.
Course requirements and procedures:
1. Discussions: About two-thirds of our eighty minute classes will center on discussing groups of historical documents and historians' essays on America and its technologies. For each of these sessions, I will distribute in advance sets of questions which should help structure our conversations. Some questions invite you to extract useful information from the materials, others ask for your judgments and opinions (and the reasons for them). Yet other questions reach beyond the materials at hand, inviting you to speculate about implications, motivations, etc., while a few of them will call upon you to compare two or more of the items we will have read.
KEY POINTS:
1) Preparing for discussions is demanding work, necessitating that you have the question sheets, the textbook, and a notebook at hand. Read through the questions for each selection before beginning your reading, then write your responses to the questions in your notebook and bring all three to class. Responses may simply be a few phrases, a numbered list of points, or a carefully-written paragraph, but whatever the form, they will be your resources during class sessions. Don't imagine that you will readily remember your responses to questions when class time arrives if you haven't written them down. (It's possible to do question notes on a PC, but most folks find hopping back and forth from book to keyboard is clumsy, and you have to remember to print out the answers file every time.)
2) Be certain to set aside two to three hours as preparation time for each seminar class. The reading selections are not long (20-30 pages per class), but they are detailed and you'll need time to think about the questions and outline your responses.
3) Don't expect that you will be able to sit quietly and listen to others talking in discussions. Each of you will be directly asked one or more of the discussion questions in each class. If for some reason, you are not prepared for a class, come anyway and deal with the consequences. Missed discussions trigger a mandatory writing assignment, and in the Honors Program, missing two or more classes will generate an "academic warning" notice to the program office.
4) The work you do, both in preparation and in active discussions, will pay major benefits in building or refining skills in analysis, reasoning, comparison, and oral presentation. This course is structured to reward steady, active effort, not passive listening or cramming for exams.
3. In-class presentations: Each student will do two presentations during class time. For the first, October 18, 20, and 25, I'll ask each of you to take all of us on a "guided tour" of a website which deals with the history of technology. You'll need to select a site (there are scores of them), get it approved by me (office hours), work your way through it so as to plan an organized tour, decide what features you find interesting, what aspects you find worth criticizing, and think a bit about how valuable this site is (valuable to whom and for what) and perhaps what you'd do to improve it. We'll use the computer network links in the Honors Seminar room and you'll each have about 20 minutes to "walk" us around the site.
Near the close of the term (December 1, 6 and 8), you'll each have another 20 minutes to present your evaluation of the sci-fi volume you've selected, commenting on and criticizing it given what you've learned in this course, offering perhaps some background on the author, discussing the issues about technology and society it highlights. The outline for your talk could well become the basis for your final paper, but this should be a talk, not a reading of the paper.
4. Shipbuilding unit and trip: In class on October 27, one or more of the researchers involved in a history of industry and technology project which focuses on Camden's New York Shipbuilding Co. (active c. 1899-1967) will present an illustrated review of shipbuilding's long history on the Delaware River. That Friday, October 29, we will all gather at 2 pm in the Armitage Hall parking lot (between Armitage and the Ben Franklin Bridge) to take the Rutgers van to the NYShip site, where we'll have a guided tour of the complexities of steel ship construction. New York Ship was a major producer of naval warships, including near the end of its era, the nuclear-powered ship Savannah. This tour is mandatory (arrange your schedules far in advance), but as "compensation" for stealing your Friday afternoon, there will be no classes on Nov. 1 or Nov. 3. (It would be ideal were you to use that week to start/finish reading your sci-fi choice and begin outlining your oral presentation for early December.)
Books required: Dava Sobel, Longitude (Penguin paperback); Merritt Roe Smith and Gregory Clancey, Major Problems in the History of American Technology (Houghton Mifflin paperback)
Both are available in the campus bookstore.
Course grading:
Class discussion - 40%; Longitude paper - 10%; Website presentation -15%; Sci-fi novel presentation - 15%; Sci-fi paper - 20% --- Total 100%
Class and readings schedule:
Sept 1 - Introduction
W 8 - What is Technology? Smith and Clancey, 1-21.
M 13 - Longitude I Sobel, 1-87 (big print, small pages)
W 15 - Longitude II Sobel, 88-175 (",")
M 20 - Debating Manuf. Smith and Clancey, Chapter 4, 103-19, 130-42
(Short paper on Longitude due)
W 22 - Factory Systems S&C, Ch. 5, 144-72
M 27 - More Factories S&C, Ch. 5, 172-82, Scranton handout
W 29 - "Second Nature" S&C, Ch. 6, 191-202, 221-32
M Oct 4 - Meatpacking S&C, Ch. 6, 203-21, Gideon handout
M 11 - Telephones S&C, Ch. 7, 223-46, 255-66
W 13 - Efficiency S&C, Ch. 8, 270-89, 292-99
M 18 - Website Presentations I
W 20 - Website Presentations II
M 25 - Website Presentations III
W 27 - Shipbuilding class
Friday Oct 29 - Shipyard tour, meet at 2 pm, Armitage Hall parking lot
M&W Nov 1-3 No class, read sci-fi novel you have selected
M Nov 8 - Ford/Automobiles S&C, Ch. 9, 312-337
W 10 - Ford/Autos S&C, Ch. 9, 337-54
M 15 - Chemicals S&C, Ch. 11, 393-409 (skip Chapter 10)
W 17 - Chemicals S&C, Ch. 11, 410-26
M 22 - Disaster Bhopal handout
W 24 - MIU Complex S&C, Ch. 12 427-48, 462-69
M 29 - Computers S&C, Ch. 13, 471-95
W Dec 1 - Sci-Fi Presentations I
M 6 - Sci-Fi Presentations II
W 8 - Sci-Fi Presentations III (Optional first draft papers due)
M 13 - First draft paper discussions, office 440 Armitage, 12-2:40 pm (will be scheduled)
Friday Dec. 17, Sci-fi final paper due.
Office hours: Monday and Wednesday 12:00 to 1:20 pm, or by appointment, Armitage 440
phone messages -- call 225-6080 (history office) or 215-843-0440 (home phone, has voice mail). .