The Andy Warhol version of the Pullman strike.

This is only a partial list; you can come up with your own book, but be sure to consult with me.

My “How2Write” slides

Some recommended books

• Fredrick Lewis Allen (1931), Only Yesterday: An informal history of the 1920s. Read the history that defined the 1920s for a generation, and to some degree still does.
• Gertrude Atherton, Black Oxen, (1924). A novel for the “New Woman” of the 1920s.
• Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (1924). Jesus, it turns out, was really a businessman.
• Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, (1934). The renowned anthropologist’s first book; Race, Science and Politics (1940), her second.
• General Smedley Butler, War is a Racket, (1935). To hell with war!
• Pietro Di Donato, Christ in Concrete, (1937). One of the great social realist novels of the 1930s.
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935). An essay, as Du Bois put it, “toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880.”
• Henry Ford, My Life and Work (1924; revised 1936). The flivver king takes his stand; or, read The International Jew, Ford’s anti-Semitic screed of the early 1920s.
• William Z. Foster, Towards Soviet America (1932). The head of the Communist Party offers his master plan.
• E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (1939). A milestone text in the history of African-American thought. Very influential in the 1960s.
• Madison Grant, The Passing of a Great Race (1924). Immigrants are the problem. Massive residency restrictions are the solution.
• Ole Hansen, Americanism Versus Bolshevism (1920). The mayor of Seattle, following his triumphant crackdown on that city’s general strike, shares his thoughts on the impending crisis.
• Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (1934). The renowned play about the power of a lie.
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises. A novel about love and remorse after the First World War.
• Herbert Hoover, American Individualism (1922). The future president’s credo while Secretary of Commerce; A Challenge to Liberty (1934), Hoover’s critique of the “regimentation” of the New Deal.
• Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944). A warning against state planning during the Second World War.
• Stanley Horn, Invisible Empire (1939). A sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan.
• Zora Heale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). A novel by one of the most introspective of the Harlem Renaissance writers.
• John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920). A scathing indictment of the Treaty of Versailles.
• Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922). The novel that defined for a generation what H.L. Mencken called “the booboisie.”
• Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (1942). A budding young author’s first collection of loosely linked stories, including an account of New York intellectual life during the Second World War.
• H.L. Mencken, A Preface to Politics (1917). Cynic and funny guy, Mencken anticipated the 1920s’ rejection of progressivism.
• Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936). Read the novel that defined slavery and reconstruction for a generation.
• Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). Christians must recognize that power politics will always be with us.
• Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943). The great libertarian novel of the Second World War.
• Eleanor Roosevelt, any book from this period, including The Moral Basis of Democracy (1940), My Days, (1938); This Is My Story, (1937); This Troubled World, (1938).
• Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage (1940). The famed birth control advocate opines on the requisites for domestic bliss.
• Upton Sinclair, I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty (1933). Sinclair offers his prescription for radical prosperity during the worst years of the Depression.
• John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1940). The hit novel about the Okie migration of the 1930s.
• Dorothy Thompson, influential journalist of the late 1920s and 1930s. Check out New Russia, (1928); I Saw Hitler! (1932); Anarchy or Organization (1938); Let the Record Speak (1939).
• Jean Toomer, Cane (1923). A collection of prose/poetry associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
• Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (1939). The last of the pre-World War II anti-war novels.
• Walter White, Rope and Faggot: The Story of Judge Lynch (1924). Walter White’s searing indictment of lynching.
• Wendell Wilkie, One World (1943). Franklin Roosevelt’s last Republican challenger offers his recipe for world peace.
• Richard Wright, Native Son (1940). A compelling look at Depression era race relations.

General requirements for the paper:

Use double spaced pages.

Number the pages.

Footnote or endnote all quotes, eg: ¹Matthew Lasar, Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (Philadeophia: Temple University Press, 2000), p. 187.

Include a bibliography at the end of the paper.

Use a spell checker!!!!! Do not hand in a paper with lots of misspelled words.

Proof your paper. Your spell checker will not help you discover that you used the word “there” when you should have used the word “their.”

Review the paper to make sure that the grammar is acceptable. While I will not grade for grammar, you will lose credit if your paper’s grammar and syntax are particularly bad.

Late papers

It is my experience that the most dangerous day of the year for grandparents and the roommates of college students is the day that term papers are due. An astonishing number of grandparents die on or around this day, compelling their grandchildren to halt all term paper writing activities and attend a funeral. An equally astounding number of roommates begin displaying symptoms that require a midnight trip to the emergency room, accompanied, of course, by the student whose term paper deadline has arrived. Pets also display an uncanny mortality rate around this time, as do printers.

Do not hand in your paper late. The excuses listed above and their many variations are acceptable only when accompanied by doctors notes, police reports, and other forms of convincing documentation. I am sorry for the cynicism, but experience has made me cynical. Without documentation, your term paper will be downgraded a full grade by the number of days you handed it in late (this gets unpleasant fast: A paper becomes B; B paper becomes C, etc).

Plagiarism

What is Plagiarism? Here is the definition, according to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary:

” … to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own …”

The University’s statement regarding plagiarism can be found here.
Please do not plagiarize. If I find that you did, I will give you an F in the course and turn your name over to the Provost of your college.

I want you to write a twelve page paper about a book that was written sometime between 1877 and 1914. Below you will find a list of recommendations. Read the book, read a biography of the author, and incorporate your class readings into the paper to give larger context to the issue(s) the author addresses.

In your paper I want you to outline the arguments or message of the writer and provide historical context. What, in your assessment, were the strengths and weaknesses of the author’s message? Based on your additional reading, why do you think the public was receptive to this message in the writer’s time?

You can come up with a substitute title after having consulted with me.

My how to write lecture

Recommended books

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907). A genteel intellectual’s bewildered look at the modern world.
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). The famed feminist pacifist social reformer’s autobiography.
Horatio Algier, The Cash Boy, Bound to Rise, or any other novel written after 1877. Novels about boys who make it by “pluck and luck.”
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). The original cynic’s vision of the world.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888). A utopian novel that implicitly questioned Social Darwinism.
Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money (1914). A progressive expose on banking.
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895) or Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). Novels by the famed turn of the century realist.
Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth. The philanthropists’ vision of a nation guided by the wealthy.
Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young (1883). Dime novels, dirty pictures . . . something must be done!
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909). A progressive’s vision for America.
Thomas Dixon, The Klansman (1905). The novel that gave birth to Birth of a Nation
Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column (1890). A grim, dystopian populist novel.
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (published in 1900 but suppressed; republished in 1912). Another realist novel by the author of An American Tragedy.
W.E.B. DuBois, Race and the City (1899). The famed socioligist’s study of black life in turn of the 20th-century Philadelphia.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898). A feminist critique of housework. Far ahead of its time (and ours).
William Harvey, Coin’s Financial School (1894). Free silver!!!
Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (1881). An expose of U.S. treatment of Native Americans. Or read her novel Ramona (1912).
William Dean Howells. Any novel, but A Hazard of New Fortunes or A Modern Instance would be best.
William James, Pragmatism (1909). The most important outline of this disinctly American philosophy.
Walter Lippman, Drift and Mastery (1914). An argument for the importance of government in American life.
Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894). A polemic against monopoly capitalistm.
Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907). A Christian vision of social justice.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (1889, 1894, 1896). Ya gotta be tough these days. Pick one volume to read. And don’t read more than 250-300 pages.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906). The novel that gave us two Federal laws.
Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa (1890) or Through the Dark Continent (1899). Stanley did discover Livingston. Pretty much everything else is a lie. Read Hochchild’s King Leopold’s Ghost along with either of these books (btw: they’re long books, so just read about 250 to 300 pages, no more).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Womans’ Bible (1892). Read for yourself what pissed everybody off.
William Graham Sumner, Folkways (1906). You can’t mess with society, much as you might like to.
Ida Tarbell, A History of the Standard Oil Company (1902, 1904). For this you’ll also want to read her autobiography All in a Day’s Work
Principles of Scientific Management. How to get people working at their most efficient.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). A piercing critique of modern consumer capitalism.
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1900, 1901). A quintessential vision of self-reliance from an African-American perspective.
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905). Not a lot of mirth in this absorbing novel about a young woman who must make a choice between marriage for love or for money.
Ida B. Wells, On Lynchings, A Red Record (1895). For this you’ll also need to read her autobiography Crusade for Justice

Here are some term paper topics. Most link to stories I’ve written for arstechnica.com. I’m not interested in you repeating what I’ve written or opined in these stories. I want you to follow the links to documentation and come up with your own conclusions.

Violence on Television

Write a paper about if/how the FCC should regulate violence on television. Read this report. More comments on the issue here and here. Your task: Reading this material, what are your recommendations for how to regulate violence on television to protect children. Follow up a few of the sources in the report. What’s the public interest here? What constitutive choice would you make?

The battle over fleeting expletives

Should the FCC be allowed to punish broadcasters for fleeting expletives? What are fleeting expletives? Here’s the FCC’s decision on the question regarding Fox Television’s Billboard Music Awards. Here’s a story about the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rebuke to the FCC. And the 2nd Circuit’s decision (if server is down try this one or read summary here). Then the FCC appealed to the Supreme Court (read the pdf at the bottom). Then read this story about artists urging the Supremes to reject the FCC (and read the pdf file at the bottom). And this story about former FCC Commissioners urging rejection (and the pdf file at the bottom). What’s should the Supreme Court do about this problem? What’s the constitutive choice here? What do you think would be the decision that would best reflect the public interest?

The FCC’s rules against pretexting

In 2007 the FCC established rules against “pretexting”—fooling phone companies into disclosing your cell phone records and then selling the records privately or over the Internet. But the agency’s Order also gave the FBI and Department of Homeland Security first dibs over this stolen data, giving them the option to keep it a while before letting you know that it’s been stolen.

Read the Order, and read key documents in the proceeding on this in 2007 and 2006. These would include FBI/Homeland Security filings. Read this, this, and this response from the wireless trade association. What’s the constitutive choice here? Do you think that what the FCC decided was in the public interest?

White space

The Federal Communications Commission has authorized the use of unlicensed devices to send and receive broadband in the “white space” channels. What does this mean? Read the FCC’s Order and this article by Nate Anderson of Arstechnica.com. Who wants white space devices? Why? Who opposed them? Why?

Go through the FCC’s proceeding and pick three substantial filings for and against unlicensed devices. What were the arguments for or against them? What’s the “constitutive choice” here? Do you think that the FCC acted in the public interest in its decision? Why?

Product Placement

The FCC is still trying to decide how much to regulate product placement on television. What is product placement? What are the different arguments for and against the practice (follow the links in the article)? Read the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and the positions of different groups on this issue. What do you think the “constitutive choice” should be regarding this controversial practice?

BusRadio

Earlier this year the FCC ran an investigation of BusRadio, the streaming Internet company that pipes music and talk into school buses. Many groups complained that kids shouldn’t be forced to listen to an ad based service. What are the issues here? If you were writing the report that Congress asked the FCC to produce, what would you recommend that lawmakers do (if anything) about BusRadio?

The MusicFirst petition regarding the Performance Rights Act

An organization that purports to represent musicians has complained to the FCC that some radio stations are refusing to play the songs of artists who support the Performance Rights Act. What is the Performance Rights Act? Read MusicFirst’s Petition for Declaratory Relief and the National Association of Broadcasters’ response. Should radio stations be allowed to boycott artists who support it? Does the FCC have any regulatory power here? Should it?

The iPhone and Google Voice

The Federal Communications Commission recently launched an investigation into why the AT&T networked iPhone has yet to allow its users to access Google Voice. What’s at stake in this issue? Read this article about the Carterfone decision and the Skype petition. Should the FCC apply the “open device” principle to all smart mobile phones? Why or why not?

The Sirius XM merger

In 2008 the FCC approved the merger of the Sirius and XM satellite radio services. What were the arguments for and against the merger? Do you think that the FCC made the right decision? What decision would you have made?

Which is more efficient: TV broadcasting or mobile wireless?

The wireless industry says it has a problem. It doesn’t have enough spectrum to meet the enormous demand for smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone. Read this report, commissioned by the Consumer Electronics Association and this filing by CTIA – The Wireless Association. Then read this response from the National Association of Broadcasters. The FCC has released a new public notice asking for feedback on this issue. Should spectrum owned by the broadcasters be leased or auctioned to the mobile services? Why or why not? What’s your constitutive choice here?

FAQs

Double spaced? Yes. Reference system? Use endnotes. Can I use wikipedia? No. You cannot use any source that does not disclose its author (besides FCC documents). How do I approach this paper overall? I will explain this in class. What happens if you catch me plagiarizing? I will do everything I can to get you thrown out of UC Santa Cruz. Short of this I will flunk you and turn your name over to the Provost of your college.