Studying history at Berkeley

Pr. Jennifer Burns, a history teacher from Berkeley, California, offers all her lectures to pod-casters. She covers 2/3rds of the period that we are studying at the UCP and listening to her lectures is an excellent way of improving your English and your understanding of American history. The lectures you will find most interesting to complete and review what we cover together are :
The Civil War and its aftermath
Reconstruction
Gilded Age politics
Workers and Unions
Progressivism
Social Thought in the Gilded Age.

Seminar 5 will be on Native Americans, the following lectures will provide you with the required background information :
The Conquest of the West
The Settling of the West

For seminar 6 on immigration, you will learn a lot by listening to the lectures on :
Immigrant culture
Meaning of whiteness

If you want to prepare for the lectures I will be giving after the break you can listen to :
The Roaring 20's and The Scopes Trial
The 1920's: The Jazz Age
The Great Depression and New Deal
New Deal, Part 2

You will find all these podcasts on Berkeley's website. If you have a MP3 player, you can download the MP3 files onto your computer and then copy them into your player.
If you have an i-pod, go to the i-store and search for "History 7B" or "Jennifer Burns". You can then subscribe to the entire series of podcasts or download them one by one.

If you want to find out more about Jennifer Burns check out her website.

Google Group for the first year students

Dear first year students,

You will find the homework on this link.

The Mormons

As a young boy, Joseph Smith started having visions and revelations. In 1827, he claimed he had been directed to golden tablets on which the story of the ancient israelite tribe of America was inscribed. He translated these revelations into English and the Book of Mormon became the fundamental text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. All this took place in up-state New York in a context of intense religious revival and amidst a treasure hunting craze.

Ever since the 1830s, when John Smith started preaching this new religion, he encountered scepticism and downright hostility. The hostility was and still is based on the originality of the Mormon faith and on the peculiarity of their brand of Christianity.

The prophet and his followers were gradually chassed west : from up-state New York to Ohio, and then to Missouri (God had revealed to Smith that the city of Independence was to be the New Jerusalem) from which they were violently expelled. They fled and settled in Illinois, where their community established a boyant city that was renamed Nauvoo. It was in that city that Smith received the revelation encouraging plural marriages and integrating the practice into the Mormon faith. However, once more, as they were starting to build a temple and as the number of converts they made increased, opposition built up against them. A newspaper harshly criticized the Mormons' hold over the city and Joseph Smith, their spiritual leader and prophet who held the office of city mayor. On the orders of Smith, the newspaper's presses were destroyed, this led to charges being pressed against him. Joseph Smith was held in jail and on June 27, 1844, a mob stormed the jail and Joseph and his brother were shot dead. This marked a second stage in the development of the Mormon faith (Brigham Young became the second prophet and religious leader of the Church) and latter led to the great migration of 1846-47 to Salt Lake City in the barren territory of Utah.
In Hugh Brogan's book (p. 232-45) you will find an excellent survey of the creation and early years of the Mormon Church.

The PBS documentary frontline offers an interesting overview of the life of Joseph Smith and the history of the Mormon Church. I would recommend parts 2, 3 and 4, which explain the origins of this new "American" denomination. The rest of the episodes retrace the troubled early years of the newly founded community. PBS offers a sequel to this historical overview exploring the evolution of the Mormon community in the social and political fabric of the USA. They were the ultimate outsiders for more than a century but today Mormons are part of the mainstream American society, they hold values (family, faith, community) that are shared by a majority of Americans. Today one of the front-runners in the Republican primary race is a Mormon. Mitt Romney has been presenting himself as a social conservative (despite a reported flip-flop on abortion) and is trying to seduce the evangelical base of the party and debunk commonly held misconceptions about his Church. You can hear what Mitt Romney has to say about this issue here.

Commentators have been eagerly reflecting on whether his faith will hinder him from getting the nomination.
NYT commentary.
NPR page on Mitt Romney.

free speech, you tube, etc...

During the seminar, Antonin mentionned the video that caused a bit of scandal several weeks ago. At a forum where John Kerry was speaking, an unruly student was taken away, silenced and "tasered" by the police. Watch the video.
The incident was covered by the local press and the television outlets passed excerpts form the videos taken by students attending the meeting. Wikipedia offers an ongoing debate (see the discussion page) about the event and tentative transcript of the exchange between Us Senator John Kerry and Andrew Meyer.

For more information on the repercussion of this event check out the NYT article on a student journal using vulgarity to express discontent towards the administration.

movies for seminar 5

At the request of a student, the Godfather II has been added to the movie list for seminar 5 on immigration.

You will shortly find a pdf document dealing with immigration in the US to download on the UCP website and on the american studies google group.
More from me on the mormon faith, the primary elections and other topics soon.

Obama or Hillary?

As far as I could guess, most of you find the Democratic race more interesting than the Republican contest for the presidential nomination.
Do you think Hillary Clinton is the first woman to run for President? Think again ! You might want to find out more on this topic. A woman tried to run for President as early as 1872, at a time when woman weren't enfranchised.

So far, Hillary Clinton has been in the lead, at least in national polls. Her campaign is strong and this quarter she has raised more money than Barack Obama, for the first time this year. This week's issue of the Economist has a long paper on her candidacy. According to them, Hillary Clinton is likely to win as she has many assets (name recognition, money, an organized party machine...) however she is a divisive personality : she musters real opposition and even hatred (and not only from conservatives). Her Republican opponents use her probable victory in the primaries to exite and unite their own rather apathic base, which is still considerably undecided.
Some Democrats thus consider it would be a mistake to nominate her, since she would not create a concensus and might not manage to win against a strong Republican nominee.
If you are interested in specifics you will probably find the presentation of her health care plan worth your time.

You probably all know that this is not the first time a Black American is running for the nomination. But this is the first time an African American is getting quite so much attention and support. The New York Times has a video on the Obama fans.
You can also refer to the video I had recommended on an earlier post (2008 Primaries) if you want to learn what is the main challenge Barack Obama needs to overcome in his duel against Hillary Clinton.

Please do leave a comment if you want me to cover any thing in particular.

Constitution of the USA

If, for some reason, you didn't get a photocopy of the American Constitution you will need to print it off the internet, or download it from the google group site.
See you next week.

Podcast for seminar 1

PBS is an American TV network offering, amongst other things, a variety of documentary programs. They offer a history series called American Experience for which there are short audio previews. These extracts are often well thought out and are all available for podcasting. Do try it out, you can access the podcasts through the website or through i-tunes ( by going on the i-tunes store and searching for "american experience").
The 4th of July 1826 was a momentous day : the Americans were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Find out what else happened that day by listening to the summary.

I usually enjoy their frontline series that you can watch on the web with windows media player or realplayer. Some of the shows I found most interesting were on the Mormons, the Irak war, Karl Rove, the "persuaders" (marketing gurus).