AC200  MIDTERM QUESTION

Instructions:  Following is the essay question that you will be asked to
answer during the midterm on Wednesday, October 27.  Please prepare your response
to the essay independently of other students.  In preparing for Wednesday's exam,
you may write down (or type) any information that will help you to compose your essay in
class, as long as your notes fit on one side of one 8 and 1/2 by 11 inch piece of paper.  

Note:  On Thursday, I decided to add a second option for the essay.  You may choose to
write on either topic specified below.  Be sure to use specific examples drawn from 
readings, web assignments, and other course materials to substantiate your argument.

Midterm essay:

Option 1: Race, class, and gender are all factors that have shaped the course of American cultural formation. Focusing on one of these factors, discuss its influence on American culture in the period 1876-1930. In your response, be sure to include examples from at least two different historical moments.

Option 2: In this course, we have used a variety of cultural forms (music, art, fiction, expository writing, etc.) to illuminate the contours of American culture at particular moments in time. In your essay, discuss two examples of how the juxtaposition of cultural forms has enriched our understanding of particular topics or periods in American cultural formation.

Sample Identification (sorry this is a little late):

America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision. I do not mean that we shall necessarily glut ourselves with the raw product of humanity. It would be folly to absorb the nations faster than we could weave them. We have no duty either to admit or reject. It is purely a question of expediency. What concerns us is the fact that the strands are here. We must have a policy and an ideal for an actual situation. Our question is, what shall we do with our America? How are you likely to get the more creative America--by confining our imaginations to the ideal of the melting-pot, or broadening them to some such cosmopolitan conception as I have been vaguely sketching?

Sample Response:

This statement is taken from Randolph Bourne's "Trans-National America" (1916). It reflects Americans' heightened concern for the meaning of American identity in the World War I era. It also reflects Americans' efforts to grapple with the vast influx of new immigrants who did much to transform American culture in the period 1880-1920. In contrast to DW Griffith, but on terms comparable to those of Anzia Yezierska, Bourne argues that the promise of America resides in its immigrant-enriched future, not in some nostalgic conception of the white, Anglo-Saxon past.

Obviously, there could be suitable variations on this response. Essentially, it includes a sentence identifying the passage as precisely as possible, followed by two or three sentences explaining its significance in relation to broader cultural events and other assigned texts.