American Studies Consortium

Re-enacting the Past:

Memory and Ritual in American

Culture and Society

Staff/Ph.D. Seminar

Thursday 19 and Friday 20 March 1998

Room 319, Building 326

Department of English, University of Aarhus

Program

Thursday 19 March

Required Preparatory Readings for Day One

Robert V. Wells, 'Taming the "King of Terrors": Ritual and Death in Schenectady, New York, 1844-1860,' Journal of Social History, 27 (1994), 717-734; Francis Robert Shor, Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America, 1888-1918 (1997), Chapter 7; Nathan Huggins, 'The Deforming Mirror of Truth' [1977], in his Revelations: American History, American Myths, ed. Brenda Smith Huggins (1995), 252-283.

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Friday 20 March

Required Preparatory Readings for Day Two

T.C. McLuhan, Dream Tracks: The Railroad and the American Indian, 1890-1930 (1985), 16-27; Rev. George P. Donehoo, 'The Soul of the Red Man: A Study,' The Red Man, 3, 8 (April, 1911) 317-322; D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (1934), 106-111; D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), 86-87; John Collier, On the Gleaming Way (1949, rpt. 1962), 26-31; Zit Kala-Sa, American Indian Stories (1921; rpt. 1979), 66-67; Luther Standing Bear, My People, The Sioux (1928), 140-145; Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (1933), 179-180; Carlisle School for Indians, selected documents; Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (1995), Chapter 2.

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The Speakers

Carl Pedersen

Carl Pedersen is Associate Professor of American Studies at Odense University, and the Conference Secretary for the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR). He has been a research fellow at both the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (1993) and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research (1996). His most recent publications include 'America's Others: The Uses of the Black Underclass and the New Immigrants,' in Hans Bak et al. (eds.),Social and Secure? Politics and Culture of the Welfare State: A Comparative Inquiry (1996), 'Sea Change: The Middle Passage and the Transatlantic Imagination,' in Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (eds.), The Black Columbiad (1994), and (as co-editor), Voices from the African-American Experience (1995). He is currently co-editing two volumes, Mapping African America and Transatlantic Passages.

Fran Shor

Francis Shor received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, having completed an undergraduate degree in History at the University of Pittsburg. He is presently an Associate Professor and Graduate Chair in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Wayne State University in Michigan. His recent interests have been focused on the history of radicalism and reform in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. In 1997 Greenwood Press published his Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America, 1888-1918.

Robert Wells

Robert V. Wells received his doctorate in American History from Princeton University, and is currently Professor of History at Union College, Schenectady, New York. During the 1997/1998 academic year he holds the Fulbright Chair in American Studies at the Center for American Studies, Odense University. His research and teaching interests focus on early American and demographic history, and he is currently working on American customs regarding death. Professor Wells is the author of five books, including Revolutions in Americans Lives and Uncle Sam's Family: Issues in and Perspectives on American Demographic History (1985).

Joel Pfister

Joel Pfister is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Wesleyan University and was previously lecturer in American Studies at Yale University. He has studied at Columbia University, the University of Sussex, the University of London, and Yale University. His writing has contributed to the formulation of a cultural history of emotional life in the United States and to the theoretical development of American cultural studies. He is the author of The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne's Fiction (1991) and Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (1995) and has co-edited Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (1997). He has also written articles on the relationship between American Studies and European cultural studies.

Elsebeth Hurup

Elsebeth Hurup graduated from the University of Aarhus in 1984 with an M.A. in English and History of Art. The author of Milk and Honey... (1985) and The Great Gatsby: En Analyse (1985), and editor of The Seventies: The Lost Decade (1996), she was Lecturer in Danish at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, between 1987 and 1989. More recently she has taught English language and American Studies at the universities of Aarhus and Odense. She is currently based at the Department of English, University of Aarhus, where she is working on representations of history in American film and television during the 1970s.

The illustration at the top of this page is of a Decoration Day postcard. Now known as Memorial Day, and celebrated on the Last Monday in May, Decoration Day was first proclaimed by General John Logan in May 1868. The event, in which graves were decorated with flowers, was intended to commemorate the sacrifice of both Union and Confederate soldiers in the Civil War, although the states of the former Confederacy held separate events until after World War 1. The illustration shows a one-armed veteran standing next to a cannon with a red rose wreath and a large flag. The poem at the bottom mentions the 'blue and the grey.'

The American Studies Consortium is grateful to the American Studies Center Aarhus and the Department of English, Aarhus University, for sponsoring this seminar

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