Summer Institute for International Professors and Scholars in American Studies

During the academic residency component, each week will include lectures on human movement along a major waterway and the social and cultural development that followed and became important in American history. Lectures will move over space from the East Coast to the West and over time from early migrations and colonial unrest to current debates concerning gender, race, ethnicity, and class. In addition, each week will include a special focus on an institution that originated in a riverine or coastal area and that evolved to meet national needs: the U.S. Constitution, Chicago politics and economy, the University of Mississippi and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and global culture and education in California.

The Institute's first week, "The Atlantic Waterways to North America," treats, first, the development of a colonial population comprising Indians, Europeans, and Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, second, the political, religious, and literary forms that arose within that population. Europeans were not the world's first skilled maritime navigators, but they were the first to possess both the ability to move settlers back and forth across an ocean and the urge to resettle part of their population. The Spanish, Dutch, French, and English all settled in North America, but each with different intentions and results. Participants in the Summer Institute will learn about the various motives and means of settlement as well as settlers' various ways of relating to Indians and of procuring adequate labor in lands that to Europeans seemed open and rich but devoid of sufficient laborers. Indians suffered greatly from disease and abuse and Africans soon came by sea to provide labor in many areas of North America, yet Europeans themselves bore heavy burdens of labor indentures and disease-induced mortality. Students should also learn that historical events have meaning not only in themselves but in a larger system: European settlement affected Indians everywhere, the slave trade affected African population for more than 200 years, and the American colonies were crucial to Europe. Waterways led to a rural economy, later praised as "agrarian," in the Southern colonies, as tobacco floated down rivers to the Atlantic for shipment to European ports. Waterways led to urban sites in the Northern colonies as cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York funneled goods between European ships and American farms. Northern port cities also attracted the greatest variety of free men and women of European or African background, since the ports offered both work and the possibility of even a small community of people all of similar background.

Drawing from our first week of study, participants will be able to explain to their students that from the rural, riverine Southern counties and the urban, maritime North‹in great measure out of a clash between these two forms of American culture‹arose some of the most conspicuous elements of American culture. The American Revolution, in the Northern port cities, had an urban face expressing the dissatisfaction of artisans and people who wanted a greater say in politics, but it also had, in the Southern colonies, an agrarian face expressing the sanctity of property (including slaves) and the necessity of gentlemanly, orderly politics. The Constitution, with the Bill of Rights, was in some ways a melding of these two faces of the Revolution and proved to be an enduring means of balancing different interests in society and politics. The failure of British colonies in the West Indies to join the Revolution can be explained in part by their extreme dependence on maritime trade and their lack of hinterlands to attract free, white men. Reform movements like abolitionism were articulated on rivers and seas. Black mariners carried information to slaves about the possibilities of freedom, work, and dignity in different parts of the Atlantic world. Frederick Douglass had a striking vision of freedom as he gazed at the Chesapeake Bay, he escaped on a boat, and he sought work on docks in Massachusetts. Intent on making waterways their own, slaves saw the path to freedom in rivers and seas. Moreover, many white abolitionists lived in port cities, where a cosmopolitan view of the Atlantic world at once made evident the evils of the slave trade and suggested the value of freedom. Early American education was also conditioned by waterways, as the scattered Southerners dismissed Jeffersonian plans to provide public schooling, while urban Northerners fought the first American battles over integrated public schools as children of the port cities' black communities fostered in port cities first attended "charity" schools and later were allowed, after great protest, to attend tax-supported schools. Improvements in waterways and commercial uses of waterways were contentious issues in early-national politics that were carried over into courts and the voting booth.

Participants will learn, too, the ways in which waterways came to figure in the arts: James Fenimore Cooper saw the excesses of his society at work along the Hudson River, yet painter Thomas Cole saw religious meaning revealed along there; Henry David Thoreau saw water as symbolic of purity and knowledge, yet Herman Melville saw the killing of whalers and sailors in American enterprises at sea. Finally, in this week, participants will learn how to relate to the great Atlantic migrations of the nineteenth century (Irish, German, Jewish) to earlier ocean crossings and the growth of great port cities (Boston, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans). This first week will include orientations to the WMU campus, library, and computer facilities.

The Institute's second week, "The Great Lakes and Northern Passages into the American Heartland," allows for the consideration of local environmental, political, economic, social, and educational issues. Kalamazoo is a city built along a river and, as such, grew economically through the lumber industry that evolved into the manufacture of paper, an industry that, though lucrative, led to the despoliation of the river (Western Michigan University's College of Paper Technology is the major national training ground for the paper industry). Teachers will look at the history of Kalamazoo, from its indigenous Potawatomi Tribal culture (whose word for boiling pot was "kalamazoo," signifying the rising of mist from the river in the morning), through the explorations of the French voyagers from Canada, and the arrival of Europeans in the early nineteenth century. The city was "founded" in the 1830s as a European settlement town and has defined itself over the last century and a half as a blending of European (notably Dutch and later also Latvian), African, and Indigenous American cultures. The seminar will include visits to the city and travel on the river, allowing participants to come to know the region, the history of the movement and merging of immigrant groups, the efforts to adapt to the post-industrial economy of the late twentieth century, and the local movement to restore the natural beauty and health of the river. We will also read fiction and poetry of the region: Cooper's description of Kalamazoo County in Oak Openings, Caroline Kirkland's appeal to women in A New Home‹Who'll Follow?, as well as Carl Sandburg's poem "The Sins of Kalamazoo," and Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River" about fishing in lower Michigan.

Beyond the local riverine culture, the seminar will focus on the Great Lakes Region, a maritime environment influenced and framed by an area containing one-fifth of the world's fresh water supply. In recent years historians, archaeologists, folklorists, and geographers have turned their attention to the realms, communities, vessels, shipping, navigation, and resources of the Great Lakes. Maritime environments, whether they are defined or examined locally, regionally, or nationally, imply movement of many kinds. In this regard, the maritime history of the Great Lakes is most poignantly revealed in terms of inextricable interactions with natural environments, within and between locales and regions, and, given the rise of a national economy, with America's East and West Coasts. Institute participants will establish reference points for understanding the history of midwestern maritime consciousness, and, at the same time, acquire a rigorous methodology and interpretive perspective for locally- and regionally based maritime history. Midwestern consciousness was not solely informed by the large bodies of water known as the "inland seas" or "sweet seas," but by rivers, lakes, and canals that were proximate to them. Within this framework, teachers will explore the elements of nature, intercultural contact, resource extraction, commodity movement, technology, and material life that defined and expressed the social, cultural, and environmental sensibility of the region and its specific locales. We will look especially at Chicago and Detroit as representative cities that developed industrial economies and societies and, in the late twentieth century, became sites of conflict as those industries dried up.

The Institute's third week, "Mississippi Passages between North and South," treats, first, the use of the Mississippi River in settlement, economic development, and nation-building and, second, the ways typically American forms of music, literature, politics, and race relations developed along the river and traveled along its course. In some ways, these American forms developed because of the river. Probably the first city on the Mississippi was Cahokia, a settlement of native Americans who built great earthworks and traded on the river but who dispersed before their mounds were found by the French in the seventeenth century. Participants will learn about the complexity of some native American societies as well as about the debate among scholars over the numbers of indigenous people at the time of European incursion. French and English settlers, farming along the river, made it into an avenue of intercontinental commerce. Moreover, participants will also learn about the evolution of the Mississippi from a colonists' river into a nation's waterway. Beginning in the antebellum era, Americans learned how to control the river's flow and used points along its banks like St. Louis as "gateways" between the east and the west‹passages for people and goods. The Mississippi played a crucial role in the growth of Southern agriculture and the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth century as steamboats carried cotton and other staples from field to market. Moreover, native American land with access to rivers like the Mississippi and the Tennessee became the object of white speculators in the antebellum years as Indian removal policies led to the forced migration of the Chocktaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee. Both native Americans and some white groups like the Mormons fled across the Mississippi to escape disastrous circumstances in the east. The Mississippi, along with the Missouri, became an instrument of nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny as New Orleans and Fort Leavenworth became the sources for attacks on the Mexicans in the 1840s.

With a sense of the ecological and economic history of the Mississippi, Institute participants will be able to present to their students the dynamics of cultural flow along the river. A persistent problem in American society can be seen in the different paths of St. Louis and East St. Louis, the former became the vibrant "gateway to the West," while the latter, which could have been its sister city across the river, became a poorer place disproportionately inhabited by minorities. Yet the river has inspired American visions: Abraham Lincoln saw in the river a symbol of both the separation and the unity of the USA, Mark Twain immortalized the Mississippi in travel narratives that seek to journey also into the American heart, and runaway slaves followed the river north just as after the Reconstruction free blacks followed it north to escape from poverty and racism in the South. As a passage for popular music, the Mississippi has few peers, whether it appears in Paul Robeson's "Ol' Man River," John Hurt's adopted name, or the delta blues carried into the cities by musicians like Muddy Waters and Big Mama Thornton. The great flood of the Mississippi in 1927 was remembered in many blues songs, such as John Lee Hooker's elegy to a small town washed away by the waters. New Orleans, St. Louis, and Chicago have all provided stages for some of the greatest American music. Participants should then appreciate the ways in which economic and cultural development led to civil rights efforts by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other groups working on the Mississippi Delta and to agitation over the integration of the University of Mississippi in the 1960s. We see a continuation of tumultuous relations between different races along the Mississippi in the 1990s in the effort to obliterate the names of slave-holders like George Washington from public school-buildings. Yet we see also in the 1990s at the University of Mississippi the nation's leading institution in understanding an American region as the product of interracial interaction: the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Through discussion and through reading of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, participants will learn how this center has advanced national self-understanding in the United States.

The Institute's fourth week, "Pacific Shores or Pacific Rim?," focuses first on the complex history of migration and settlement of the Pacific Coast, and second, on the continuing cultural importance of the region for the nation at large. Students should understand that from prehistory the Pacific Ocean has been a busy highway, bringing people first from Asia and then from the rest of the world to what is now the Pacific Coast of the United States. Many ancient creation stories, for example, tell of how the native peoples of the Americas arrived here from islands beyond the western ocean. Moreover, continued intensive interaction with the Pacific led to the development of distinctive maritime cultures all along the American Pacific Coast, ranging from the Tlingit in Alaska to the Chumash of Southern California. Much later, the ocean currents brought Spanish settlement from Mexico and Russian settlement from Siberia, setting off European competition for this strategic region. As the gateway to Asia and Asian markets, the Pacific Coast eventually attracted the interest of England and the United States as well. Using the inland waterways of the Far West, especially the Columbia River, the Lewis and Clark expedition forged an overland link between the eastern United States and the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century. It was not until the middle of that century, however, when the California Gold Rush inspired massive numbers of U.S. citizens to travel "around the Horn," that the United States secured political control over much of the region. The subsequent commercial exploitation of the West stimulated yet another Pacific migration, that of the Chinese and Japanese, who, among other things, brought a new religious diversity to the American Far West. Ultimately, however, Asian immigration ran into a backlash of political fears and cultural anxiety on the part of European Americans. Free immigration was curtailed, and while America expanded across the Pacific into Asia, Americans in the West have ever since tried to hold the line against what they perceive as "foreign" expansionism into America.

In addition to this background, Institute participants should also be able to introduce their students to the special, if contradictory, place the region has had in the American imagination. For Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, the sea journey to California represented an escape from the oppressive antebellum America East into the relative freedom of the Hispanic West. For Mary Austin, the author of The Land of Little Rain, a similar journey represented a flight to a different kind of freedom---freedom from the constraining gender roles of Victorian America. And yet for still others, such as the poet Robinson Jeffers, the Pacific West was "continent's end," and thus a metaphor for the exhaustion of humanity and the necessity for a radical re-orientation towards the "transhuman magnificence" of nature. Most Americans, however, saw the Pacific Coast simply as "the nation's other shore," the culmination and capstone of America's Manifest Destiny. For this reason, the American Pacific Coast has become symbolic of both the worst and the best possibilities for America at large. This is especially true as the region experiences a renewal of large-scale Hispanic and Asian migration. Participants will therefore come to understand why issues related to education in California---issues such as bilingualism and Affirmative Action---have become so bitterly divisive, contributing to increased racial and ethnic polarization not only in the West, but in the nation at large. Conversely, participants will also investigate how some Pacific port cities such as Los Angeles have taken globalization seriously and have sought to develop civic models that will allow all Americans to meet the challenges of living and working in a world where the distinctions "domestic" and "overseas" have largely become meaningless.

Previous section
Next section