"Ambitious" is, admittedly, a word I would choose to describe myself if I had to do one of those horrible icebreakers in a workplace team-building exercise.
But maybe I was a little too ambitious this time, trying to move states, begin a new job at an entirely new institution, prep several new courses, and write a regular Substack column about one of the said courses that was furthest outside my area of expertise.
Somewhere in the middle, I also adopted a poodle puppy from a rescue and became an Instagram stage mom (please follow Clover and like all of her posts, thank you).
I 100% dropped the ball on the Substack part. Whoops.
But that's ok - I survived the year, my students learned things, and I still have a lot to say about it all here.
The class
My Spring 2024 course "Go Burbs: Local Histories of Modern America" recently wrapped up at Bryn Mawr College, where I teach. I have renamed this Substack after the class because it is way better than what I had before - thanks, creative frenzy fall semester past self.
I will have more substantial posts chronicling what we did and what exciting local history stuff we delved into, but let me provide a small preview now to wipe the dust off this Substack.
Here is the course description below. This is a genre of writing that I particularly hate. Much like conference abstracts, you have to submit them much further in advance than when you actually begin to design the syllabus. So they always come out sounding incredibly generic and boring.
HIST 341: Go Burbs: Local Histories of Modern America
If "all politics is local," then so too is all history. This course takes a local approach to the history of the United States, focusing on the nearby Philadelphia suburbs as a microcosm of modern American society and culture. Paying particular attention to Delaware County, students will investigate local history and local cultural sites and integrate them into a broader historical context.
In practice, when designing the syllabus, I ultimately gave equal weight to Delco and the main line, as my concession to teaching at BMC and not, say, Swarthmore or Haverford.
Here is just a little sampler of the course content, below.
I will get into specifics in subsequent posts, reflecting on what worked and what I want to change or add.
Some topics we covered:
Who Built the Burbs?
Moving to the Suburbs
Buying the Suburban Dream
Civil Rights and the Suburbs
Suburban Housewives and the Feminine Mystique
The Keystone Swing State
From the War on Drugs to the Opioid Epidemic
Some cool people we met:
Paul Hewes, Acting Director of the Delaware County Historical Society
Neil Makhija, Montgomery County Board of Commissioners
Some books we read from, in no particular order (except alphabetical):
(Disclosure: these are Amazon affiliate links.)
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon & Schuster, 2000)
Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (Basic Books, 2012)
Drew Gilpin Faust, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury (Picador, 2023)
Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford UP, 1985)
Barbara Miller Lane, Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945-1965 (Princeton UP, 2015)
Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs (Princeton U Press, 2023)
Timothy Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics (Penn Press, 2018)
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (Basic Books, 1988)
John M. McLarnon, Ruling Suburbia: John J. McClure and the Republican Machine in Delaware County (U Delaware Press, 2003; out of print)
Christopher Mele, Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City (NYU Press, 2017) [about Chester, PA]
Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (U Chicago Press, 2004)
Initial Assessment
Overall, I think my foray into teaching local history was a success. Granted, I still have not received my course evaluations, so my students may have had different thoughts entirely! Their final projects were excellent across the board though, which is always a good sign.
I think they learned a lot, and I did too. I’m excited to write up some of those things and share further thoughts over the summer.
If you didn’t have Ruling Suburbia on your reading list I was going to tell you to add it for next time (if there is a next time.)
What a great concept for a course. I hope it inspires your students not to take their own home town’s histories for granted.