Birth of a Nation

First, let me just say how happy I was with the first three discussion questions that students posted for the first reading assignment. You should be paying attention to these postings, and in particular the three from yesterday as they each offer excellent themes for interpreting tonight's film, Birth of a Nation.

To remind all, I will screen the film tonight, Wednesday, January 28, in the Tupelo Room at Barnard Observatory. I will begin the film promptly at 8:00 PM. It is roughly 3 hours long. Those who have signed up to post discussion questions may do so tomorrow morning before we meet. Please post your observations below this blog post.

The Legacies of Reconstruction

The Civil War and, perhaps even more importantly, the postbellum struggle for social and political mastery had a profound impact upon the memory and identity of all southerners, whether black or white. It was key for the development of not only the Lost Cause and New South ideologies, but also sewed the seeds of twentieth-century black political activism.

Please post your discussion questions (for which as of 11:00 AM on Monday, I have not yet had anyone sign up!) below for Reading Assignment 1 (RA1).

Accessing the Podcasts

In order to access the seven podcast lectures for this course, you will need to either subscribe to them using a program like iTunes by pasting http://www.history.vt.edu/nystrom/lecture5.xml into the URL for a podcast, or you can listen to them in Mozilla Firefox by merely clicking on THIS LINK.

I recorded these in the Spring of 2007 while teaching at Virginia Tech, but the information pairs up well with what we are doing in the Spring of 2009 at Ole Miss. They are intended to contextualize the readings and serve as a basis point for discussion.

Welcome Back!

If you are just arriving at this weblog, you will want to take some time to explore. You will find on the sidebar to the right links to a course calendar with assignments, the syllabus, and the sign-up sheet for discussion questions (you will have to email me to get your name on this - it is not an online form, per se.) This blog will be important to your success in the class, so I suggest you either bookmark it or subscribe to it with an RSS reader. You will also have to be a registled blog user to post comments, which you will need to do in order to post assigned discussion questions. If you find this confusing, I'll be going over it in class on the first day. Be sure to be in attendance!