To: General Education Course Development Grant Competition Committee,

Office of the Provost

 

From:  Mary Cygan, Associate Professor, History, Stamford Campus

 

e-mail: cygan@uconn.edu 

voice: 203-251-8426 or 203-329-8773

 

 

Course Proposal

 

Working title: Religion in the United States: Historical Approaches

 

Relation to General Education Requirements:

 

     This course will be a 200 level "W" course open to sophomores.  I am designing  this course to meet a distribution requirement for the History Major and  will also submit it for approval for the American Studies Major.  Since the only prerequisite for the course will be English 110/111, students with undeclared majors and BGS students will be encouraged to enroll. The comparative themes and the attention to multiple voices in the final syllabus will satisfy the requirements for the Diversity Group in the new General Education requirements.

 

Course Themes:

 

    This course will challenge students to think critically about religion by introducing them to the ways historians study it. The reading and writing assignments will teach students to distinguish different types of sources (not only primary and secondary sources, but peer-reviewed and journalistic sources, as well as prescriptive and descriptive sources).  The assignments will help students be more sophisticated about identifying multiple points of view and sorting out different notions of "truth:" as scholars' conclusions supported by empirical evidence, as first-person narratives detailing subjective experience, or as codified dogma defined by religious authorities. Students should come away understanding how to historicize religion: how to locate certain concepts, institutions, and cultural traditions in a specific time and place. 

 

    I will divide the semester into four modules: America in the late eighteenth century, in the mid-nineteenth century, at the end of World War I, and at the turn of the millennium.  Each module will include two or three lectures establishing basic political, economic and cultural concerns of that era and the readings will compare the ways adherents of several religions responded to those conditions.  For example, the late eighteenth century module could consider questions such as: how did the Enlightenment affect Calvinists, Quakers, Anglicans and Catholics?  How did contact with Christians influence an Iroquois movement to revive and purify earlier traditions? How did African Americans select from Christian traditions to fashion a New World Christianity?  The mid-nineteenth century module could consider how the question of abolition split congregations in the North and South as well as how Irish and German Catholics and German Jews adjusted to nativist politics of  the 1850s. The third module might consider how early twentieth century racial theories affected relations between new immigrants (such as Russian Jews and Catholic Poles) and the Jews and Catholics from Northern Europe who had already established religious institutions in the United States during the previous fifty years. The legacy of  late nineteenth century Protestant proselytizing among West Coast Filipino, Japanese, Korean and Chinese communities as well as Protestant missions among Southwest and California Native Americans might be compared to early twentieth century African American urban congregations.  The last module would consider how Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu immigrants arriving in the late twentieth century have organized themselves into new congregations. This module could review how scholars have hypothesized connections between entrepreneurial activity and certain religious beliefs in previous centuries and consider how useful these theories are for understanding late twentieth century  evangelical  congregations emerging in Caribbean and Central American neighborhoods in the United States as well as evolving religious views among immigrants from Asia and the Middle East.  In this last module, interviews conducted by students in the course might also supplement the written primary sources.

Evaluation of Student Mastery of Skills and Course Themes

 

   Students will write three five-page essays.  All students will be required to write essays during the first and last modules and may pick one essay topic from either the second or third module.

 

    In each module, students will work in groups of three or four with each group focusing on a specific religion in the time period under discussion.   Each group will receive a packet of primary sources concerning that religion and several secondary sources discussing that religion's connection to larger trends of the time period. The students will write five-page essays measuring the primary sources against the scholarship on the religion.  Each essay will consider a different perspective found in the primary source packet.  One student might look at the religion's own official texts (the prescriptive literature); another might try to understand conflicting views among adherents from different ethnicities, classes or genders; and a third might try to distill the impression of the religion held by contemporaries viewing it from outside (journalists, reformers or neighbors).  All the students in the group would be required to summarize the secondary literature in the packet, but in a way that selects for insights relevant to the point of view that student has chosen to explore (official church hierarchy, the grassroots experience or the outsider viewpoint) in the primary sources. 

 

   Having students in each group peer-review each others essays before revision should reinforce two important skills for advanced writing in the liberal arts.  First, a chronic problem in lower-division courses is students' tendency to fill space with passive, unfocused summary often drifting into unacknowledged paraphrase. By reading each other's essays, students should see how summaries should support specific questions, that it is an intellectual task requiring careful selection. Secondly, identifying and presenting multiple points of view is a crucial skill for advanced writing in the humanities and social sciences. Students should be able to see how their separate essays (each concerned with a particular point of view) if taken together can anticipate a longer essay incorporating multiple points of view.

 

 

Activities to be undertaken during the grant period

 

   I would use the time provided by this grant to read more widely in the recent scholarship in this field (including new studies by historians, anthropologists, folklorists and sociologists) and to identify appropriate primary sources for the writing assignments.

 

 

 

 

 

   Thank you for your kind encouragement.    

 

1) I’m glad to have more room to elaborate on the activities to be undertaken during the grant:

 

   Though I am familiar with the historical literature on religion and European immigrants in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, this course will require me to broaden my understanding of earlier eras and cultures. To do this, I will survey new dissertations (as noted in dissertation abstracts) and monographs, and read relevant articles in journals such as:  American Indian Religions, Church History, Ethnohistory, Folklore Studies, History of Religions, Journal of Law and Religion, Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Religion, Latin America Research Review, North Star, A Journal of African American Religious History, and Religion and American Culture.  I will also search for relevant publications in related fields such as anthropology, sociology and literature through Project Muse and JSTOR.  I will search these publications not only to deepen my understanding of the topics I described for each of the four modules in my proposed syllabus, but to identify fresh primary sources for the writing assignments.

 

    I plan to work with Shelley Roseman, the reference librarian for history at the Stamford Campus, to obtain print copies of select primary sources cited in new scholarship on American religion that may not be available in digitized form (by contacting the cited archives and/or the authors) and resolving copyright issues for use in the course packets.  I will also work with Shelley Roseman to develop a comprehensive list of relevant primary sources that are already available in digital form (through such databases as the Making of America primary source bank  (4 million pages for US history) at Cornell University and other databases indexed by the American Library Association.

 

 

2) The course objectives that were scattered through the proposal are gathered here in a bullet point format:

 

Course objectives -- In this course, students should learn:

 

  • to think critically about religion; in particular to historicize religion (to locate concepts, institutions, and cultural traditions in a specific time and place and to hypothesize connections between changes in religion and economic, political and intellectual changes in the broader society)

 

  • to gain insight into the kinds of questions historians ask about religion
    • to frame appropriate questions for primary and secondary sources
    • to appreciate the difference between peer-reviewed and journalistic sources
    • to understand the difference between prescriptive and descriptive sources

 

  • to identify and describe multiple points of view

 

  • to recognize different notions of truth that appear in scholarship on religion
    • truth as empirically determined
    • truth as subjective experience
    • truth as (understood by historical persons to be ) codified in dogma

 

·         to appreciate the task of periodizing United States history by working with four major periods: the late eighteenth century, the mid-nineteenth century,  the end of World War I, and  the turn of the millennium

 

·         to craft a summary of  secondary literature that is focused on a specific problem and that avoids simple paraphrase

 

·         to critique the writing of others