Dr.
J. Mark Souther
Class
Meetings:
MC411
MWF
Office
Hours:
RT 1904
MW
Phone: 687-3970
Email: m.souther@csuohio.edu
This
course considers the role of tourism in American society and culture from the
early nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. It emphasizes how historical memory
shapes tourist attractions and how tourism shapes local, regional, national,
racial, and ethnic identity. We
will examine Americans’ motives for choosing various destinations—retreat and
spiritual uplift, health and recreation, historical understanding, celebration
and commemoration, multicultural exoticism, and entertainment. We will also trace the development of
numerous tourist destinations, including seaside and mountain resorts, national
parks, natural springs, religious retreats, amusement parks and theme parks,
battlefields, living history museums, preserved or reinvented historic sites,
gambling and vice destinations, and urban entertainment districts.
Students should
expect a combination of slide-based lectures and class discussion every day.
In the spirit of the CSU history department's Social History and
the City initiative, when appropriate, we will explore examples of leisure
sites in Cleveland, Akron, and Northeast Ohio. On some days we may begin with
a short reading quiz. This means
that regular preparation and attendance are essential to students’ class participation
expectations. The course will
include a midterm and a final examination, as well as a course project.
Required
Texts
Jane
S. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from
(
John
Hannigan,
(London
and New York: Routledge, 1999)
Hal
K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century
American West
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998)
Marguerite
S. Shaffer, See
(
Jim
Weeks,
(
Assignments
Class
Participation:
20%
Class
participation is rooted in careful preparation for each class meeting. I assume that such preparation will
encourage active discussion in class.
This portion of the grade is calculated based on students’ performance on
multiple in-class quizzes taken at the beginning of class meetings. At the end of the semester, I will
determine class participation based on the average of quiz grades. I will drop the lowest quiz grade. No make-up quizzes will be given. Therefore, regular attendance and
preparation are essential.
Midterm: 25%
This
examination will cover all assigned readings and lectures through Week 6. The exam will consist of five short
identification terms (which students will choose from a list of eight terms) and
one short essay (which students will choose from two provided essay
topics). The short identification
section requires students to provide a definition as well as the significance of
each term to that week’s material.
It will comprise 40% of the examination grade. The essay is designed to encourage
analysis of one or more themes that run through multiple weeks’ material. It will comprise the remaining 60% of
the exam grade.
Final: 25%
This
examination will cover all assigned readings and lectures for the entire course
(except that the short identification terms will come exclusively from Weeks
7-15). The exam will consist of
eight terms (which students will choose from a list of twelve terms) and one
well-developed essay (which students will choose from two provided essay
topics). As with the midterm, the
short identification section constitutes 40% and the essay 60% of the exam
grade.
Paper: 30%
Each
student will prepare a ten-page paper (approx. 2,500 words) in which they
explore a site of tourism, recreation, and/or leisure in Cleveland, Akron,
or elsewhere in Northeast Ohio that corresponds to any of the types of attractions
covered in the course, using sources found in CSU Special Collections or the
Photographic Division of the Cleveland Public Library, supplemented by appropriate
books, newspaper articles, and other sources.
Students should consult at least one scholarly book or at least three
scholarly articles to help place local sites into their broader context.
As part of this project, students will select and digitize at least
six photos or other illustrations in Special Collections to incorporate into
their paper. These images will
become available on CSU's Cleveland Memory Project and will ultimately form
the foundation for a new history department based Web site called “Recreation,
Leisure, and Tourism in
Key Dates:
Fri., Feb. 6 Special Collections
orientation
Mon., Mar. 29
Submit digitized images
Mon., Apr. 5
Create Web pages together
Fri., May 7 Paper due
Graduate
Students
Graduate
students will prepare a 15- to 20-page essay in place of the 10-page essay
listed above and should begin with a brief exploration of the historiography of
American tourism before moving to the specific topic.
Academic
Integrity
Using
someone else’s ideas or phrasing and representing those ideas or phrasing as our
own, either on purpose or through carelessness, is a serious offense known as
plagiarism. “Ideas or phrasing” includes written or spoken material ranging from
whole papers and paragraphs to sentences and phrases. “Someone else” can mean a
professional source, such as a published writer or critic in a book, magazine,
encyclopedia, or journal; an electronic resource such as material we discover on
the World Wide Web; another student at our school or anywhere else; and a
paper-writing “service” (online or otherwise) which offers to sell written
papers for a fee.
Source:
Schedule
The
Industrial Revolution, Railroads, & the Discovery of
Nature
Sears,
Sacred Places, “Introduction” and
“‘Doing’
Rothman,
Devil’s Bargains,
50-80
Shaffer,
See
Weeks,
Sterngass,
First Resorts, “The Public Resort,” “The Commercialization of
No
Class on Mon., Feb. 16
Cocks,
Doing the Town, “An Individuality All
Its Own” and “The Noble Spectacle,”
143-203,
ECR
Glassberg,
Sense of History, “Celebrating the
City,” 61-85,
ECR
Mitchell,
All on a Mardi Gras Day,
“Northerners,” 82-95, ECR
Long,
“A Notorious Attraction,” in Starnes, Southern Journeys, 15-41,
ECR
Belasco,
Americans on the Road, “Itinerary,”
“Gypsying,” and “Cars vs. Trains,” 3-39,
ECR
Brown,
The Wild East, “Drive-In Wilderness,”
174-209, ECR
Rothman,
Devil’s Bargains, 143-167
Shaffer, See America First, 130-168, 221-260
Weeks,
Desmond,
Staging Tourism, 1-139
Historic
Preservation, Invented Pasts, & Heritage Tourism,
1920s-1950s
Yuhl,
“Rich and Tender Remembering,” in Brundage, Where These Memories
Grow,
227-248, ECR
Rothman,
Devil’s Bargains,
81-112
Hoelscher,
Heritage on Stage, “‘Swisscapes’ on
Rothman,
Devil’s Bargains,
287-370
Moore,
“The Ta’am of Tourism,” 193-212,
ECR
Friedman,
“The Luxury of Lapidus,” 1-9,
ECR
Wallace,
“Mickey Mouse History: Portraying
the Past at Disney World,” 33-57,
ECR
Week
11, April
Levenstein,
Seductive Journey, excerpts TBA,
ECR
Mon.,
Apr. 5 – Meet in Library Room 502 to create Web pages
Shannon
and Taylor, “Astride the
Journeys,
177-195, ECR
Eichstedt
& Small, Representations of
Slavery, “Segregated Knowledge” and
“Toward
Relative Incorporation,” 170-230, ECR
Hannigan,
Souther,
“Making ‘
Journeys,
114-137, ECR
Rothman,
Devil’s Bargains,
168-286
Handler
& Gable, The New History in an
Weeks,
Course
Project Due May 7
Final
Exam Friday, May 14,
1 Susan Smith,
An Example of a Footnote, First Usage in a Paper
(Cleveland: Fictitious Publishing
Company, 1996), 48. Also see,
The