pushing ourselves to make connections over and over again

As we barrel toward the end of the semester, the students have a choice to read an excerpt from one of two books: Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance by Carla Kaplan or Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. While both titles seem odd for a course on the "nineteenth century city," here is where the tire really hits the road. In the same manner that the students are being pushed to see "emerging city life" in the physical space of Tuscaloosa, they will be challenged to do the same via these two readings. Along the way, they will return to ideas they have learned this semester.

Miss Anne in Harlem will open the door for them to return to the idea of the "public feminine," or the ways that women began to politically inhabit spaces outside the home. But this time they will do as much in the context of white women in Harlem in the opening decades of the 20th century.  Among the women who venture to this space to partake in the black arts scene are British heiress Nancy Cunard and ex-pat Sylvia Beach, who once owned Shakespeare & Company, a bookstore in Paris and published James Joyce' Ulysses.

Fast forward to Americanah, which finds a Nigerian female college student returning "home," but not before commenting on all that she heard, saw and experienced in America. Think of her as a counterpart of sorts to Frances Trollope, the Englishwoman who failed at opening a bazaar in antebellum Cincinnati, but did well at writing a book in 1832 about Americans' bad manners. 

In both books, race, class and gender are still before us. Why? It's worth thinking about why such a conversation matters because they inform how people inhabit the public space today. Also, both books should push us to wonder about what it really means to be "American" across time, or how does the American city differ from other non-U.S. cities that found the likes of Beach, Cunard and Trollope, but also Ifemelu, the well-traveled protagonist in Americanah.

As we turn to the last edit of our music video, we will ponder, too, how the rural space is never entirely left behind even in a world increasingly defined by urban life. Why?

I want see the students to keep pushing themselves to make linkages across time. Where do we see the city and the many things that announce urban life in the characters and real people in these two readings? Where do we see the  "city people" that Gunther Barth describes, ones who lived in the emerging urban space between 1830 and 1910, give or take a decade?

Finally, next week I am pleased to announce that Steve Davis, historian for Bryce Hospital, will visit our class. The students' earlier learned about Bryce Hospital after visiting the former site of the Kilgore House, which once housed Charles Kilgore, a Bryce engineer and his family. The house, which was demolished last year, was the site at the University of Alabama to house female students. How do we insert mental health into the story of a modernizing world? After learning about the nervous breakdown of U.S. geologist Clarence King in Martha Sandweiss' study in last week's reading, it will be great to have more context via Mr. Davis.