Course Descriptions | American & New England Studies

Woodsman driving pulpwood on the Kennebago River

ANE 600 Creating New England I

This required core course examines the development of New England regional identity from the 17th to the mid-19th century. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches and materials, the course focuses on how regional identity has been both historically grounded and culturally invented. Topics include: the invention of New England as a second England; the Yankee character; the New England town; the creation of regional traditions; and New England reform and cultural pluralism.

ANE 610 Creating New England II

The second part of the required core sequence, this course continues the examination of New England regional identity from the mid-19th century to the present. Topics include: the colonial revival; New England's working class and ethnic heritage; nostalgia; the regional revival of the 1920s and 30s; and regional identity and consumer culture.

ANE 612 Documenting America: Ethnography and Oral History

This course is an introduction to the practice, politics, and history of documentary field studies. It will focus on oral history and ethnography as both a method and as a particular genre of culture writing and representation. In class, students will explore various strategies and practices of ethnography, including travel writing, local color, anthropology, documentary film making, and oral history; students will grapple with contemporary issues that confront modern practices of "field work," such as cultural authority, displacement, marginalization, modes of cultural interpretation, stranger talk, insiders/outsiders, "wrong" stories and "true," etc. In the field, students will work with informants to record and interpret the cultures and histories of a particular place and people.

ANE 615 Folklore and Region

This course will begin by introducing students briefly to the study of folklore, particularly in a regional context, and to the identification and analysis of folkloric "texts" broadly conceived. It will then proceed topically, examining regional folk culture as it relates to various of the elements that help comprise a regional identity: history, economic activity as it is constrained by the region, and the natural and humanly shaped physical environment. Attention will also be paid to variations in regional folk culture according to gender, ethnicity, and class. Each topic will include an extended examination of an example from New England as well as materials from other regions of the country.

ANE 620 Regional Writing and the Sense of Place

This course focuses on New England literature of place including fictional, historical, poetic, and autobiographical writing. It examines the subjective experience of place and the cultural perception and use of space. The course explores how memory, experience and nostalgia connect individual and collective identity to place. It also offers some comparative perspectives on the sense of place in other American regions.

ANE 622 Food: History, Culture, Politics

This course will explore the history, culture and politics of food in America with a special emphasis on New England and regional differences. It will look at colonial food ways including diet, food theft, trade patterns, and regional diversity; nineteenth century health, sanitation, and temperance reforms; the rise of cooking schools, food writing, and regional cuisine; and contemporary issues such as fast and slow food, terminator seeds, organic farming, and the diet industry.

ANE 625 The West and the American Imagination

This course will focus on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century West as an historic and imagined place. We will examine the distinctive historical developments and natural forces that shaped the West as a region. At the same time we will discuss the important place of the West in the national imagination. Topics will include: the "new Western History"; women in the West; the multicultural West; the creation of the Plains Indians; the West in art and popular literature; Hollywood's West; and the tourist's West.

ANE 628 New England and the Sea

This course will examine the role of the sea in shaping New England society, culture, and thought. The course will focus on the "new maritime history;" literary and artistic responses to the sea; the economic importance of the sea for recreation and for the fishing industry; and efforts to preserve and interpret the region's maritime heritage.

ANE 629 Ethnicity in New England

This course explores the historic role of ethnicity in the formation of New England social life and cultural identity. Using a variety of texts and approaches, students will examine immigrant community life (including food-ways, housing, leisure, and work), constructions of "race" and "whiteness," and the relationship between ethnicity and regional identity.

ANE 630 The Culture of Consumption

Focusing on New England and the emergence of industrial society, this course will explore popular forms of leisure, pleasure, and consumer culture in 19th and 20th-century society. We will explore both popular writers such as P.T. Barnum and Edward Bellamy, as well as theorists as diverse as Thorstein Veblem and C. Wright Mills. Topics include: Victorian identity and consumption; the spa and the health club; rural peddlers; minstrels, burlesque, vaudeville, and melodrama; the rise of the department store; working-class style and the culture of wanting; advertising; the New England woman and the Newport belle; the tourist and the commodification of New England.

ANE 633 The Mapping of New England

A study of the history of construction and use of cartographic representations of New England and Maine, to the end of the 19th century. The basic theme running through the course is that of cartographic literacy and commercialism: who used the maps and for what purposes? The course is structured around those cartographic modes (specific combinations of geographic knowledge, technological practices, social institutions, and cultural expectations) which have been relevant for New England. The scope of the course will expand to address, when necessary, more general issues in European and North American cartographic history.

ANE 635 Art and New England Culture

This course will examine painting, prints, and photography from the 17th through the 19th centuries; it will focus on New England art and its place in American art history. Students will study style and subject matter and their relation to literature, thought and social history. Central to this course is the consideration of how region is "imaged" in the visual arts and how these images shape regional and national culture. Topics include "reading" colonial portraits; landscape painting and the commodification of nature; race, ethnicity and regional types; Winslow Homer and the masculinization of region; and imaging the New England woman at the turn of the century.

ANE 638 Reading the Cultural Landscape

This course will examine the New England and American human landscapes as texts which can be read to reveal cultural attitudes, values, priorities, and experiences. Emphasis will be on the analysis of ordinary landscapes of the sort which surround us every day. The course will focus on typical landscape "settings" or "compositions," not necessarily on individual components within those landscapes: that is, domestic or residential landscapes, commercial landscapes, industrial landscapes, civic landscapes, historic landscapes, and so on.

ANE 641 Environment and Culture

This course is an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which occupants of the North American continent, from the pre-contact period to the present, have conceived of and interacted with the natural environment. The history of human use of and attitudes toward the environment will be examined within a cultural context. Course materials will be drawn both from New England and from other regions of the country.

ANE 644 Twentieth-Century New England Politics

This course examines the politics of New England since 1900, with emphasis on conflicts among the distinct subcultures (White Anglo Saxon Protestant, European-American, and African-American) which have given the region's politics its particular flavor. Special attention will be given to two dramatic political events—the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the Boston busing controversy—in which these conflicts played a significant role.

ANE 648 Domestic Architecture and American Culture

This course will examine the physical form as well as the idea and image of "home" from the 17th through the 20th centuries. House designs and styles and their historic changes and diversity across class and geographic boundaries will be examined. Students will also analyze the idea of home in visual culture (paintings, prints, photography, popular illustration, film) and written texts (prose, architectural pattern books, advice books, magazines).

ANE 650 Women's Captivity Narrative

Traditions and Transformations (P5683). This course examines captivity narratives—stories of capture, redemption, and (occasionally) escape. While the majority of the texts represent captivities of European settlers and indigenous people, and of these, most will be women's accounts, the course will conclude with the transformations and appropriations of captivity conventions in nineteenth-century texts. In particular, the inquiry will examine the intersections of gender, authorship, and history through the figure of the captive-as-informant. The course will focus on this figure in order to investigate several topics: authorial impersonation, racial and ethnic difference, conditions and practices of historiography, the intersection of popular and elite texts, and archival research.

ANE 655 Historical Archaeology of New England

An examination of the role of historical archaeology in interpreting the past. Several important topics in regional contemporary historical archaeology will be examined including: exploration and settlement during the contact period, landscape research and reconstruction, ethnicity and social inequality, subsistence and food-ways, material culture studies, and the relationship between culture and consumption.

ANE 657 Language and Print Culture in America

This course will examine what various groups of Americans have been publishing and reading over time for purposes of education, edification and entertainment, as well as the larger linguistic text in which those books have been produced. We will focus on questions of both the history of American English and the history of the book in America, while also examining the specific nature of print as a medium of communication.

ANE 658 Visual Culture of 20th-Century America

This course will look at the production and explosion of visual images in 20th-century America. Students will examine varied image types (advertising, film, painting, prints, photography, public art, television, and video) and how these images shape knowledge, experience, and culture. Topics include the spectacle of city; images that sell; the meanings of abstract art; and documentary photography and surveillance.

ANES 660: New England Autobiography

This course examines 19th- and 20th-century New England autobiography; it focuses on works that illuminate aspects of regional experience. The readings represent diverse forms of autobiographical expression as well as essays that introduce contemporary approaches to the study of autobiography. The course emphasizes a historical-cultural reading of autobiography, relating issues of style, self-representation, the life cycle, gender, class, ethnicity and place to particular historical contexts and cultural needs.

ANE 665 Sex in New England

This course will explore changes in the meaning and place of sexuality in American life and in the shaping of New England's identity and culture. Exploring primary and secondary sources, we will look at Puritan family life (and not so "puritanical" sexual behaviors), the sexual politics of witchcraft, divorce in colonial society, Utopian free love campaigns, same-sex intimacy and the conjoined emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality, gay urban culture, the Boston marriage and the female world of love and ritual, commercialized sex and antiprostitution activity, rural vice campaigns, youth culture, literary sexology, the sexual revolution, and contemporary sexual politics.

ANE 668 Writers of Northern New England

This course focuses on literature about the subregion that Robert Frost referred to as "North of Boston." The course will examine writers who root their work in the landscape, culture, and history of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Considerable attention will be devoted to contemporary writing.

ANE 670 Museums and Public Culture

This course will examine the role of museums, preservationists, and collectors in shaping cultural identities and public memories in 19th- and 20th-century America. Topics will include: ethnographic collections and displays, fine arts museums and patrons, traditions of human display (such as 19th-century "freak shows"), history, anthropological and natural history museums, festivals, living history sites, and the narrative role of collections, artifacts, and museum design.

ANE 675 Workshop in Research and Writing

This course explores various modes of critical writing as they relate to contemporary practices and debates in American Studies. It is run as a collaborative workshop; students will read and comment on drafts of each other's papers as a central element of the process of revision. By semester's end, students will have produced an extensive research paper or a thesis chapter. This course is required for students writing a thesis or project, but is also open to all students who have completed at least 15 hours of course work. Prerequisite: 15 credits completed in the ANES Program, including ANE 600 and ANE 610. Students working on a thesis or project are strongly advised to have a proposal ready for submission to the ANES Curriculum Committee during the previous semester.

ANE 685 Reading and Research

Open to advanced students with exceptional records in the program, this course offers opportunities for reading and research under the direction of a faculty member. The approval of the ANES Curriculum Committee is required. This course may be taken only once.

ANE 687 Internship

Open to qualified students with exceptional records in the program; required for students in the Public Culture and History track. Internships are by application to the ANES Curriculum Committee. Participating organizations include: Portland Museum of Art, Old York Historical Society, Pejepscot Historical Society, and Maine Historical Society.

ANE 690 Project

Completion of a two-semester project that may be an independent project or that may combine independent study and work in a historical society, a museum, a cultural organization, or other public or private institution. In consultation with an advisor, the student defines and develops the project in relation to his or her particular interest in American and New England Studies.

ANE 695 Thesis

The product of original research, the thesis should embody an interdisciplinary combination of approaches and/or materials.

PPM Muskie School Course Descriptions

For students in the Public History and Culture Track, see the Muskie School of Public Service's course descriptions in non-profit management.