Professor Max Cavitch Books:
Course Description:
Note:
Week 1
Jan 7: Introduction.
Jan 9: Read the first third of Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (approximately through page 80) and the
handout of various charts and data.
Recitation Jan 11: Read the second third of Journal of the Plague
Year (at least through page 160). Assignment: Please bring a list of 5
different kinds of contagion (aside from the plague itself) that occur in these pages
and list page numbers where these occur.
Week 2
Jan 14: Finish Defoe, and read through the two small selections on the Plague and the Fire in
Samuel Pepys's Diary. Read also the handout that contains pictures of London before and after the
fire, and the handout containing Wren's, Evelyn's and Hook's plans to rebuild London.
Jan 16: Read William Penn, "Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in
America" (photocopy); Preface to the first "Frame of Government" (photocopy and
on-line -- click here for a facsimile of the first page of the document); --, Letter
to the
Free Society of Traders (photocopy); Thomas Holmes, Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia" (photocopy and on-line);
Benjamin West, William Penn's Treaty with the Indians (on-line).
Recitation Jan 18: Bring in your maps of the City of London, Wren's plan to
rebuild London, and Thomas Holmes, Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia" (photocopy and
on-line). Writing Assignment Due: Please write a 1-2 page
essay analyzing the Penn Philadelphia city plan in relation to the actual
maps of the City of London as it was built after the fire. Given your
reading of Defoe and Pepys and your own interpretation of Wren's and
Penn's plans, what urban problems is Penn seeking to solve? To what
degree (in your opinion) does he relate aesthetic beauty and symmetry
with other desirable civic traits? Why was it possible to fulfill the
Philadelphia plan in ways that it was not possible to fulfill the London
one?
Week 3
Jan 21: No Class. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Jan 23: Read Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, pp. 3-85. .
Jan 25: Independent Excursion to Independence Hall (on your own). Click
HERE for the assignment (due Jan 28).
Week 4
Jan 28: Read Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, pp. 85-191, and
view Benjamin West, Franklin
Drawing Electricity from the Sky
(on-line).
Jan 30: Read Benjamin Franklin, "The Way to Wealth" (in our Penguin
Franklin, pp. 215-225); also review in the Autobiography pp.
116-21 (on George Whitefield); George Whitefield, "The Pharisee and the
Publican" (photocopy and on-line); John Wollaston, George Whitefield
[Attitude of Preaching] (on-line); "Dr. Squintum's Exaltation; or,
The Reformation" (on-line); Phillis Wheatley, "On the Death of the
Reverend George Whitefield" (photocopy). Finally, take a look at the
original woodcut from original broadside version of Wheatley's elegy for
Whitefield (on line).
Recitation Feb 1: Discussion on Franklin, Whitefield, and
Wheatley. Assignment: From the short list of topics we will hand
to you, write 2 one-page sermons on the same topic, one written from a
Whitefield-Calvinist perspective and one written from a
Franklin-Capitalist perspective. In class, be prepared to perform at
least one of your sermons with gusto.
Week 5
Feb 4: Read Adam
Smith, Theory of Moral
Sentiments (selections in photocopy), and William Wordsworth,
"Sonnet on
Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress."
Feb 6: Read Adam
Smith, The Wealth of
Nations (selections
in photocopy).
Recitation Feb 8: Read the Declaration of
Independence and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, The Social
Contract (selections in photocopy). You may want to begin reading Olaudah Equiano's
Interesting Narrative for next week as well.
Week 6
Feb 11: Begin Olaudah Equiano's
Interesting Narrative,
pp. 1-144.
Feb 13: Finish Equiano,
pp. 145-236.
Recitation Feb 15: Equiano and Kopytoff. Read Igor
Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process"
(photocopy).
Week 7
Feb 18: Read Matthew Carey, selections from A Short Account of the
Malignant Fever (photocopy); Absalom Jones & Richard Allen,
Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People (photocopy); and
William Neill, selections from Plagues and Peoples (photocopy).
Feb 20: Charles Brockden Brown, from Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of
the Year 1793 (photocopy); John Edgar Wideman, "Fever" (photocopy).
Due February 22: Assignment: Visit Washington Square and its
surroundings to get the lay of the land. In the voice of the historical
persona you've been assigned, write a two-page (600-word) essay or letter
using the following guidelines: It's a late summer morning in 1793.
You're standing in front of the Walnut Street Jail at 6th and Walnut
Streets. Someone passes by staggering and drops unconscious at your feet.
From physical signs on his body, you're pretty sure he's got the fever.
What do you do? What else happens to you during the rest of the day and
night? It's the next morning: where are you now? Who are you with?
Wherever you are, you find you've got an hour or two to record your
experiences of the previous 24 hours. Perhaps you write a letter to a
friend, or an article for a newspaper, or an entry in your diary; or, if
your persona is illiterate, you tell the story to a stranger and he or
she transcribes what you say. Whatever form it takes, your response to
this assignment should be vivid, detailed, historically informed, and
above all consistent with your assigned persona.
Recitation Feb 22: We'll spend this session talking about the
week's reading and what you wrote.
Week 8
Feb 25: Midterm Examination.
Feb 27: Read from William Godwin, Caleb Williams (ch. 11-14,
photocopy), and from Charles Dickens, American Notes and General
Reflections (ch. 7, photocopy). Read Michel Foucault, "Panopticism"
(photocopy).
Mar 1: Class Fieldtrip: We will be going to Eastern State Penitentiary as a
group. Please be prepared to discuss this week's readings while we're there on site (in
other words, bring your texts). We will meet our bus at 36th and Spruce streets at 1:00
p.m.; the bus will be parked on the south side of Spruce. We'll arrive at ESP around
1:30 or 1:45; the tour should be over by 2:45 or 3:00 p.m. The bus will then take us
back to Penn. Eastern State Penitentiary is located at 2124 Fairmont Ave.
Week 9
Mar 4: Read William Wordsworth, "Composed on Westminster Bridge, 1802"
(photocopy) and The Prelude, Book VII ("Residence in London";
photocopy). Begin Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium
Eater, pp. 29-69. Recommended: Porter, London: A Social History,
Chapter 8.
Mar 6: Read Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd"
(photocopy), and De Quincey, pp. 70-116.
Mar 8: No class.
March 9 through March 17-Spring break.
Week 10
Mar 18: Fanny Kemble, Journals, pp. 22-97.
Mar 20: Fanny Kemble, Journals, pp. 98-201.
Recitation Mar 22: We will be meeting with one of the reference
librarians in the Van Pelt Library to give you an introduction to conducting
research. Details to be announced.
Week 11
Mar 25: Read William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (photocopy),
and the materials on the 1854 Cholera Epidemic
in London (photocopy).
Mar 27: Continue with materials on the 1854 Cholera Epidemic.
Mar 29: Excursion to the Mutter Museum.
Week 12
Apr 1: Read Henry "Box" Brown, from Narrative of Henry Box
Brown (photocopy). Have a look on-line at the image of Henry "Box"
Brown arriving in Philadelphia in his crate.
Apr 3: William Wells Brown, St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and Its
Patriots (photocopy).
April 5: On this day, instead of a recitation, we will be meeting
with you about your long essays. For this meeting, please bring a one-page
prospectus of your essay project and a preliminary bibliography (at
least 2 primary and 2-3 secondary sources).
Week 13
Apr 8: Please read the materials in photocopy and on-line about the
London Great Exhibition of 1851.
Apr 10: Please read the materials in photocopy and on-line about the
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.
Apr 12: No class. We will again meet with you about your Long
Essay Assignment. Annotated Bibliography Assignment Due.
Week 14
Apr 15: Concluding Remarks and evaluations.
Apr 17: Review and final questions.
Apr 19: Final Exam.
Apr 26: Final Essay Due.
Attendance and Participation:
Assignments:
Essay Specifications
Exams:
Graded Work:
Academic integrity:
Professor Michael Gamer
Teaching Assistant: Dahlia Porter
Professor Cavitch's Office Hours: Tuesday 2:30-4:30
Professor Gamer's Office Hours: M 2-4
Dahlia Porter's Office: 4th Floor Bennett Hall, cubicle A3
Dahlia Porter's Office Hours: T 12-1:30, Th 3-4, F 11:30-1
Class Meets: MW 1-2, Williams 29; F: 1-3 Neil 309 and Williams 421.
Course Homepage:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/Undergrad/Courses/Spring02/traffic
Syllabus URL:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/Undergrad/Courses/Spring02/traffic/syllabus.html.
Course listserv address: COLL004-301-02A@LISTS.UPENN.EDU
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, London and Philadelphia were
international centers of activity in the arts, civic planning, education,
religion, and science. They were also two of the most important cultural
exchange-points along the Atlantic rim, linking Europe, Africa, and the
Americas in what is now commonly called the "transatlantic world." People
of all sorts traveled to and from London and Philadelphia--sometimes on
ships, sometimes by staying at home and poring over books, maps,
paintings, and curiosities that made the journey for them. They were
participants in a complex "traffic" that flooded the transatlantic world
with new people, new objects, and new ideas. This new, mobile world was
for some, like Benjamin Franklin, a place of apparently unfettered
possibility. Others, like Olaudah Equiano, were dragged into it in
chains. Diverse cultural forms and institutions had to be developed to
reflect, shape, and manage their experiences. In the process, the modern
city and the modern world came of age, for better and for worse. We'll
begin our exploration of this world in the 1660s, when plague and fire
made London into a nightmare scene of urban life, before moving on to see
how London was subsequently reimagined and transformed alongside the
emergence of Philadelphia, founded in the 1680s as part of the new
British colony of Pennsylvania. The course will take us up to the end of
the 19th century, when the United States was poised to replace Great
Britain as the world's chief imperial power. Philadelphia anticipated
that national ascendance in 1876 with an enormous Centennial
Exhibition--one of the most extravagant cultural events of its time
(recalling London's Great Exhibition of 1851), and a vantage point from
which we might look forward to the post-imperial, globalist era we're
living in now.
For the readings below, where you see that a text or image is
available on line, please go to the electronic version of the syllabus,
where the links are provided.
Course Calendar
Unit One: Plague, Fire and the New World City
Unit 2: Philadelphia and Transatlantic Culture
Unit 3: Circulation, Transport, and the Commodity
Unit 4: The Limits of Urban Enlightenment
Unit 5: Tripping
Unit 6: Reform Movements
Unit 7: Imperial Traffic: The Great Exhibition and the
Centennial Exposition
COURSE POLICIES:
As this course is a seminar, your presence matters, and at the end of
the semester part of the calculation of your final grade will be based on
your attendance, timeliness and (most of all) your participation in
recitation. Since we know that disasters happen unexpectedly during the
semester, we allow you three absences. Since there's no such thing in
this class as an "excused" absence, we don't want to know why you miss
class. Please do not write to us saying "I know you don't want to know
about why I've missed class, but I still wanted to let you know" etc.
Your three absences are your business. Missing more than three classes is
equally your business, but it will significantly lower your grade, since
it will inhibit your ability to contribute significantly to our
discussions. You should count on 4-5 absences lowering your grade by 1/3
(B to B-, for example), 6-7 by 2/3 (B to C+), 8-9 by one full grade (B to
C), etc. That said, please DO notify us if you are experiencing a major
illness (missing more than a week of class); and do get a note from your
doctor.
For each assignment we will provide instructions, either on the
course syllabus or on a separate handout (all of these documents are also
will be available on the course website). Any assignment you hand in
should be as immaculate and finished as you can make it. Late essays will
be accepted only at my discretion and (if accepted) will be marked down
one-third of a letter grade for each day beyond the deadline.
Prepare your essays according to the following specifications: typed
or word-processed (12 pt. font); double-spaced; 1" margins on all four
sides; give it a good title; mark all pages with your name and the page
number; staple it; quote accurately and provide parenthetical page-number
citations every time you quote; full bibliographic citations are required
for any material not already on the syllabus.
The date of the mid-term exam is February 25. The date of the
final exam is April 19. The mid-term exam will cover all of the
readings and lectures from the first half of the course. The final exam
will be comprehensive. The format of each exam will be a mix of ID's,
short-answer, and essay questions. If you miss an exam, you will receive
a score of "0" unless you provide signed letter of excuse from your dean
or principal academic advisor, in which case you will be allowed to take
a make-up exam.
It is your responsibility to be familiar with the University's Code
of Academic Integrity. Instances of academic dishonesty will be referred
to the College Office for adjudication.
