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Understanding the changing role and character of American communities is a major part of making sense of American history. This course addresses the central elements of community in the American context: family, neighborhood, church, school, fraternal and other voluntary organizations, politics, and government. Emphasizing the importance of place, space, and face-to-face relationships, it begins by investigating the nature of 17th-century villages and ends by analyzing contemporary urban and suburban society. During the course of the semester it addresses the different motives and circumstances which influenced the construction of the wide range of communities -- rural villages, utopian communities, company towns, garden cities, new towns, and master-planned suburbs.
This regularly offered course fits within the Community History track of Public History, but it also serves the interests of non-public history students. Besides attending to the varieties and elements of community histories, this course also covers the numerous types of available source materials. Part of this course involves reading community studies, or studies focusing on certain aspects of community life. In some weeks all students read the same book; in others, they choose from a bibliography of relevant works. Student write several 3-5 page reviews of assigned readings, which should summarize the book's argument, analyze its use of sources, and evaluate the author's understanding of community.
A second part of the course focuses on the primary materials for available for studying community history--and includes doing some historical work on local topics. Students do three projects: on biography and family history, institutions and politics, and business. These assignments involve small research projects which allow students to examine a number of basic, community history sources. The assignment will focus on Phoenix-area and Arizona sources, but the presentations also cover other sources elsewhere, and students are not confined to Phoenix or Arizona topics.
The final course assignment is a 15-20 page paper on community history. This paper may take one of three forms: a review of the literature on a particular aspect or area of community history; a research proposal which summarizes some relevant literature and reports on some investigation of primary source material; or a webpage which includes both primary material and an analysis of that material. Students are also responsible for presenting a thoughtful critique of one of the other papers.