Questions
Larson: Summer for the Gods
- To what extent were Christians and Darwinians actually at odds in the late 19th century?
- How come William Jennings Bryan didn’t like Darwin?
- Who were the “modernist” Christians?
- What did “majoritarianism” mean for Bryan?
- In Tennessee, was there a clear dividing line between anti-evolutionists and progressives?
- From whence came the American Civil Liberties Union?
- Clarence Darrow: “It is not the bad people I fear so much as the good people.” Sound familiar?
- Why did Dayton want the Scopes trial? Was Dayton a typical Tennessee city?
- What is “opportunism”? Were Bryan and Darrow opportunists? How about Dayton’s boosters?
- What was the Scopes defense’s strategy for defending Scopes?
- Larson argues that our memory of the trial is distorted. How?
- Is this debate over? Should it be?
Questions for Beyond Separate Spheres
What were the basic assumptions with which Dr. Clarke worked?
Why did the academy in the late nineteenth-century become “feminized?”
What made the University of Chicago special in this regard?
Thorstein Veblen; Lester Frank Ward; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; how did they turn things on their heads?
How did pragmatism and the New Pschology help women challenge Dr. Clarke?
What was the relationship between these new women researchers (Talbot; Thompson; Hollingsworth) and the suffrage movement of the time?
How did the male psychologists of Columbia help further research on
female mental capabilities (despite the attitudes of the men)?
How did Talbot; Thompson; Hollingsworth change American psychology?
Why and how did W.I. Thomas start to change his mind about personality and behavior?
What was Jessie Taft’s critique of the suffrage movement?
What did Virginia Robinson feel that women needed to fully realize their ambitions?
What was functionalism? How did manifest itself in the ideas of Elsie Parsons?
Why were Clelia Mosher and others “reluctant revolutionaries?”
How did Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict benefit from the research of these earlier women? How did their perspectives differ from them?
Questions for The Metaphysical Club
1. Explain the Law of Errors. What did the Law of Errors and 19th-century statistical thought teach the pragmatists about how we learn things?
2. Describe the Sylvia Howland case? How did the Peirces solve the case (at least for themselves)? What significance can we find in their solution?
3. What did Louis Agassiz believe in? How did his ideas differ from Darwin’s? Why did William James like Darwin’s ideas better?
4. What implications can you find in uncertainty and the concept that nothing goes anywhere purposefully on its own? What does this mean for social policy in the late 19th and early 20th century?
5. What did Oliver Wendell Holmes learn from the Civil War? What did he learn about certitude? Can we ever escape certitude? If not, what do we do?
Questions for Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow
What does Levine argue in this book? How does the central argument of Fredrickson’s Inner Civil War bear resemblance to Levine? How does it differ?
Do you believe Levine when he says that he holds no nostalgia for the past he describes?
How did Shakespeare, opera, and classical concert music become transformed over the 100 years that Levine chronicles? Why?
What other public cultural forms changed? How?
How did U.S. attitudes towards European culture (in relation to itself) change over this period?
What events in the late 19th century United States probably influenced the cultural changes that Levine describes?
What spectator events in the 20th century probably most resemble Levine’s early 19th century audiences?
How did attitudes towards race and class impact the changes that Levine describes?
Is throwing vegetables at actors a “democratic” expression? What is Levine’s vision of democracy?
Do Hollywood and Vaudeville fit into the framework that Levine describes?
What cultural forms does Levine pass over in his discussion?
Read Levine’s description of the colorization debate on pages 248-249? What significance does Levine attach to that debate? Could it be read differently?
Reading Levine’s epilogue, how would you assess the state of culture today?
Is there any space in Levine’s framework for the conviction that some cultural forms require more effort and thought to effectively express than other cultural forms?