Talk:How They Had Fun: Culture and Context in the United States, 1900-1960

Aims of this Course

To be a means of learning about the culture of the first half of the 20th century within the historical events that shaped them. That, at least, is the over arching goal. The course will ideally be accessible to those interested with any level of historical knowledge/experience (it's not meant to be daunting, it's about making knowledge accessible rather than building an academic fortress). Someone can embark on the course at any point in time, and the course should essentially run itself (so if I, or anyone else with interest in creating/maintaining/pruning the course gets busy or distracted in life, the course won't fade away with the user). Ideally if this one works out, it would be excellent to have a part two covering the second half of the 20th century.

As far as course material goes, at the moment I'm thinking that each decade should contain at least one primary source and one secondary source to examine, maybe with several sources (primary or secondary) to compare/contrast. When a cultural aspect is introduced it would be nice to have it somehow connected to another historical issue. For example, off the top of my head - when approaching fashions of the 1920s, do so while also having a look at women's rights of the period. Hopefully the course will show the ways in which events and movements in history affect style/taste/popular ideas. As a final note on this, the connections will ideally be made through examining sources and works of historians rather than through likely incorrect generalizations without backing, like "After women got the vote they bobbed their hair and wore short skirts." There are endless aspects of culture so the course has the potential to grow and be added to by multiple contributors.

These are the aims that I have, but this is Wikiversity after all, so any other angles of thought on how this course should be approached/structured/run are great and very welcome! RoseGraham 00:43, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Rose, I noticed you are a new user. You may or may not be aware that there is a sister project making open textbooks online so they are easy to reference. www.wikibooks.org Also MIT's opencourseware project may have some materials you can use for suggested readings. Your course goals look like fun, I will try to stop back by and check it out again in a few months. Thanks for joining us here at Wikiversity! Mirwin 00:44, 20 February 2007 (UTC)