HIST 216 - Special Topics in US History

SPRING 2020 TOPIC: SEM: TELEVISION, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY

Since the 1950s, television has been an important medium for political discourse and a powerful venue for shared cultural experiences. News programs, talk shows, and comedy-variety shows have raised awareness of injustices through different ways of informing and entertaining their audiences. Sitcoms, science fiction, and dramas, from the 1970s search for social “relevance” to HBO’s more recent serials, have sparked conversation by presenting complicated and controversial issues to broad audiences. Children’s programs like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood have tried to enact different visions for an ideal American future. In this course, we will consider ways in which television has promoted and hindered social justice through the content and aesthetics of programs, how they have presented social groups and issues, and how they reflected and affected public discourse. We will also look behind the scenes, to see how television producers, corporate sponsors, government regulators, media critics, and social activists have tried to use television as a tool to change American society. This course will have a collaborative public history component: creating an exhibit and research guide for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. As a class, we will be among the first scholars to study some of the thousands of public television programs that WGBH and the Library of Congress have recently digitized, and we will create a publicly available resource to help researchers, educators, journalists, and activists better understand and use television for social justice.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered periodically