Father Charles Coughlin occupied both a strange and a familiar place in American politics in the 1930s. Politically radical, a passionate democrat, he nevertheless was a bigot who freely vented angry, irrational charges and assertions. A Catholic priest, he broadcast weekly radio sermons that by 1930 drew as many as forty-five million listeners. Strongly egalitarian, deeply suspicious of elites, a champion of what he saw as the ordinary person's rights, Coughlin frequently and vigorously attacked capitalism, communism, socialism, and dictatorship By the mid-1930s, his talks took on a nasty edge as he combined harsh attacks on Roosevelt as the tool of international Jewish bankers with praise for the fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. The "Radio Priest's" relentless anti-elitism pushed Roosevelt to sharpen his own critiques of elites, and in that sense Coughlin had a powerful impact on American politics beyond his immediate radio audience. This 1937 sermon, "Twenty Years Ago," reflected much of what made Coughlin popular.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the history of Spanish missions in California. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Learn about the role local churches played in bringing Hutus and Tutsis together in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in this Wide Angle video segment.

Super Satya is ready to have a super day, including finally conquering the tallest slide in Hoboken. But her day takes a not-so-super turn when she realizes her superhero cape is stuck at the dry cleaner. Will she be able to face her fears, help her friends and be the true hero everyone knows she is? Super Satya Saves The Day introduces Satya, a precocious Indian-American superhero.-----------------------Authors: Raakhee Mirchandani (Mango & Marigold Press) & The Sikh Coalition

This course explores the relationship between music and the supernatural, focusing on the social history and context of supernatural beliefs as reflected in key literary and musical works from 1600 to the present. It provides an understanding of the place of ambiguity and the role of interpretation in culture, science and art. Great works of art by Shakespeare, Verdi, Goethe (in translation), Gounod, Henry James and Benjamin Britten are explored, as well as readings from the most recent scholarship on magic and the supernatural.

Aim is to analyze important current events for what they reveal about the nature and working of our technological world. Starting point is connection between technology and terrorism. Subject also explores how a human-built world can foster insecurity and danger, and how human beings respond. Many invited guests help develop a strong interdisciplinary approach (science, engineering, social science, humanities). Topics include technological risk and remediation, sociotechnical systems, imagination of disaster, technology and identity, technology and religion, technology and education, and technology and trust. Written and oral assignments and a final project required. Service-learning proposals and web-based presentations, in addition to written work, may be considered for the final project by the instructor.

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century numerous reform movements emerged; some people even chose to withdraw from society and form ideal or utopian communities. The Shakers were the oldest of these utopian movements. Founded by Mother Ann Lee in 1774, they abandoned the traditional family in favor of a new fellowship of men and women living as celibate brothers and sisters. Many entered Shaker communities in the 1820s and 1830s, attracted by their equality and simple, but spiritual, lifestyle. This anonymous Lowell mill worker made two visits to a Shaker community in New York State and offered a glimpse into the isolated world within. Her opinions changed over time as she found some interesting similarities to factory life; the Shakers were as industrious as any factory worker, paying close attention to their bell schedule.

The "locomotives," "conductors," "depots," and "roads" Levi Coffin mentioned in this segment of his Reminiscences (published in 1876) are all metaphorical. The Underground Railroad was not composed of steel rails and puffing locomotives but was instead a system of routes, guides, and safe houses used by escaped slaves as they traveled to the freedom of the northern states and Canada. Because of the necessary secrecy of their journeys, it is impossible to know exactly how many slaves escaped on the Underground Railroad during the antebellum years. Historians estimate that the number ranged from several hundred to 1,000 per year. Even with the help of the Underground Railroad, the trip was difficult and dangerous. Escaped slaves typically traveled at night and hid during the day, always on the lookout for slave catchers. Levi Coffin, a Quaker shopkeeper who lived in Newport (now Fountain City), Indiana, worked on the Underground Railroad for many years. After emancipation, he devoted himself to assisting the freedmen.

After their arrival, the Puritan migrants to Massachusetts Bay quickly dispersed into a series of settlements around Boston and then moved inland. Colonists formed clustered towns where they could secure land for their families and churches for their worship. One such community was Concord, Massachusetts, founded by Simon Willard, a fur trader with the local Indians. In his history of New England, entitled The Wonder-Working Providence, woodworker and local historian Edward Johnson recorded an account "of the manner how they placed downe their dwellings in this Desart Wildernesse." Johnson emphasized the providential (God-given) nature of the Puritan mission, one that saw the eastern woodlands, a region that the English and Indians shared in the first decades of settlement, as a wilderness.

The concept of globalization fosters the understanding of the interconnectedness of cultures and societies geographically wide apart; America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Subject scans existing debates over globalization in four continents. Explores how globalization impacts everyday life in the First and Third World; how globalization leads to a common cosmopolitan culture; the emergence of a global youth culture; and religious, social, and political movements that challenge globalization. Materials examined include pop music, advertisements, film posters, and political cartoons. Topic for Spring 2003: Popular Culture in Japan. Taught in English.

This course considers reggae, or Jamaican popular music more generally--in its various forms (ska, rocksteady, roots, dancehall)--as constituted by international movements and exchanges and as a product that circulates globally in complex ways. By reading across the reggae literature, as well as considering reggae texts themselves (songs, films, videos, and images), students will scrutinize the different interpretations of reggae's significance and the implications of different interpretations of the story of Jamaica and its music. Beginning with a consideration of how Jamaica's popular music industry emerged out of transnational exchanges, the course will proceed to focus on reggae's circulation outside of Jamaica via diasporic networks and commercial mediascapes. Among other sites, we will consider reggae's resonance and impact elsewhere in the Anglo Caribbean (e.g., Trinidad, Barbados), the United Kingdom (including British reggae styles but also such progeny as jungle, grime, and dubstep), the United States (both as reggae per se and in hip-hop), Panama and Puerto Rico and other Latin American locales (e.g., Brazil), Japan and Australia, as well as West, South, and East Africa (CĺŞte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Uganda).

John Ball was a lawyer, businessman, educator, civic leader, and traveler who was born on the Vermont frontier in 1794. Ball escaped the life of his father's farm to study at Dartmouth College. He then practiced law, taught, and eventually settled in Grand Rapids and became a Michigan state legislator and a founder of the state's school system. Before settling down, however, he led a life of great adventure. In 1832 Ball joined an expedition to Oregon, but tiring of Oregon--and suffering from the "ague"he mentions here--he boarded a Hudson Bay Company ship bound for Hawaii (or the Sandwich Islands, as they were called then). He landed in Honolulu on December 22, 1833. In Hawaii Ball observed the interactions among the native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, and American missionaries, merchants and diplomats. This selection comes from an autobiography Ball wrote at age eighty.

British literature and culture during Queen Victoria's long reign, 1837-1901. Authors studied may include Charles Dickens, the Brontes, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Discussion of many of the era's major developments such as urbanization, steam power, class conflict, Darwin, religious crisis, imperial expansion, information explosion, and bureaucratization. Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; syllabi vary.

Democratic Presidential candidate Al Smith faced a vicious campaign of anti-Catholic innuendos and slurs--both covert and overt--in the 1928 election. A widely distributed periodical called the Fellowship Forum declared that "The real issue in this campaign is PROTESTANT AMERICANISM VERSUS RUM AND ROMANISM." Anti-Catholicism was not confined to fringe groups. One of the most vocal opponents of a Catholic presence in American politics was Thomas J. Heflin, the junior senator from Alabama, who delivered some of his most vicious speeches on the floor of the Senate. Heflin's January 18, 1928, speech before his Senate colleagues blamed the defeat of 1924 Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis on Roman Catholics ("Al Smith's crowd") who demanded--to Heflin's outrage--that the party denounce the Klan.

Religious concepts and metaphors suffused the words and ideas of many late nineteenth-century American workers. The New and Old Testaments provided not only personal succor to many working people but also a set of allusions and parables they applied directly to their lives and struggles in industrial America. Working-class ideas and writing often were cast in stark millenarian terms, with prophesies of imminent doom predicted for capitalists who worshiped at Mammon's temple and imminent redemption for hard-working, long-suffering, and God-fearing laboring men and women. Christ was uniformly depicted in workers' writing as a poor workingman put on Earth to teach the simple principles of brotherhood and unionism. In this 1897 essay in the Railway Times, titled "Christ," Murphy O'Hea suggested that Jesus Christ's early career as a "poor humble carpenter" proved "that the cause of Labor is holy."

Father Charles Coughlin attracted an enormous audience for his radio sermons in the 1930s. Although he initially supported President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, his speeches turned increasingly strident, conspiratorial, and anti-Semitic over the course of the decade. After 1936, his talks combined harsh attacks on Roosevelt as the tool of international Jewish bankers with praise for the fascist leaders Mussolini and Hitler. The now bitter and delusional tone of his sermons alienated his larger audience and made many of his fellow Catholics nervous. John Ryan, a Catholic priest himself, had long been active as a social reformer and university educator, and became a vocal critic of Coughlin. Ryan published the following missive in the Catholic journal Commonweal in October, 1936.

Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713–1755) began life as a vivacious girl with a "wild and airy" temperament and ended it as a sober Quaker. Born in England, Ashbridge eloped at fourteen and was widowed five months later. After rejection by her family and a three-year sojourn with relatives in Ireland, she sailed for America as an indentured servant, arriving in New York in July, 1732. This selection from her autobiography begins as Ashbridge sets out from her home in Long Island to visit relatives in Philadelphia. By then she had undergone an intensely felt spiritual search and had married her second husband, a teacher with a penchant for violence and drink. Ashbridge's dispute with her second husband over her Quakerism ended only with his enlistment in the army and subsequent death. She married a third time, to a Quaker named Aaron Ashbridge, and died while visiting Quakers in England and Ireland.

Law and custom in seventeenth-century New England gave male property owners authority over the women, children, and other dependents of their families. Women who spoke up or stood out merited suspicion, and many were accused, prosecuted, and occasionally executed for the crime of witchcraft. Women could be excommunicated, as Ann Hibben was in 1641, for usurping" her husband's role

Exploration of the changes and continuities in the lives of South Asian women. Using gender as a lens, examine how politics of race, class, caste, and religion have affected women in South Asian countries, primarily in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Current debates within South Asian women's history illustrate the issues and problems that arise in re-writing the past from a gendered perspective. Primary documents, secondary readings, films, newspaper articles, and the Internet.

"This semester, we will read writing about travel and place from Columbus's Diario through the present. Travel writing has some special features that will shape both the content and the work for this subject: reflecting the point of view, narrative choices, and style of individuals, it also responds to the pressures of a real world only marginally under their control. Whether the traveler is a curious tourist, the leader of a national expedition, or a starving, half-naked survivor, the encounter with place shapes what travel writing can be. Accordingly, we will pay attention not only to narrative texts but to maps, objects, archives, and facts of various kinds. Our materials are organized around three regions: North America, Africa and the Atlantic world, the Arctic and Antarctic. The historical scope of these readings will allow us to know something not only about the experiences and writing strategies of individual travelers, but about the progressive integration of these regions into global economic, political, and knowledge systems. Whether we are looking at the production of an Inuit film for global audiences, or the mapping of a route across the North American continent by water, these materials do more than simply record or narrate experiences and territories: they also participate in shaping the world and what it means to us. Authors will include Olaudah Equiano, Caryl Philips, Claude L?vi-Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Jamaica Kincaid, William Least Heat Moon, Louise Erdrich, ?lvar N