Thursday, February 10, 2005

Assignment Preview:

According to Tylor, 1974, culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws, custom and other capabilities as members of a society. " We'll isolate these factors in our exploration of the diverse sub-cultures that contributed to our overall cultural fabric in the Sixties.

Each student has selected an Unsung Hero, or someone who has had slightly less coverage than some other luminaries from this decade. Using them as a starting point, we'll place them into a sub-culture, then examine that subset using:
- knowledge: formal education, work experience, family background
- belief: Religious, political, economic or personal Philosophies
- art: Literature, Film, Music, Graphic Arts, Fine Arts
- morals: Personal rules of conduct
- laws: Creating, Breaking, Subverting
- customs: Speaking patterns, Social habits, Dietary habits,
- other capabilities as members of a society.

This will provide a structure that will allow comparisons of seemingly dissimilar people and begin to sharpen our focus.

Some Unsung Heroes will have scant amounts of data concerning certain areas. In an effort to understand the subculture it will be acceptable to generalize by extending the subject to include either known associates or people who may have similar experiences with the main subject along some controlled lines.

Begin to establish a context for your subject. Date of Birth, hometown, personal demographics, family background, schools/military service, relative health status. As a starting point, try to establish how they may have spent their formative years or adolescence.

Elizabeth and Amy

I'm adding stripped-down Powerpoint presentations of the in-class lectures. Some features have changed, for example, I've added links to text of Churchill's "Iron Curtain' speech instead of audio clip, and a link to a web site that features video of atomic blasts instead of video clips. While not exactly what the rest of the class saw, they're close enough for our purposes.

I'll be adding more over the week end.