Interdisciplinary Insights: Culture, History, and Society

Philosophical Foundations & Social Theories

Key Thinkers and Concepts

• Jacques Derrida: French philosopher who coined “deconstruction.”
• Franz Boas: Believed culture determines human social development. Argued that race is not biology, but culture; human nature is best understood through culture.
• Walt Rostow: Proposed stages of economic development:
  1. Traditional society (agriculture)
  2. Transitional stage (specialization)
  3. Take-off (industrialization)
  4. Drive to maturity (innovation)
  5. High mass consumption (consumerism)
• Modernization Theory: Posits that rich nations are further along in development, while poor nations are slower. Suggests providing aid to help them develop faster.
• Dependency Theory: Argues that the economic “pie” is unfairly stolen, advocating for economic independence for poor nations.
• Common Theory: Relies on a strong government or state for economic development. Notes a prominent gap and experiences followed by developing nations.

Understanding Material Culture

Objects as Historical Sources

• Inclusion of Material Culture: Incorporating objects as legitimate sources of history changes the narrative.
  • Archaeology: Studies artifact relation to past human behavior, with an emphasis on everyday life.
  • Cultural Anthropologists: Study beliefs through artifacts.
  • Art Historians: Focus on the sensory relation to artifacts.
• The study of material culture rejects the “totemization of language”; things do not merely illustrate what we talk about.
• Style: Taxonomy; the understanding of classifications according to time, and the norms of that time period or place.
• Taste: A way to assert individual or group identity within a time or place.
• Material Culture Erases Hierarchies: To a certain degree, material culture can depict the everyday life of ordinary people, in opposition to document-based history, which focuses on elite people at supposedly important times.
• I-C (Interpretation of Culture): Captures what scholars of material culture believe: artifacts have “social lives,” with different meanings and uses in different times.
• Material Culture and Language: Material culture rejects the totemization of language, acknowledging expressive layers not necessarily verbalized and rejecting language as the sole means to understand the meanings of things.
• Totemization: Thinking of language as the single source of meaning, as an entity having “godlike agency.”
• Qisuk: A living artifact, from the Eskimo culture.
• Phrenology: A pseudoscience focused on measurements of the human skull. Posits that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions, with the shape and size of the skull indicating character and mental abilities.

The Society of the Spectacle & Consumer Culture

Visual Dominance and Commodity

• Guy Debord: “The image has become the final form of commodity…” from The Society of the Spectacle. This leads to depersonalized visual curiosity and reduces the past to a style.
• Entertainment: Is passive. There is a spectacle and a viewer; one cannot design or participate in it. It is anti-intellectual and divorced from learning. It shapes the stories of the past, present, and future because entertainment represents a model for society; it affects how stories are told, requiring them to be entertaining.
• Debord (revisited): Argued that modern life involves merely watching things instead of actually doing them. The spectacle is not a supplement to the real world, but an unrealistic representation of how the world is.
• Pleasure Gardens & Theme Parks: Purely for entertainment and leisure.
• World’s Fairs: A mixture of history and entertainment, exhibiting industrial, scientific, technological, and artistic achievements.
• Disney: Started the concept of “edutainment.” Children began to view films and theme parks as a form of education, though they remained mainly entertainment with some learning on the side.
• Jackson Lears: Described consumer culture, where consumption became a mass activity. Argued that society was shifting from producer-oriented to consumer-oriented, with consumption dominated by commercial products.
• Thorstein Veblen: Identified a parasitic “leisure class” that spread ideas about consumption, viewing the consuming individual as irrational.
• Antonio Gramsci: Developed the Theory of Hegemony: the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society.
• Salvador Dalí & Luis Buñuel: Challenged the dominance of the visual in various artistic formats (e.g., Un Chien Andalou). Their work suggested there is more to understanding the world, value, and meaning beyond the visual, leading to surrealist art. They challenged the idea that vision could represent an automatic truth, or that art was a mimetic observation (a direct representation of reality).
• Advertising: Can be subversive, but is more often considered subliminal (under consciousness). Subversive messages directly undermine what is going on (e.g., ruling class dictating how to live in a consumer society).
• Society of the Spectacle (revisited): A consuming culture degraded from “being” to “having,” and from “having” to “appearing,” where people are enslaved to representation and where there is no higher aim than spectacle itself.
• The Situationist International: A radical anti-art movement devised specifically to counteract the society of the spectacle. It aimed to create authentic situations that would stimulate authentic responses, emotions, and experiences.
• Performance Art: Challenges other media like the written word. Unlike text or pictures, performance art focuses on the ephemeral and the present. If a photo is a quote, performance rejects the act of quotation or even the act of leaving any trace behind.

History, Memory, and Identity

Narratives and Their Construction

• Frontier Literature: Often features a “capture—chase—rescue” motif. It is critical to American identity, and the frontier is not seen as closed, as its spirits are remembered through literature and passed down.
• Little House on the Prairie: Not historically accurate. It portrays settlers as purified by the process, while natives are depicted as savages and threats.
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder: Wrote the book based on her nostalgia for good moments, despite her personal experience with war and conflict.
• Nostalgia vs. Storytelling: Nostalgia is a longing for the past. While similar to storytelling, nostalgia differs in that it is an exercise of power, often silencing oppressed voices from the past to create an idealized memory. It involves “buying into” the stories and myths of empire, uncritically accepting the dialectical relationship between lifestyle and coercion that makes up everyday life in empire. Nostalgia is a way of looking at the past, but it is not truly accurate because it is Whiggish (history improves progressively, judged in light of the present), and one is longing for it.
• Photographs and Colonial Nostalgia: Images collect individual experiences into shared experiences of empire, forming the basis for nostalgic representations. They can disrupt nostalgia by challenging its imaginative construction.
• Music and Colonization: Music reveals layers of unconscious borrowing, deliberate imitation, and strange hybrids, offering a window into understanding colonization.
  • Camille Saint-Saëns: Wrote music to help fund French colonization in Algeria. Motifs of East (strong militaristic trumpets) versus West (soft, peaceful flutes) appear in his music.
  • Claude Debussy: Was also interested in the juxtaposition between imperial subjects and domestic traditions of music.
• Benedict Anderson: Argued that nations are “imagined communities.” This means that even if you never meet every single person in your nation, you think of yourself as part of this community. There is always a limit to a nation; it can expand to a certain degree, but it is never meant to take over the whole world, indicating a limited quality to national identity.
• German Commemorations: Represent a universal apology for enormous events that cannot be erased; they are memorials for the dead and a partial atonement.
• Japanese Commemorations: Involve a refusal to engage in public history of any sort (memorials, museums, textbook accounts).
  • Yasukuni Shrine: A place of worship, and a military and cultural center all in one.
  • Grave of the Fireflies & Barefoot Gen: Anti-war works that portray the Japanese as victims during the war. They depict families forced to separate, suffering from starvation, and living in fear, highlighting the loss of Japanese innocence.
• “The Social Production of Memory”: Argues that there is no “false” oral history. It still matters how people believed or framed the past in a particular way. It is a way of thinking about how people remember what happened. Memory is always subjective, so people need to consider subjectivity itself to understand sources. Historians argue that we need to study memory itself.
• How Histories Get Lost in Ritual: People tend to forget or misunderstand the meaning behind rituals, thus losing the history behind them.
  • Thanksgiving: The traditional food eaten is historically inaccurate. The history behind the food differs from what truly happened when Europeans first landed in the Americas. This moment of thanksgiving, supposedly peaceful, is rooted in a broader history of conquest and colonization, which is often forgotten in rituals like Thanksgiving.
• Historic Preservation: Can be seen as “pickling” the past, which damages it due to the influence of biased ideas. Only under a threat of disunion do people want to preserve parts of their collective history.
  • Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village (1929): Built to create a place that evoked nostalgia for a time when people had “real values” like hard work and self-reliance. It depicted no poverty, slums, or poor people (including slaves), and no class conflict (no rich class, lawyers, or banks). It presented a Whiggish version of history.
  • Colonial Williamsburg: Built by Rockefeller and W.A.R. Goodwin. Its themes were opportunity, individual liberties, self-government, integrity of the individual, and responsible leadership. Both examples show a biased representation of the past, exposing only what Ford and Rockefeller wanted to show, reconstructing the past to dictate how people should live and recreating “the good ol’ days.”
• Move from Fordist to Post-Fordist Economy: Shaped our consumption of history from mass consumption to specialized consumption.
  • Fordism: Deskilled workers, made them part of a factory, and produced goods cheap enough for them to consume, leading to mass consumption for specific classes.
  • Post-Fordism: A much more dispersed system, a flexible economy, where marketing targets certain audiences. This leads to more specialized consumption and a desire for different “living history” experiences, moving away from worker villages to individual ways.
• Historical Reenactments: Bring people together through the experience of modernity reflecting on the past. Performers play with what is real and not real. For example, if it were real, the ending would be unknown, so they perform historical events as if they do not know the outcome. But it is also unreal because they obviously know the “real ending.” Also, performers are safe, unlike the people who actually lived through the event.

Film, Photography, and Reality

Capturing and Shaping Perception

• How Film Captures and Changes Reality: There is not just one reality that documentarians tap into; documentary itself involves reconfiguring and representing reality. Motion picture projection, by capturing on film and slowing it down, changed what people could see with the naked eye, transforming human perception of time and movement, and allowing time to be frozen, accelerated, or slowed to understand events.
• Documentaries: Capture experiences on film that alter perception of reality as much as they reflect it, leading to a radical adjustment of point of view.
• Narrative Fictions: Tell stories that are not based on facts or real events.
• Experimental Films: Explore alternatives to traditional narratives and argue against the idea that reality can be captured in a single frame.
• Robert Flaherty: Demanded that Nanook repeatedly perform hunting scenes and prolong them to make them longer and more dramatic (at great personal peril), shooting from multiple angles. When the igloo was too small, Flaherty demanded a bigger one be built by Nanook and friends; when it was too big and collapsed, and then too dark inside, it was cut in half. Flaherty exemplified the controlling act of filming itself.
• John Grierson: Believed documentaries are not simply facts, but constructions. His impact came in post-production during editing as technology developed, showing that controlling the film through editing footage makes documentary what it is.
• Surrealism (Film): Believed art should release the creative potential of the unconscious mind. Reality could be enhanced by adding artistic elements, making it better than the film itself could do, and more accurately capturing reality.
• The Battle of Algiers (1950s Algeria): Clearly states “this does not contain one shot of documentary film.” It represents what happened through a series of dramatic reenactments that were so convincing they had to convince people that what they were showing was not real.
• Gillo Pontecorvo: Played with the idea of the documentary by deliberately blurring the line between reality and fiction. The film portrays real events, and although it was only dramatic reenactment, it was so convincing that it was used for training in guerrilla warfare, making it controversial due to its astonishing likeness to reality.
• Werner Herzog: Blatantly calls chickens stupid, stating their stupidity is palpable when you stare into their eyes. Ironically, Oppenheimer says that “when we look into their eyes, we see the part of ourselves we are most afraid—our ultimate destination. Death.” Herzog prompts us to consider if, when we look into the eyes of chickens, we see the “stupidity” and inevitable death. We must look at the multiple layers, which makes us rethink what is real.
• The Act of Killing (Documentary):
  • Errol Morris’s Comments: Questions why people repeated their crimes happily in front of the camera (performance? sham?). Argues it is not adult education, but an art form communicating about the real world, exploring an idea.
  • Werner Herzog’s Comments: States the borderline between documentary and fiction is blurred in this film due to the amount of stylization and surrealism. Believes documentary filmmaking must move away from pure, fact-based movies because facts do not constitute truth, focusing instead on historical facts and monstrosity of crime.
• Are Photographs Facts?:
  • Renaissance artists used cameras to help develop paintings, tracing images.
  • Used as a scientific device: for human/animal motion.
  • Eadweard Muybridge: Famous for human motion photographs, including nude pictures.
  • Allowed people to access the capturing of people in art, which had previously been monopolized.
  • Appropriate vs. Inappropriate Photography: In art, nudity was accepted; in photography, it was not.
  • Errol Morris: States photographs preserve information, record data, and present evidence.
  • Pictorialism: Photography imitating painting.
  • Genre Photography: Still lifes and narrative photographs, where subjects were dressed up as characters (e.g., people posing as Italians, recreating the feeling of a painting).
  • Tableaux Vivant: Live human staging of historical moments (e.g., in the late 19th century US, people dressed up or not, staged famous historical moments in the middle of a dinner party, playing with the notion of reporting news).
  • Photography was used by journalists to record news, including wars and events (e.g., Crimean War, American Civil War).
  • Alfred Stieglitz: Advocated for photography to be accepted as art.
  • Susan Sontag: Noted that photographs can be staged.
• Conclusion on Photographs:
  1. Photos are complex objects that embody layers of history, meaning, and symbolism.
  2. Photographs do not just tell one story; they tell many stories. Meaning can change over time or with the viewer.
  3. Photographs capture intentional and unintentional information.
• Roger Fenton’s Cannonballs: Challenged “realism”—the idea of taking photos that show reality. They revealed that photographs can be tampered with. Although a photograph shows reality, that reality may be that something was changed. A photographer may manipulate photos to connect with viewers. Essentially, a photograph is authentic and should be more truthful than some other mediums. The cannonballs show they were obviously moved, which is the reality of it. However, the question remains, which one came first? Errol Morris’s conclusion on the cannonballs: “Photographs preserve information. They record data. They present evidence. Not because of our intentions but often in spite of them.”
• Susan Sontag (revisited): Sees photography as a process instead of an object. “Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.” When she talks about flinching, she tells the difference between flinching and not flinching.
• Film as Experience: Is shaped as an experience because it brings the audience to step into a perspective. It is a way to shape knowledge and is used to educate. It relates actions and what can be seen; it alters perception of reality.

Oral History and Collective Memory

Voices from the Past

• Lore and Oral Tradition: A form of collective memory. People collect, store, and transmit memory in a non-written format. Oral history is about individual memory and experiences.
• Allan Nevins: Collected oral sources, wrote them down, turned them into paper documents, and archived them traditionally. Oral history was meant to supplement the collection of historical data, particularly supplementing traditional history with elite perspectives.
• Paul Thompson: Advocated for how oral history opens up to form a folk history or ordinary people’s history, including social history and labor history. He embraced sources outside of elite positions, believing that oral history can break through the boundaries between history and audiences, and between the ivory tower and regular people.
• Griot (Aka Jeli): A West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, and musician; a repository of oral tradition. Griots may use their vocal expertise for gossip, satire, or political comment. Their job was to know the entire history and stories of their people.
• Alex Haley’s Work and Oral History: Raises questions about the exact role of the person conducting interviews, and whether the source was directly from the writer’s mouth.
  • Weaknesses: Oral histories may have memory bias, are relationship-based (the relationship could shape the facts), may be malleable and influenced by other narratives, and the historian acts as a mediator or curator. They can also be politically unacceptable.
  • Strengths: Capture the layers of memory that constitute history, profoundly challenge ideas about single narratives, total histories, and one explanation for an event.
• What Oral Histories Capture Missing from Written Texts: Oral histories capture rhythm, breaks, pauses, changes in voice tone, emotions, and other signals of mental state. Images add visual effect but may also diminish people’s imagination and concentration.

Social Dynamics and Conflict

Power, Race, and Violence

• Junot Díaz: Discusses identity as a metaphor or vehicle for other topics, arguing that talking about one specific subject in depth segues into (or is a metaphor for) the relationship of other broad topics.
• Anthropometry: The study and measurement of the human body.
• Zora Neale Hurston & Franz Boas: Challenged physical anthropology by promoting cultural anthropology; both determined group identity is cultural rather than racial or biological.
• Robert Park: Developed the “race relation cycle” with four stages: contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation.
• Melting Pot: A concept introduced by French-born migrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, where people from various cultures come to America and contribute aspects of their own culture to form a new, unique American culture, potentially leading to a loss of individual culture.
• Culture is Hybrid: Novelists portray the process of assimilation and multiculturalism with language of pluralism and translations; social scientists understand it through cultural anthropology. Hybrid culture means a new “third space” is created.
• When Are Stories Dangerous (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)?: When we hear only a single story about another person or country, because we risk a critical misunderstanding.
• Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands: Asks if the migrant novel is a faithful account of what people experienced. Argues that when people have left their homelands physically for a long while, they can only return to their real homelands through their imagination, through literature (the homeland in their minds). The novel is a way of denying the official and politicians’ version of truth (truth controlled by power); it records memory and reality.
• Translation: Not just about literature translation. It is about trying to understand the cultural transformation that happens when moving from one culture to another, and the things that are inevitably lost.
  • Homi K. Bhabha: Discussed hybridity, liminality, and interstitial space; translation passes through transformation, not abstract ideas of identity or similarity.
  • Gish Jen: Argued that translation transcodes ethnicities and enables the emergence of reworked cultural identities.
• Violence in War vs. Genocide: The violence in a war is about compelling the enemy to do our will. Genocide, however, focuses on eradication, not control.
• Essential Types in History?: Yes, there are. Genocides are essentially similar as they all intend destruction: killing members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, causing a low birth rate, and forcibly transferring children of one group to another. However, their purpose and methods could be unique.
• “NEVER AGAIN”: Allows us to group violence into a macro-narrative. Memory defines progress; if we study history, we learn from our mistakes; if not, we remain as savages or children.
• Steven Pinker on Violence: States that human nature has always comprised inclinations towards violence and inclinations that counteract them, such as self-control, empathy, fairness, and reason (what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”). Pinker concludes that violence has declined over the course of history because historical circumstances have increasingly favored our better angels. According to Pinker, three factors help us understand the decline of violence:
  1. The rising importance of the state, in controlling and setting the rule of law.
  2. The force of commerce, “a game in which everyone can win.”
  3. Cosmopolitanism, “the expansion of people’s parochial little worlds through literacy, mobility, education.”
• Hegel’s Definition of Humanity’s Propensity for Violence: Man was different from animals because man was willing to die for a cause greater than life.
• Mahmood Mamdani’s Definition of Humanity’s Propensity for Violence: Argued that Hegel should have added that what separates man from animal is that man is willing to kill for a cause greater than life. Violence became anomalous to history in the 20th century because society saw violence as necessary for progress.
• Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie): A novel about love, hair, blogs, racism in America, and life in Nigeria. It explores American tensions regarding politics, racial tensions, relations between men and women, between women themselves, education, and immigration. The protagonist is a Nigerian woman named Ifemelu and her first love, Obinze. The word “Americanah” refers to a person who returns to Nigeria after time abroad. Ifemelu grew up in poverty in Lagos, won a scholarship to a college in Philadelphia, and struggled with money and finding a job. She learned about American culture and started a lifestyle blog called “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks.” After fifteen years, Ifemelu and Obinze reunite upon her return to Nigeria.
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Explored the question “Can the subaltern speak?” Her work touches on imperialism, elite history, subaltern women, feminist positivism, and essentialism (e.g., “White men are saving brown women from brown men”). She discusses Freud’s history of repression, widow sacrifice (Sati) and Western intervention, imperialism’s image, consuming humans as subjects, and defining other cultures with stronger value systems. She critiques the idea that “India’s history can be represented by its colonial masters.”
• Holdzkon on US History: Aims to teach Americans US history that people are proud of, to foster unity and reconciliation.
  • Disney’s Opinion on the American Revolution: Depicted colonists fighting not only for themselves but also for the world. Characters like “Swamp Fox” depicted real scenarios while making the subject heroic, making patriot crimes seem less serious, with the ultimate goal of freeing the world (in the context of the Cold War, reminding US citizens of freedom from Britain).
  • Civil War Films: Often take a microcosmic view, focusing on the brotherhood of individuals (e.g., Johnny and Billy), and avoiding political complexities.
  • Westward Expansion (Davy Crockett): A hit in the 1950s, depicting the fearless frontier hero. The hero does not go too far, beautifying the exploration of the West and the hero (Fess Parker). Emphasized unity and reconciliation. The Colorado River exploration (Ten Who Dared) focused on scientific results and interesting parts, not individual history or individual heroism.
• Edward Said:
  • Cultural Hegemony: Political and economical control, where people without power in the system are controlled.
  • Critiqued the Eurocentric way to understand colonization, which suggests colonization helped rebuild colonial societies.
  • Noted that colonial culture was consumed by Europeans (in the 19th century, there was little connection between colonies and metropoles).
  • Argued that empire becomes a universal concern due to events in the colony. Many writers learned much, but this did not help correctly understand 19th and 20th-century European history. He questioned how to connect culture and empiricism beyond individual authorial viewpoints.
  • Contrapuntal Reading: When reading others’ works, connect them to “what made these people think this way” (e.g., connecting Black novels to the influences on the author).
  • Described culture as hybrid, impure, and complicated, requiring attention. Discussed a sense of “salvation” for European audiences, who felt “liberated” because these matters had no direct relation to them.
• Stephanie Coontz:
  • Discussed the “Family Crisis” and the Nuclear Family. Argued that the “traditional family” (with chaste women and sexual desire) is elusive.
  • Noted that even in “traditional family” times, minority races suffered greatly.
  • The idea of “traditional families” as nostalgia only emerged after that time period and is primarily remembered by white people.
  • Highlighted that children suffered in those “traditional family” times.
  • Stated that statistical and research study of the “traditional family” concept is extremely difficult.
  • Mentioned that since the dissolution of the nuclear family concept, positive attitudes towards marriage have increased, and while marriages may not be as “strict,” people are happier.
  • Referenced Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver as examples of a child-centered society and economic improvement.
  • Noted that in the 1960s, the desire to buy homes surged.
  • Discussed new family values where both men and women were encouraged to root their identities and self-image in familial and parental roles, emphasizing recreation, fun, livability, comfort, and convenience as part of the Postwar American Dream.
  • Argued that the reality was much more complex (poverty, diversity, social change, repression, conflict still existed postwar). Suburbs were for rich people.
  • Addressed gender roles problems and teen pregnancy, emphasizing the problem of women in traditional families and the importance of women’s equality.
  • Critiqued the idea that people should return to the female-repressed families of the 1950s. She noted that “most people who talk about balancing private advancement and individual rights with nurturance, mutual support and long term commitment do not envision any serious rethinking of the individualistic, antisocial tendencies in our societies…” implying that these individuals still aim to repress women.

Architecture and Urban Development

Built Form and Societal Narratives

• Built Form, Principles of Design:
  1. Design is historical and contextual.
  2. Design is about use, which can be unpredictable and inconsistent.
  3. Design is contested.
• The built form reveals that public space and safety are a privilege for the upper class. Public space was often only made available to and affordable for the rich. This applied segregation to society, creating safe and comfortable spaces for the rich white population, and cramped, dirty spaces for everyone else.
• City Beautiful: A movement to create monumental cities, representing a rejection of the industrial city.
• Beaux-Arts: An architectural style that expresses the history of the nation.
• Georges-Eugène Haussmann: Chosen by Napoleon III to carry out huge architectural renovations in Paris. His work greatly reflected the Beaux-Arts style.
• Columbian Exposition: Had a huge cultural and social influence on architecture. Buildings were predominantly neoclassical architecture, notably the Court of Honor.
• Daniel Burnham: Director of the Columbian Exposition; a Modernist.
• Le Corbusier: An architect who created “Ville Contemporaine,” which glorified automobiles; a Modernist.
• Philip Johnson: A postmodernist architect.
• Frank Gehry: A postmodernist architect, known for works like the Disney Concert Hall.
• Modern Architecture: Very structural, tried to make everything perfect, and every part of the architecture had a purpose. There was a clear “line to follow.”
• Postmodern Architecture: Had no line to follow, allowing for any direction. It included both “bad” and “good” elements, attempting to mix the two.
• Family House in the 20th Century: The physical size of homes continued to grow, even as household size was shrinking. This period saw high rents, high crime rates, and urban core decay in cities. The house became a container of aspirations and self-image—a narrative one tells oneself about who they are.
• Housing Policy 1930s-1950s:
  • Federal Home Loan Bank: Established to provide secondary liquidity to mortgage lending institutions to solve the cash crunch during the Great Depression. It created a national system that transferred loanable funds from surplus to saving deficit areas.
  • HOLC (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation): Made mortgages easier, with longer terms and lower interest rates. Also developed a rating system.
  • FHA (Federal Housing Administration): Took the HOLC system and turned it into the redlining system. It provided federal mortgage insurance for houses considered good investments, holding very long-term loans (20-30 years) with low down payments.
  • Redlining: The practice of refusing a loan or insurance to someone because they live in an area deemed to be a poor financial risk. It involved providing mortgage insurance for those in areas of good financial standing. An example from Coontz shows that Black people in the city were given fewer privileges than white people who lived outside the city.
• How Architecture Reflects and Shapes Narrative: Through architecture, we notice how history is not one story but is nuanced. It reveals great tensions between rich and poor, and between those with authority and those who resist it. It shows how history includes tragedy and great human suffering, and how it occurs within multiple realities. This built form offers layers of the past, present, and even the anticipated future.

News, Media, and Democracy

Information and Its Construction

• Fourth Estate: News and Press: Keeps democracy healthy and the other three estates honest. It informs people about what the government does.
• Contradictions of the News:
  1. News is sold—it is not just presented (e.g., “fake news” to engage people and continue publishing).
  2. News serves a public and civic purpose, but it should also represent the tastes of the people.
  3. News relies on an “operational fiction” that it is objective and impartial, but some news is considered better than others.
• How News Coverage is Constructed (Late 20th Century): Saw an increase in the scale of profitability through news coverage. The number of news outlets and potential hours dramatically increased.
  • 60 Minutes: One of the first news networks.
  • Ted Turner: Founded CNN.
• Velvet Strike: A collection of images used as graffiti “sprays” in the violent multiplayer spaces of the popular counter-terrorism game Counter-Strike. Velvet Strike was conceptualized at the beginning of Bush’s “War on Terrorism” and invited individuals to submit their own “sprays” relating to this theme.

Global Perspectives and Future Challenges

Clash of Ideas

• Francis Fukuyama: Argued that we had reached “the end of history” in 1989 with the triumph of liberal democracy, signifying the end of all major ideological change.
• Samuel P. Huntington: Argued that we are not at the end of history, but rather that the future would see an endless “clash of civilizations.” He believed there would always be a fundamental source of conflict in the world causing cultural clashes, and he specifically argued that Islam was the most difficult to deal with.
• Edward Said: Countered Huntington with the concept of the “clash of ignorance.” Said argued that Huntington was an example of ignorance, judging an entire cultural group based on the acts of a few deranged militants. He believed that labels like “Islam” and “the West” mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality.