Visit our companion site,
American Passages. Produced in conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting, this rich site includes an archive featuring over 3,000 images, audio clips, presentation software, and more.

Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.

Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.

Topic Clusters

Slavery, Race, and the Making of American Literature

The conversation is vast and ever unfolding: about race slavery in the United States, and about the legacy of that practice in our history, our literature, our culture, and our quest for a collective national identity. This NAAL cluster is intended to help you pause and consider the presence that nineteenth-century American writers can have in that conversation, and to think about a couple of questions that from some perspectives seem even larger.

1. At various moments in NAAL, we can sense a competition between expository prose and imaginative literature. Sometimes the ironies in that competition seem huge: for example, in the decades after its publication, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin won more readers, and aroused more passions among them, than any true-to-life slave narrative, abolitionist tract, or political speech ever given on the subject of slavery. On the web, look for materials that provide a chronicle of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin phenomenon: paintings and chromolithographs of moments from the novel; posters for dramas based on the book; advertisements for other books that tried to answer it or develop its themes. Why do you think that fiction of this sort played such a significant role in the national debate over slavery? Can you think of modern fictional works (novels, stories, plays, films) that have had a similar impact, overshadowing or eclipsing factual reportage? Should imaginative texts have such centrality in our political and moral life? Why or why not?

2. Public figures with long and complex lives, and often with prodigious records of achievement in many realms, are sometimes remembered selectively for comments they made—sometimes in passing, sometimes not—on moral issues that still matter to us. Thomas Jefferson’s comments from Notes on the State of Virginia are a case in point. Over the course of his own career, even Abraham Lincoln made contradictory observations about the slavery question; and you can probably think of other, more modern public figures who have been challenged repeatedly, in the national spotlight, for a perceived lack of consistency, sometimes over a long span of time, on some important matter. Can you create a short list of contemporary Americans—celebrities in one realm or another—who have faced this problem, and describe briefly the controversy in each case? When we select the words of public figures as representative commentary on national issues, how much attention can we pay, and should we pay, to the broader context: the life and the other words associated with this author or speaker?

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Native Americans: Struggle and Survival

At various moments in your experience with American literature, you may have discussed the complications and challenges of engaging with Native American authors and voices. We face problems related to the passage of time and cultural difference. Translation is also an alienating and uncertain process; and in so many discussions and good-faith readings, there is the persistent implication that the indigenous peoples of North America are peoples of the past.

1. To think more freshly and creatively about “struggle and survival” as part of the Native American experience, search on the web for contemporary Native American newspapers and web sites. Many of these nations maintain a lively and eloquent presence in the world of print and cyberspace. Visit some of these sites, or check for Native American newspapers and magazines in a library, and comment about explicit and implicit efforts to represent Native American cultural experience as a phenomenon of the twenty-first century, and not just of bygone times.

2. Controversy continues about the Native American presence in the encompassing culture of the United States: what that presence is, and should be, and who should control it. Part of that presence is visual, rather than verbal. In various towns in the Southwest, you can sleep in concrete wigwam motels or buy kachinas (representations of Hopi and Zuni spirits) made in the Philippines; in Florida and on the East Coast, you can buy headdresses, moccasins, and beadwork manufactured in China; elsewhere in the country, you can find “Indians” in advertisements for restaurants and casinos; and practically everywhere you can see representations of Native Americans on ball caps and tee-shirts sold to fans of college and professional sports teams. In some places and moments, these uses of Native American culture cause controversy; in other situations, similar images don’t draw much attention. What’s the difference? Think about examples that you have seen, and discuss with others the values that you think should apply to sorting this all out—deciding, in other words, where respectful or legitimate representation might end and caricature or stereotype might begin.