Making San Francisco American
October 24, 2012
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1835525.Making_San_Francisco_American Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906 by Barbara Berglund The San…
Barbara Berglund
Teaching: A commitment to showing how knowledge of the past is relevant to understanding the present shapes my approach to the range of courses I offer in U.S. cultural and social history: “U.S. Women’s History,” “History of the American West,” “19th-Century Social Movements,” “19th-Century Popular Culture,” “U.S. Cultural History,” and “Race, Class, and Gender in the 19th-Century U.S.” She is particularly interested in teaching students about how formations of race, class, and gender came into being, how they have changed over time, and how their historical legacies continue to influence our lives today. Her teaching methods and philosophy are organized around my desire to convey my enthusiasm for a subject to her students, her responsibility to guide them in the acquisition of critical reading and writing skills, and my faith in their abilities. Creating an open, active learning community in the classroom is among my highest priorities as an educator. Research: Her research explores the intersection of race, class, gender, and popular culture, often in the cities of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American West. It is motivated by my desire to reveal how seemingly mundane or innocuous cultural forms (e.g., magazines, restaurants, hotels, tourist venues, amusement parks, parades, music, photographs, museums, fairs, dance halls, department stores) are more often than not sites where power relations, the basis of American social order, are hard at work. In “Western Living Sunset Style in the 1920s and 1930s: The Middlebrow, the Civilized and the Modern,” an article published in the Western Historical Quarterly in 2006, she examine middlebrow culture in literature as well as the less well-traveled terrain of the domestic space of the modern home and reveal how visions of a regional aesthetic sensibility and a racialized, gendered, and class-inflected social order constructed and reinforced one another in the pages of a lifestyle magazine popular in the early-twentieth-century American West.
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