Literature & American History — A Cross-Reading

You live in a building full of people who have read things — novels stuffed into bookshelves, news articles skimmed at breakfast, history absorbed in high school and half-remembered ever since. This course is an invitation to bring all of that into a room together, once a week, and look at it more carefully.

We will read American history and American literature side by side — not as two separate subjects that happen to share a timeline, but as two disciplines that have been in active conversation across every generation of this country’s life. A great document and a great literary work set in the same moment, read together in the same ninety minutes, will tell you something that neither can tell you alone.

I have spent my career teaching both. That is not an accident; it is the premise of this course. I hope you will join us.

— James F. Mulhern

This course meets in the community room of 2601, and it is free, non-graded, and open to all adult residents. You do not need a background in literature or history. You need only a willingness to read closely and to think out loud with your neighbors. All readings will be provided or linked; nothing will cost you anything. The only requirement is showing up with the reading done and something on your mind.

This is a sixteen-session course that pairs a primary historical document with a literary work from or responding to the same historical moment. Each session asks two questions: What does the document tell us that the literature cannot? And What does the literature tell us that the document cannot?

The course is possible — and, I would argue, uniquely possible — because of a fact about my career. I have served as Department Chair in both English and Social Studies. Most teachers spend their lives in one discipline or the other. I have had formal authority over both curricula, both sets of standards, both bodies of knowledge. This course is the direct result of that double life. It is the course I have always wanted to teach, and your building is where I want to teach it.

The architecture is simple: a primary source and a literary text. A speech and a poem. A constitutional amendment and a great essay. A presidential address and a novel’s opening chapter. We read the document first — on its own terms, as a document — and then we read the literary work, and then we put them in conversation. In that conversation, history and literature do something neither discipline can do alone.

This is not a partisan course. Primary documents are read as documents — as historical artifacts shaped by particular people in particular circumstances — not as platforms for contemporary political argument. Literary works are honored as the artistic, imaginative, and moral responses they are, not as ammunition. You will find documents and literary voices across the full spectrum of American political and moral experience in this syllabus. That range is deliberate. The point is to read with rigor and generosity, not to arrive at a predetermined verdict.

This is not a lecture course. I will provide context and guide discussion, but I will not spend ninety minutes talking. You will.

This is not a test. There are no grades, no quizzes, no papers — though there are optional writing prompts for those who want them. The only measure of success is the quality of conversation we build together.

Where: Community Room, 2601 When: Weekly, 90 minutes — day and time to be confirmed Cost: Free Credit: None Prerequisites: None Class size: Open to all residents Materials: All readings distributed as printed packets or linked PDFs — at no cost

Each ninety-minute session is divided into three roughly equal movements:

First thirty minutes — The Document. We read the primary historical document closely. We ask: Who wrote this, and for what audience? What does it want? What is it trying to accomplish politically, legally, or rhetorically? What does it leave out? What assumptions does it carry?

Second thirty minutes — The Literary Work. We turn to the poem, story, novel excerpt, or essay. We ask: What kind of text is this? What formal choices has the author made, and why? What emotional or moral register is it working in? What is it doing that a document cannot do?

Final thirty minutes — The Cross-Reading. We put the two texts in conversation. We ask: Does the literary work endorse the historical document, resist it, mourn it, celebrate it, or complicate it? What can we see in the document now that we could not see before reading the literature — and vice versa?

This is the heart of the course. The cross-reading is where the two disciplines illuminate each other.

• Every session will start and end on time.
• You will always know what to read before you arrive — no surprises.
• Your reading will be provided; you will never have to buy a book.
• All perspectives held in good faith will be treated with respect.
• The conversation will go where the texts lead it, not where I decide in advance it should go.
• I will share my own thinking openly — including where the texts still puzzle or move me.

• Come having done the reading. Even one close reading is enough; deep familiarity is not required.
• Bring a pencil and mark the text. Underline a sentence that surprises you. Circle a word that does not fit. Put a question mark in the margin. These marks are the beginning of discussion.
• Speak up, even uncertainly. The best questions in a seminar are the ones that begin: I may be wrong about this, but…
• Listen as actively as you speak.
• Leave partisan certainties at the door. The texts will surprise you if you let them.

Primary source — A document or artifact created at the time of the historical event being studied, by a participant or witness: the Declaration of Independence, a photograph from a battlefield, a contemporary diary. Distinguished from a secondary source, which is an account or analysis produced later by someone who was not present.

Secondary source — An interpretation, analysis, or account of historical events created after the fact, drawing on primary sources: a history textbook, a biography, a scholarly article. This course privileges primary sources, but secondary sources are valuable for providing context.

Historiography — The study of how history is written: who writes it, from what vantage point, using what sources, and with what assumptions. Historiography asks not just what happened but how we know what happened, and who decided.

Periodization — The practice of dividing history into named eras or periods (the Reconstruction Era, the Progressive Era, the Cold War). Periodization is always a choice — an argument about what matters — and different historians periodize differently.

Rhetoric — The art of effective persuasion through language. In this course, we study rhetoric in both directions: how political documents persuade, and how literary works use rhetorical strategies to make aesthetic and moral arguments.

Occasional writing — Writing produced for a specific occasion or event: an inaugural address, a war declaration, a letter accepting a Nobel Prize. The occasion shapes and constrains the writing in ways that purely expressive writing is not constrained.

The public letter — A letter addressed to a specific individual or group but written for a public audience. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook” are both public letters — intimate in form, universal in ambition.

The speech as text — The written version of a speech, which differs in important ways from the speech as delivered. We study speeches on the page, attentive to their written rhetoric, while acknowledging that they were composed to be heard.

Manifesto — A public declaration of intentions, beliefs, or principles, typically by a political movement or individual. The Declaration of Independence is sometimes read as a manifesto; Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” has elements of one.

Jeremiad — A prolonged lamentation or moral complaint, named for the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. In American literature and oratory, the jeremiad is a specific form: it praises the country’s founding ideals, mourns the distance between those ideals and present reality, and calls for a return to first principles. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a powerful example; so is Douglass’s Fourth of July speech.

The Federalist tradition — The tradition of political argument descending from The Federalist Papers (1787–1788): legalistic, rational, concerned with institutional design, mistrustful of passion and faction, committed to the proposition that government can be improved through argument and deliberate choice.

The antislavery tradition — The literary, rhetorical, and political tradition of American writing that opposed slavery, from the founding era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. It includes slave narratives, abolitionist journalism, political speeches, and novels. Douglass, Stowe, and Lincoln all participate in it, in very different ways.

Abolitionist literature — Writing produced in the service of the movement to abolish slavery, typically before the Civil War. It includes works of testimony (slave narratives), sentimental fiction (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and oratory (Douglass’s speeches). It was the first major American literary movement motivated by explicit political purpose.

Witness literature — Writing that bears testimony to historical events, typically traumatic ones, from a position of direct experience. Whitman’s war poems, O’Brien’s Vietnam stories, and the literature of Japanese American internment are examples. Witness literature raises distinctive questions: What does the writer owe to the truth? What does fidelity to experience permit, and what does it require?

An essay by James F. Mulhern

There is a question my students in both disciplines have asked me, in slightly different forms, across thirty years of teaching. The history students ask it as skepticism: Does it really matter what the poets thought? The English students ask it as anxiety: Do we have to know the history to understand the poem? My answer, in both classrooms, has always been the same: you are asking the wrong question. The real question is what each discipline can see that the other cannot — and why you need both.

History, at its most rigorous, is the discipline of evidence. It asks: What happened? Who decided? What records remain, and what records were destroyed or never made? It submits every claim to the test of documentation. The Declaration of Independence is a historical artifact — a piece of parchment produced on a specific date by specific men with specific interests, some of them honorable and some of them self-serving, and it has a history of use and misuse that is itself part of the historical record. The historian teaches you to read that document as a document — to ask who it was written for, what it was designed to accomplish, and what it deliberately left unresolved.

But history, precisely because of its rigor about evidence, has limited access to interiority. Documents tell us what was decided, argued, proclaimed. They rarely tell us how it felt to be inside that decision — or outside it, looking in. The Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause is fourteen words of sovereign law. Those fourteen words do not tell you what it felt like to be a Black American living in the decades after those words were ratified, watching them be systematically ignored by the courts. W.E.B. Du Bois tells you that. The amendment opens a legal possibility; Du Bois inhabits the human reality.

Literature, at its most serious, is the discipline of interiority. It asks: What was it like? What did it feel from the inside? What did language itself do to the human beings who lived through this? It has access to consciousness, to ambivalence, to the body, to grief that has no political remedy. When Whitman describes dressing a soldier’s wounds in “The Wound-Dresser” — the specific fractures, the heat, the eyes turning toward him — he is doing something that Lincoln’s Second Inaugural cannot do, for all its grandeur. He is making us present. He is making the cost of the war something we cannot abstract away.

But literature, precisely because of its power to make the particular vivid, has its own distortions. A novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe can make slavery emotionally real to readers who might resist a political argument — but it can also sentimentalize, simplify, and occasionally appropriate the very experience it seeks to honor. Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” makes westward expansion feel joyful, inevitable, almost sacred — and in doing so, it becomes complicit in an erasure. Literary language is not innocent. When we read it alongside the historical document, the document’s specificity becomes a corrective to the literature’s seductions, just as the literature’s depth becomes a corrective to the document’s abstraction.

This is the double correction at the heart of this course. We read primary historical documents first — on their own terms, as the political and legal instruments they were. And then we read literary works that respond to, resist, celebrate, or mourn the same historical moment. The documents keep the literature honest about power. The literature keeps the documents honest about people.

I have been asked, in designing this course, whether it is appropriate to pair a presidential address with a poem — whether the two forms are so different that the comparison is unfair to one or the other. My answer is that the comparison is not only appropriate but necessary. Both the presidential address and the poem are language. Both are made by human beings with intentions, limitations, and blind spots. Both have audiences they are trying to persuade or move. Both have formal constraints that shape what they can say and what they must leave unsaid. Reading them together does not reduce either to the level of the other — it elevates the conversation between them.

And that conversation, I have found, is more alive than either discipline alone. The history student who reads Lincoln’s Second Inaugural with Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser” comes away understanding the war differently. The English student who reads “The Wound-Dresser” alongside the Inaugural comes away understanding the poem differently. The resident of this building who reads both, in ninety minutes, on a weekday evening, in a room with neighbors — that person, I hope, comes away understanding something about what it means to live in the country that produced both.

That is what I have tried to teach, in two disciplines, for thirty years. It is what I intend to teach here.

I am James F. Mulhern — a Professor of English, an AP Consultant, and the recipient of a fully funded Writing Fellowship at Exeter College, University of Oxford. I have spent my professional life in schools and universities, teaching writing, literature, and the humanities.

But the thing that makes this particular course possible is a fact about my administrative life that is genuinely unusual: I have served as Department Chair in both English and Social Studies. Not one or the other — both. Most teachers spend their careers in a single department, mastering a single discipline’s standards, vocabulary, and ways of seeing. I have had the rare privilege and responsibility of leading both, of being formally accountable to both curricula, both sets of teachers, and both ways of approaching the human record.

I did not plan it that way when I began teaching. It happened because I was willing to go where I was needed, and because I had always been, at heart, a reader who could not choose between a great document and a great novel when the same moment in history had produced both. That double life — in English and in Social Studies, in literature and in history — has shaped everything I believe about how educated people should read.

This course is the direct expression of that belief. It is not a literature course that happens to include some history, nor a history course that uses literature as illustration. It is a course built on the premise that the two disciplines need each other — that they are, at their deepest level, both trying to answer the same question: What happened to us, and what does it mean?

I am glad to be teaching it here, in this building, for this community. I have studied at Oxford during my Exeter College Writing Fellowship and taught in university lecture halls and in high school classrooms. I do not think any of those settings is more important than this one. The conversation that happens when neighbors who have lived different versions of American history sit down together to read the documents and literature of that history — that conversation is the one I have most wanted to be in.

Come as you are. Bring the text. Bring your questions.

The community room is open.

Course materials are provided free of charge. All readings are either in the public domain or available as free digital borrows through the Internet Archive — no library card or purchase required. For questions, contact Mr. Mulhern through the building management office.

See also: art-of-telling.com