- How were settlement houses different from the Americanization programs directed at Native Americans and Mexicans? What demographics were important to each of the three movements?
- What criteria did the American Indian Citizenship Act (1919) use to give certain Native Americans citizenship? How does this definition of being an American relate to other subjects we have discussed?
- In the documentary we watched in class, Dorothea Lange asked, “What actually is the human condition?” Her photographs could also be seen as a documentation of “the American condition” during the period in which she worked. What do they say about this?
- We talked about some of the American responses to the Great Depression, including shame, fear, and blame. What aspect of American culture caused Americans to feel shameful of their personal state, and of the state of the country? Is this aspect still a part of our culture today?
- Why do you think Americans turned to the memory of the Civil War in the aftermath of the Great Depression? Do you think they returned to an actual memory or a “willfully misremembered” one?
- Graham Clarke talks about the “problematic nature of the photographic image as both arbiter of meaning and trace of the ‘real.’” In what ways are photographs not an exact mirror? What does this mean for the way we have to analyze photographs?
- What are some of the visual elements of photographs that can help us analyze them? What about the compositional elements?
- How did the technological advances in photographic technology in the 1850s change the way American Indians were photographed? In what ways was this photography, both before and after the advancements, sometimes inaccurate?
"Segregated Water Fountains, North Carolina" by Elliot Erwitt (1950)
"A Great Day in Harlem" by Art Kane (1958)
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