RHE 309K, Fall 2009

In the early years of the republic, Thomas Jefferson imagined the democracy of the United States as a society of independent farmers, a pastoral picture that has persisted into the 21st century in the ideal of the American suburbs. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan borrowed a phrase from one of the first Puritan settlers of the continent, "the city on a hill," to describe another, more urban conception of the American landscape. Indeed, throughout the history of the United States, images and ideas of the city and the country have figured as critical terms in the country's political debates. This course explores that American rhetorical landscape, from the writings of Henry David Thoreau about his social experiment at Walden Pond, to the social statements of the Dogtown skateboarders in their reclamation of suburban L.A.