General Seminar Information

Application Deadline: April 11

Apply to a Seminar

• Date: April 25, 2007
• Location: National Archives and Records Administration - Waltham
• Time:9AM - 3PM

Address and Directions

Using current scholarship on the process and nature of suburbanization and its subsequent impact on American consumer culture, this seminar will explore the locales and lifestyles that many of us take for granted. Dr. Steven Corey will lead teachers through a discussion that begins with the major suburban developments that followed World War Two and continues through today when high energy costs and a reliance on huge shopping malls are forcing many to rethink the viability of suburban sprawl.

 

• Dr. Steven Corey
• Professor of History
• Worcester State College

Steven H. Corey is Professor and Chair of the Urban Studies Department at Worcester State College in Worcester, Massachusetts where he has taught urban, social, and environmental history and public policy since 1995. He earned his Ph.D. in American history from New York University where he completed a dissertation on the history of solid waste management in New York City from the colonial era to the first Earth Day in 1970. Prior to Worcester State, Dr. Corey served as research curator for Garbage! The History and Politics of Trash in New York City, a noted public history exhibit at the New York Public Library (1994-1995) and an instructor of history at Yeshiva University in Manhattan and The University of Rhode Island where he also earned his MA and BA in history.

Bibliography

• Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. [Chapters 5, 6, & 7.]



• Kunstler, James Howard. “Making Other Arrangements: A Wake-up Call to a Citizenry in the Shadow of Oil Scarcity.” Orion (January/February 2007). http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/om/07-1om/Kunstler.html.



• “Locating the Suburb,” Harvard Law Review. 117, no.6 (April 2004): 2003-2022.

Discussion Questions

1. How did the nature of suburbanization after WW II create a social landscape where Americans began to share less common physical space and public culture? How did residential inequality in suburbia represent a challenge to the democratic promise of a Consumer’s Republic based on mass consumption?



2. How did the new landscape of mass consumption, represented by shopping malls, forge a metropolitan society segmented by race, class, and gender? In what ways were the responses of city leaders to the loss of community marketplaces a replication of the exclusiveness and social and economic inequality of the suburbs



3. Do you agree that suburbia is a complicated subject? What is the so-called “Slippery Suburb” and is it possible to construct a theoretical framework that captures all of the various images and facets of modern suburban life?



4. What is James Howard Kunstler’s argument about the relationship between suburbs, automobiles, and environmental sustainability? Do you agree that we must return to traditional cities, towns, and neighborhoods and a productive rural landscape that is more than strictly scenic or recreational? What would this mean for Massachusetts in general and the Boston metropolitan area specifically?



5. In what ways does your daily life reflect the post-war trends in consumerism, suburbanization, and auto-dependency examined by the readings?

Address and Directions

• NARA-Waltham
  380 Trapelo Road
  Waltham, MA



• From the North
  
  
  Follow 95 South until exit 28
  At the end of the exit ramp, take a left onto Trapelo Road
• Follow Trapelo Road for almost 3 miles
• NARA will be on your right