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McCarthy-Era Political Diatribes Inspire Undergraduate Research Projects
More than 900 first-year UCI
undergraduates came face to
face with the rhetoric of McCarthyism
and the Cold War era when librarians
visited their classrooms carrying
boxes of rare pamphlets. The context
was the Humanities Core course
in spring 2004, for
which librarians
collaborated with
Core faculty and
lecturers, utilizing
the evocative power
of original research
materials to actively
engage students
in planning their
research projects. In
forty-two sessions,
librarians placed rare
and fragile Special
Collections and
Archives research
material from the
1940s to 1960s into
the hands of students
for analysis and discussion.
This collaboration was led by Prof. Elizabeth Losh, Humanities Core Writing Director, and Manuscripts Librarian William Landis, who together had experimented with various methods of introducing Core students to primary research resources over the past two years.
Class sessions focused on each
student’s examination of a political
pamphlet as part of a guided exercise
designed to help them engage with
the item’s rhetorical stance and
its broader sociopolitical context.
The pamphlets represented a wide
variety of perspectives
on the issues of the
day, ranging from
conservative religious
perspectives on “the
communist threat” and
detailed articulations
of communist or
socialist party platforms, to transcripts of the
McCarthy hearings and
Clark Kerr’s testimony
on the University of
California controversy regarding
loyalty oaths.
Students contemplated questions such as these: Who wrote and
distributed the pamphlet? For what
purpose was it produced? What was
the author’s point of view? What
biases are evident? What about its
content or presentation intrigues
you? What is a research question for
which the pamphlet might be a good
primary source?
The subsequent round-robin
discussion of each pamphlet revealed
a high level of engagement on
the students’ part, fueled by their
fascination with both the survival of
ephemeral 50-year-old documents and
the unfettered opinions expressed by
the authors.
Student and faculty response to the
sessions was uniformly enthusiastic
and was noted as a highlight on many
course evaluations. The sessions
also stimulated hundreds of trips
to Special Collections and Archives
by students seeking primary source
material for their documentary
research papers, dramatically elevating
the department’s reading room traffic
throughout spring quarter.
UCI librarians are actively interested in exploring opportunities for more such teaching partnerships designed to teach lower-division undergraduates to find, understand, and effectively use primary sources in their research and writing projects.
For more information, contact Jackie Dooley, (jmdooley@uci.edu or x44935).
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