This week Professor Krase will discuss the auto/biography project in more detail. Then we’ll investigate the demographics of New York “then” and “now.” Sara will be giving a visual tour of Williamsburg, Brooklyn “then and now” followed by a tutorial of how to access census data using Social Explorer, and then you will create your own “then” and “now” census maps of New York City to be included on your individual e-portfolios.
So you made a beautiful map and now you want to add it to your e-portfolio?? Follow these four steps:
- Click on “Share” in the upper right hand corner and copy the number/letter part: http://www.socialexplorer.com/869f3cd4ed/view
- Find the page or post you want to add it to and click on the “text” tab
- Paste this code, with your numbers there instead of the red text: “socialexplorerembed code=”THE NUMBER THAT YOU COPIED FROM THE SOCIAL EXPLORER EMBED CODE” **except use brackets [ ] instead of those outside quotes
- Click update!
For next week we’ll read:
Lyford, Joseph P. “The View” in The Airtight Cage; A Study of New York’s West Side. (1966).
Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan. “Introduction,” in Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. (1970).
Gottehrer, Barry. “Middle Class on the Run” in New York City in Crisis [a Study in Depth of Urban Sickness]. (1965).
United States. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. 1968.
Jerome Krase
February 6, 2017 — 11:44 am
We’ll start off every class with a short review of our previous class so that we can discuss the issues raised and fill in the holes if there are any, and there usually are. For example, last week I tried to give a general overview of my attitude toward the Sixties and my pedagogy or attitude toward learning. BTW, I anticipate I will learn as much from this class as you because as you will discover today that for most of the 1960s I was elsewhere.
Also, I try to start each new topic with questions… Remember that I think one can’t learn unless you have questions you want answered.
For my 1960s bio I would consider such big and small questions as “What was the neighborhood in which I lived like in the 60s?” Given my class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender etc, what would my politics or ideology be?” If I could vote, who would I vote for/” “who would be my cultural heroes/” “What would my attitude toward the Women’s Movement(s) be?” “would I be an anti-war protestor or a silent majority “hard Hat?” “What music, dance steps, art, movies, tv programs, celebrities, clothing and other ‘styles’ like haircuts, would be my favorites?”
“How did the rapidly failing economy impact me and my family?” “What jokes would I laugh at?”
C. Wright Mills was a Columbia University scholar who wrote my mantra:
Jerome Krase
February 6, 2017 — 11:51 am
C. Wright Mills lucidly described the problem of modern alienation and argued that making sense out of our confusing existence is the goal of the “Sociological Imagination”. The persons that Mills describes below, with a minor edit from me in quotes, could be theoretical portraits of New York City residents in the 1960s trying to understand the rapidly changing world around them:
Nowadays “people” often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel…. Seldom aware of the intricate connections between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history–making in which they may take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them. (1959:3-4)
C. Wright Mills, C.W. (1959), The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press).