Kulturraumstudien USA, Homework for January 6th, 2020

*** Please be advised that our institute holds classes on Jan. 6th!***

For homework, please have a look at the objects listed on this page. In your opinion, which objects definitely belong in the collection and which ones are questionable? Are there any missing that you would include? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/101-objects-that-made-america-2254692/

Bear in mind that the collection was inspired by this project: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nrtd2/episodes/Downloads

To my Erasmus students / exam re-takers taking the exam in Jan (please note that some review will be included in our last two sessions in Jan.; I encourage you to bring in questions):

Concerning review for the exam, please review all of the posts from the blog (can be easily accessed by typing "Kulturraumstudien" into the search engine at the top lefthand corner of the blog webpage) and your notes from homework and class. You should be familiar with the following terms and able to use them naturally in analysis: culture, text, discourse, collective consciousness, prototype, consensus, frames, scripts, localization, canon, democracy, capitalism, metonymy, conceptual metaphor, orientational metaphor, cultural memes, signs, symbols, indexes/indices, icons. You should be familiar with how the electoral college works, the Bill of Rights, the context for the "space race", the Civil Rights Movement, the effects of the Civil War on modern-day race relations, the notion of Reconstruction, how the US does (and doesn't) talk about class, ways of dividing up the US.  Remember: I am predominantly interested in how this background knowledge feeds into your analysis of cultural artifacts on the exam. (Why are we seeing/hearing what we're seeing/hearing and how is it a product of its time and cultural context?)