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Vermont Life‘s Vermont:  Making Meanings for the Green Mountain State

Students in this course will work collaboratively to build an online history project aimed at a wide audience. Since 1946, Vermont Life magazine has created particular images of the landscape, culture, and recreational possibilities in the state. Our goal will be to construct a website that examines the evolution of these images and the meaning of the state over time, paying particular attention to consumerism, the environment, tourism, urban-rural contrasts, local food movements, and the ways that race, class, and gender influence all of these.
Course Learning Goals:
1) To build critical, interpretive, and analytic skills in the study of popular culture, with regard to visual, written, and material sources.
2) To analyze and form arguments about how sources convey meanings of race, class, gender, region, environment, place, and nature.
3) To build facility with some digital tools and tactics in service of analysis and communication.
4) To communicate argument and evidence to public audiences (as opposed to one professor) on a website.

Some key themes:
1) Vermont Life’s construction of meanings of Vermont over time, 1940s-2017
2) Post-WWII tourism in the United States
3) The meanings of anti-modernism/modernism in postwar US culture
4) The meanings of authenticity/”the real”
5) Gender, race, and class
6) The meaning of the “rural” in postwar United States culture