Virginia Reinburg
Associate Professor of History
This is a Capstone course, which means it will help you reflect on your life and work for the past four years, and point toward your life after Boston College. I hope taking this course will encourage you to live reflectively in the larger communities and worlds you inhabit. The topic of the course is history and memory. Individuals remember, but communities and societies also remember. Memory preserves the past, whether a personal past or a collective one, and makes it available for present use. In this course we will focus on memory as personal recollection, as well as collective memory or history. Readings will include history, memoirs, and first-person accounts. Discussion of readings will engage issues of citizenship and community, vocation/work, spirituality, and relationships.
Tentative Reading List
- Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student 2005.
- Augustine, Confessions, book 10.
- Yi-Fu Tuan, Who am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit 1999.
- James Carroll, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us 1996.
- Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-43 1981.
- David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory 2001.
- Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust 1999.
- Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning 2002.
- Jennifer Lash, On Pilgrimage 1991.
- James Martin, Lourdes Diary: Seven Days at Masabieille, America, vol. 191, no. 3 (August 2, 2004), and vol. 191, no. 4 (August 16, 2004).
Assignments:
- Students will keep a journal and write at the beginning of every class meeting about the reading or other work for the week.
- A short essay commenting on college transcript.
- An interview about vocation and work.
- An intellectual and moral autobiography, written in stages over the semester.