In-class questions for August 21

Answer the following questions, drawing on course readings.

1. What are the roles of religion, mythology, spirituality, or similar ideologies in building community?

2. What is the relationship of the suburbs to war?

3. Reread the section of Blue Sky Dream where Beers’s father struggles to establish a lawn. What’s at stake in this process, and who are the stakeholders?

4. Historically and today, do Americans find uniformity desirable in their communities? If so, is it the same kind of uniformity criticized by Pete Seeger in “Little Boxes”? Explain.

5. What is David Beers’s “tribe”? Why were they so influential? Are they still powerful today?

6. What role does race play in the building of American communities? Where is race explicitly addressed? Where is it implicitly addressed, and how can you tell?

7. What were the imagined threats to American communities in the mid-20th century? And in The Village? And in our lives today? What has changed, what has not, and why?

8. Why does Robert Bruegmann praise the suburbs? Does he appreciate them for the same reasons Beers’s parents appreciated the Valley of Heart’s Delight?