Prof. Richard Saunders Jr.  (Rich)
Department of History
116 Hardin Hall
Clemson University
Clemson SC 29634-0527
864-656-5373 (work)
864-654-2841 (home)
 (please no calls during the evening news hour, 6-7:30 ET)

SYLLABI (and reading lists) FOR FALL 2009 ARE POSTED BELOW.
Scroll down.  Way down, 'tll you come to "Syllabi for Prof. Saunders' Courses."

E-mail is airedal@clemson.edu (as in Airedale dog without the final "e"). But if you want my attention, call me, or make a hard copy and put a stamp on it. 

Tuscaloosa, 1990. Saunders is in front of the letter
 "B" in the word "Club."         

Wayne-O Bassett '10, Rich Saunders, Tyler Loftus '08 road trip to
                                                                                                                            the Beartooth Mountains of Montana, June, 2008.
Below: Rich Saunders and his dog Pete in the Bighorn Mountains
of Wyoming. In Pete's long [dog] life (1991-2005) he crossed the
Arctic Circle twice, the Cabot Strait three times and the Strait of
Belle Isle three times. He sailed the inside passage from Prince Rupert
to Port Hardy (British Columbia) aboard the Queen of the North which now
rests at the bottom of Wright Sound near Hartley Bay. Pete peed in every
state and province except Florida, Hawaii and Nunavut.

Read my newest book:
Railroads today carry nearly twice the tonnage they did in World War II, their supposed finest hour, and more than five times what they did at the beginning of the 20th century, their supposed heyday. Most people are unaware of this because they don't ride passenger trains much anymore, they know a lot of old rail lines in their hometown were torn out, and they see trucks on the    highway all the time. But those long container trains that roll through Clemson every hour on the Norfolk Southern--they represent the new face of railroading, and of the global interlock of commerce of which the railroads are a vital part.
    This book tell the story starting from the railroads' darkest hour, when the largest of them (Penn Central) was bankrupt and physically deteriorated. It continues through a period of uncertainty when government had to come to the rescue. Government--the Nixon Administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress, working together -- did so with a disciplined plan to lop off a lot of uneconomic branches and eliminate a lot of jobs--meaning some big shippers and powerful labor unions were going to take a hit. Bit it was a plan that had a chance to to create out of the ashes a viable railroad system. It worked. It worked so well that the result of the government's effort--Conrail--eventually re-entered the private sector as a roaring success. The Carter Administration's deregulation of the railroads--the Staggers Act of 1980--put the finishing touches on a revived, resurgent, financially strong freight rail system.
    This is the story of Main Lines. It is a good story of public policy, business strategy, business executives--the honest ones who take real pride in providing a quality service. There is not much choo-choo nostolgia here, although there is time to shed a tear over the loss of the once great Rock Island Line, the ill-fated Milwaukee Road, and the most beautiful mountain railroad in the world, the Royal Gorge Route of the old Denver & Rio Grande Western. Passenger trains play only a small role in the story, but enough to make a reader think 'wouldn't it be neat if we had good trains to ride on today--practical, and an awful lot of fun.'
    I am the first one to tell the story as a comprehensive whole. It is a complex story--Louis XIV of France comes up three times, Fidel Castro only twice, to give you an idea of how wide we must range to pull the story together.
    Read it--then go down to the station right here in Clemson and watch a mighty container train roll by. Feel the ground shake. Feel the awe of  that speed and energy so perfectly chanelled on those rails. Let your imagination wonder what's in all those containers? Where are they all coming from? Where are they all going? who made all that stuff? Who packed it all? Who will buy it? How does the railroad keep all those little boxes straight, and deliver them on time to all those shippers? It is an awesome and thrilling thing to witness. And don't go on the tracks or you will be reduced to dogfood in a split second.

Railroading today. Canadian Pacific in Kicking Horse Canyon, Photo by the author.

Read my new book:
I think I have told a good story, but this book  is not choo-choo nostalgia. Nor is it particularly about passenger trains. Most of the work done by American railroads is hauling freight and that is mostly what this book is about. It is a story of business strategy, transportation economics, transportation technology, commodity movements, regulatory law, labor productivity, labor relations, and mostly about the people in railroading and in government who made it all happen.
    For my students who are just curious about what their professor is up to, I suggest reading chapter four "Troubles, 1950-1964" and chapter fourteen, "The Fall of the Penn Central". Four  is a good journey into political economy in a time when government fostered the development of air and highway transportation and railroads began to struggle as private enterprises. Fourteen is a story of everything going very wrong.  It's always fun to read about other people screwing up, especially when they are doing it so royally.

CLEMSON folks may be most interested in the story of D.W. "Bill" Brosnan, pp. 288-306. He was  a Georgia Tech grad who was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Clemson in 1964, and his grandson, Dr. Walter Brosnan, is a Clemson graduate.  Brosnan was the president of the Southern Railway in the 1960s. Southern is now a part of Norfolk Southern, of which the line through Clemson is a part. He was one of the 20th century's true geniuses of transportation and in many ways, the originator of North America's lean, productive freight railroad system of today.
    In the Brosnan story, you will read about the "Rathole", the corridor between Cincinnati and Chattanooga, which once carried famous passenger trains like the Carolina Special between Chicago and Charleston, and the Royal Palm between the Great Lakes and Florida, but was such a difficult route across the eroded Cumberland Plateau--heavy grades, tunnels and high trestles-- that it was an obstacle to freight.  Brosnan figured out how to open it up and turn it into one of the mighty freight arteries of the nation, getting resources to, and creating markets for  southern industry. It is one of the often overlooked factors in creating the economic boom of the Sunbelt.  You will read about  the Big John, a giant hopper car conceived by Brosnan for carrying grain in bulk. This one, rather simple concept raised the productivity of, and permanently altered the economics of,  midwestern agriculture and southern livestock and poultry operations, even helping to change the American diet by lowering the relative cost of meat. It inadvertently became the focus of a fight over rates that once and for all drew back the curtain on the ineffectiveness of federal rate  regulation, no matter how well intentioned regulation was when it was initiated.
Brosnan was a flawed genius, an autocratic tyrant who fired people and canceled their pensions for the slightest provocation, creating a virtual reign of terror at the Southern in the years he was in charge. Finally his board of directors decided that Brosnan's firing the railroad's most talented people, stifling creative thinking by subordinates and declaring war on other railroads, the railroad brotherhoods and the U.S. Government (the Interstate Commerce Commission) was not in the Southern's long term interest. When the board voted not to waive the mandatory retirement age for Brosnan as they had for every other president, chairman Harry deButts said sadly "I was the one who hired him. I should be the one to tell him." Whereupon, Brosnan began a new career on Canada's iron ore-hauling Quebec, North Shore & Labrador Railroad, creating for them the same lean, productive transportation machine as he had at the Southern, along with all the  labor animosity and managerial upheaval.
    Altogether, it is a good story of technology, economics, strong personalities and human interest.

Mark Hemphill, editor of Trains  which is an important publication for all railroaders,  said Saunders "makes a messy subject gripping" and called the book "neither a polemic nor a binfull of dusty facts, this is railroad history at its best." January 2002, p 92. <>    These books are available at the Clemson University Library. Any bookstore can order them or you can order them from online book retailers.


SYLLABI FOR PROF. SAUNDERS'
COURSES

These are the most recent syllabi for each course. Syllabi for upcoming semesters are usually not ready until after final exams the previous semester. WARNING: DO NOT BUY BOOKS FOR AN UPCOMING SEMESTER ON THE BASIS OF A PREVIOUS SEMESTER'S SYLLABUS.

NOTICE:  These educational materials are primarily for my students. They are enoucraged to print a single copy of items they need for their personal study. All are other visitors to this site are welcome to print a single copy of items they wish for their personal use. Everyone is welcome to quote from the material with proper attribution and citation. ALL OTHER RIGHTS ARE RESERVED. No other printing or distribution of this material is permitted without permission.

1. If you click on the COURSE NUMBER you will get the current syllabus.
2. If you click on  STUDY TERMS, you will get a list of important proper names for that particular unit of the course that are likely to come up as identification on exams.
3. If you click on NOTES or on topical subjects listed under a course heading, you will get Saunders' own notes, fleshed out considerably from what you got in class. These are vaulable study tools but are no substitue for coming to class and absorbing material at a measured pace across a 50-minute span. Nor will simply memorizing these notes get you a good grade. You have to understand the material so you can reason with it and reach conclusions from it to get a good grade. Rote memorizing gets you a C--not much more.

Key words are in CAPS. These are words that are potential identification items for examinations. Students should make a list of them and see if you can talk about them (to yourself, mostly). If so, you probably have a pretty good grip on the material.

Items in italics are the professor's own impressions, judgments and opinions. They are presented as the reasoning of someone who has studied these events for many years (and in the Post-World War II era, lived through them and has thought about them a lot since). It should be interesting to students to see how the professor reasoned through to his own personal conclusion. But on these matters, students are invited to reason through to their own conclusions. Italics means take it under advisement. These items are offered in good faith. They are not here just to make you mad. You don't have to agree. Think it through for yourself.

My suggestion to students is to visit these notes about once a week, reading them paragraph by paragraph, asking yourself after each one "do I remember this from class? Can I explain this?" If you wait to the night before the exam, it will be overwhelming and do you little good.

HIST 173   WESTERN CIVILIZATION II, SEVENTEENTH TO TWENTIETH CENTURIES

PART 1.  1648-1815
01  Absolutism
02  Scientific Revolution
03  The Enlightenment
04 Quebec & Yorktown 
05 The French Revolution
06  Napoleon

First Examination

IMPORTANT ANNOUCEMENT ABOUT YOUR SECOND HOUR  EXAMINATION

<>The exam was originally scheduled for October 3 because I thought I was going to pilot of van full of alums to the wedding of anohter alum in Egg Harbor, Wisconsin. (It's a rugby thing.) But the road trip fell through.We are going to have to fly. So I will be here for all classes. Octobr 3 was way too early to give such an exam anyway.
Your exam will come at the logical time to have that exam, after the units on industrialization, nationalism and imperialism, going right up to the end of the 19th century and starting to lap over into the 20th century. THAT WILL BE FRIDAY, OCT. 23.

If this causes special problems for you, I am very flexible about makeups, especialy if I am the one who changed the exam time. Just ask. However, any makeup must be made up before Friday of the following week, before we give the exam papers back. I am very flexible about arranging times but IT IS UP TO YOU to come to me and arrange the time to take your makeup.  (Please note, along this line, at the final examination, there are all kinds of deadlines and schedule constraints and make-ups are most certainly NOT OK on the final.)

PART 2. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (to 1914)

07  Conservatism and Liberalism: the Post-Napoleonic Settlements
08  Industrialism
09  Nationalism
10  Imperialism
Second Examination

PART 3. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Please note: spring 2009--portions of imperialism on Africa, China, Japan and the Ottoman Empire will be included on the final exam.
11  The Crisis of Capitalism
12 The Coming of the Great War
13 The Great War and Russian Revolution
14 Grim Year 1919
15 Jazz and Anxiety
16  The Great Depression
       World War II

You are responsible for all material up to the end of World War II in August, 1945, but nothing after. However I post the notes for a postwar unit in case you are interested. It represents how I think Western Civ should end if we only had just a little more time.
Postwar World

FINAL EXAM

Your final exam will be like a third hour examination, entirely on the 20th century (and including that little bit of Ottoman material that wasn't covered before the 2nd hour exam). However, there will be one extra essay, the only part of the exam that goes back beyond the 20th century. It is given below. By giving it in advance, I intend for you to think about it and at least do some outlining before you come into the exam. It is a blocklbuster of a question. It is where I expect "A" students to soar.  There is no one answer or not even one way to answer it. I am looking for a thoughtful, artciulate, reasoned, nuanced essay that sounds like it comes from an educated mind trying to make sense of a large historical problem. Remember, history is built on facts, and so should this essay, at least references to specific people or events--Napoleon or Jefferson or Bismarck, for example.

Here is the question:

What became of Enlightenment values in the 19th and 20th centuries?

There is more posted about your final exam and final grades on BlackBoard.

HIST 305   JAZZ AGE, DEPRESSION AND WAR; THE UNITED STATES, 1918-1945

01     The Progressive Impulse
02     Disillusionment, the Versailles Settlements and the World After    
03     Struggle for America's Soul, 1919
04 The First Mass Consumption Boom
05     Components of the Jazz Age
06     Crash and Deflation
         The New Deal
         War Clouds
         Danzig to Pearl Harbor
         America at War
         Hiroshima 

HIST 306   THE UNITED STATES IN THE AGE OF THE COLD WAR, VIETNAM AND CIVIL RIGHTS, 1945-1975

Saunders regards all of his courses as exercises in HISTORICAL LITERACY--meaning an acquantance with the historical referneces that come up in the press or in literature and films, in conversations among educated people, references that you should be aware of of and know about.

In these notes that are posted, I have written you a textbook. It is the best textbook you will ever find on this era, espeically in the second half of the course. I have two published textbooks in front of me that publishers wanted me to use—William Chafe’s The Unfinished Journey from Oxford and Cary Donaldson’s The Making of Modern America from Rowman & Littlefield. Both are expensive. Neither one has much in it. Both are as dull as oatmeal mostly because they are too timid to wade into anything controversial or speculative. Saunders thinks controversy and speculation are what give history excitement, what make it a dynamic discipline—what makes it fun. Every bit of the good stuff has been squeezed out of those books. I am sure each of the authors got tenure or promotion for their effort and made lots of money out of students’ pockets but neither one of their books holds a candle to the wealth of material you have here for free.

On the other hand, you are probably getting here more than you would like. I know a few of you are in college just to get your tickets punched to the next station in life and want as little work as you can get by with. I like to think most Clemson students really do want to learn things and be knowledeable and competent when they graduate. I know this is a lot of material. Do I expect you to memorize all of it? No of course not. I can’t hold it all in my head. That’s why I use PowerPoints and notes. I have given you not just the bare-bone outline, but enough juicy detail so you can remember the big picture, and also some ideas about what it all means or how it relates to latter-day situations in out own time. Ideas, of course, are things to think about, to debate, and to question.

Part 1
01   Building Peace, 1945-1947
02   Containment and its Critics
03   Korean War
04   McCarthy and His "Ism"
05   The Great Fifties Economic Boom
06   Ozzie, Harriet & Elvis 
07   The Brown Decision
08   Sputnik to the New Frontier
Midterm Exam

Part 2
09   Camelot
10   Vietnam: Wading In (to 1963)
11   Vietnam: Into the Quagmire (1963-1967)
        Selma and the Great Society
        Summer of Love
14    1968, the Year of National Nervous Breakdown
15    Stagflation-Weaterhmen-Cambodia, 1969-1970
16   Wage/Price Controls-Spies-Enemies-the Watergate Breakin, 1971-1972         
17    Nixon goes to Beijing and Moscow
18    Watergate and its Legacy
19    Fall of Saigon
Final Exam

HIST 308   THE UNITED STATES IN THE AGE OF REAGAN AND CLINTON,  1975-2004

Study Terms I   Before the midterm
Study Terms 2  After the midterm

HIST 325  AMERICAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

01 Colonial and Revolutionary
02 Launching the Economic Republic
               Building the Economic Republic
               Swashbuckling Capitalism
05  Crisis of Farmer & Labor in the Gilded Age
06  The Progressive Era
07  Boom & Crash
                The New Deal
                The Postwar Economy

HIST 391 THE WORLD IN THE ERA OF THE COLD WAR, 1945-1991
This is a course in historical literacy, the "hard history" of  people, events and movements that shaped the world and form the foundation of today's daily news.  It is not a "soft" course on feel-good multiculturalism or global citizenship.  It is world history, not U.S. history, although the United States was such a powerful presence in these years, it is impossible to talk about the world without it.  Every college graduate should have the contents of this course under their belt, especially in a world where the United States is not likely to play as dominant a role as it has in the past.

The Early Period, 1945-1960
01  The Year 1945
02   East Bloc
03  Collective Security
04 SCAP Japan, 1945-1951
05  The End of the Raj (India, Pakistan), 1947
06 The Birth of Israel, 1948
07   Chiang and Mao (China), 1945-1950
08    War in Korea, 1950-1953
09    Decolonization ASIA  (Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaya), 1945-1955
10    Arabia, Nasser & the Suez Crisis, 1956
11    Decolonization AFRICA and the Congo Crisis of 1960-1961
12    Western Europe; British Socialism, deGaulle & Adenauer, 1945-1961
13   Khrushchev, Guatelmala, Hungary and the U-2 Affair, 1954-1961
        Midterm Examination

The Middle Period, 1960-1980
14   Two Cold War Chapters: Cuba and Vietnam, 1960-1973
15   Great Leap Forward, Detente & the Fall of Saigon, 1955-1975
16   Dirty Wars, Tupamaros and the Murder of Salvador Allende, 1960-1973
17 Turmoil in the Middle East with Oil, 1958-1979
18   Japan, Incorporated, 1960-2005
       Nine Keys to Africa
  Seventies Crises: Greece, Bangladesh, Angola, Cambodia    
20 The Soviet Union, China,and Arms Negotiations, 1974-1980 
21   Iran, the Hostage Crisis and Afghanistan, 1979-1989

The Recent Period, 1980-Present
22   Contras, Death Squads, Panama and Cocaine
23   The End of the Cold War
24   Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War and Northern Ireland     
25 The European Union

HIST 409 THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AND WATERGATE
                   A Journey into the Underbelly
Book List   for second book report

01  Deep Background--Abroad
02  Deep Background--At Home
03  The Origins of Camelot
04  Ike, the U-2 and Castro   
05  Camelot
06 Assasination
07  Discrepancies
08  Conspiracies
       Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy
       Spies
11   Brooding and Loathing at the Nixon White House
12   Watergate
13   How Was That Again?


HIST 490  SENIOR SEMINAR. THE WORLD IN THE POSTWAR ERA, 1946-1960.                       

HIST 800           UNDERSTANDING, TEACHING AND RESEARCHING UNITED STATES HISTORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

About Teaching. Why Saunders teaches the way he does.

Vitae: academics like to blow their horns by keeping track of every last committee and every last scholarly paper no matter how insignificant. CV