In addition to the university statement on academic misconduct, our department developed an additional statement on plagiarism which I link on my syllabus: http://faculty.winthrop.edu/huffmons/PLAGIARISM%20AND%20ACADEMIC%20MISCONDUCT.htm

Where do I sign up? This seminar would be a nice follow-up to Marvin’s southern politics class. I would like to do my book review on the Boss Crump book. Nah, this sounds like an awesome class. It’ll be especially interesting knowing at least half your students probably won’t be from the South.

Yeah, the Crump book looks like fun; I just found that one a week ago while I was adding the Herenton book which I read in my undergrad days. I probably could add a few more if I went through the UP of Mississippi catalog.

I’d imagine there’s a lot of overlap with Marvin’s class, particularly in the first half, although the presentation may differ quite a bit—I never had Marvin’s class myself, so all I have to go on is second-hand accounts from students who took his undergrad and graduate courses. The syllabus the first time around was a bit of a mish-mash of Marvin’s syllabus from the last time he taught it at Mizzou and Scott’s syllabus from 2004ish at Winthrop, along with a few pet ideas of my own.

In this iteration, I got rid of some of the South & North Carolina material and replaced it with some Louisiana stuff, canned a book I liked but one that wasn’t very on-topic, and added some new stuff (most notably the Lassiter book, one of the competing entries for “book that challenges the conventional wisdom about the ‘southern strategy’ even though most southern politics scholars thought the ‘southern strategy’ was overstated as an explanation of southern realignment in the first place”).

Scott can take credit for the book review idea, although he’s doing it a different way than me (he’s having individual presentations on the books) probably due to a smaller class size. I have two sections that could max out at 35 each (current enrollment is 22 and 20, and increasing), so I figured group presentations on states would be easier—and I’m probably changing that to have groups present on 2–3 states, just to make the time more manageable.

I didn’t notice the Herenton book; which begs the question: someone wrote a book about him? Apparently my book, due to come out October 5 entitled “Dr. Willie W. Herenton: Why Even Some Libertarians Think Term Limits Are Good” won’t be the first about him.

I had Marvin’s grad Congress course and, compared to the other professors who I had for both grad and undergrad, was the most similar to the model of the undergrad course though POL 318 (my God how do I remember that) wasn’t a seminar. That southern politics class was a great mix of history and political science. It’s the type of class where some history has to be mixed in. To ignore it and to focus on the “why’s” is doing a disservice to the students, in my opinion.

Hell on earth: 35 book review presentations. Good call on the groups.

Actually, two guys wrote a book about him: here you go. It’s not so much about Herenton himself, more about the 1991 mayor’s race and the history of race relations and municipal politics in Memphis, with some good stuff on Crump in there. I think the Memphis/Shelby County public library has about half the copies ever printed (multiple copies per branch).

Ahh, the Rhodes polisci guy that MUST have the all-time record for quotes in the CA. I’ve seen that book cited numerous times when he’s quoted, but never the subtitle, so I didn’t put 2 and 2 together. I’ll check it out one of these days.