Lit Blog 1

Putney, Clifford. "The Company He Keeps: A History Of White College Fraternities."Biography 4 (2011): 908. Literature 

Resource Center. Web. 21 Feb. 2016.

This book is about the roles fraternities have on their respective campuses.  It focuses on how men in fraternities like to show their masculinity.  Another important topic is how these men rely on their economic status in society.  This aspect can be circled around to also go with Armstrong and Hamilton.  

The author of this book is Nicholas Syrett.  He obtained the information and statistics from analyses of 12 colleges/universities.  He also used information on over 20 different fraternities across the country.

I have not been able to get the book yet, so I have been using the first couple of chapters for the quotes and key terms

Fraternity- a group of people that share a common profession or interests

Masculinity- possession of qualities traditionally associated with men

"Perhaps from the beginning of college itself, freshman have arrived on campus to make friends and be accepted by their peers" (Page 9). - I like this quote because it helps lead into the idea that fraternities give these young men a chance to make new friends easily.

"The need of the boy or girl for the recognition, respect, and acceptance of others means that such others hold a potentially powerful instrument of reward and punishment over him.  This is not to say that those in fraternities are not responsible for their actions, but rather to recognize that one of the reasons that fraternities are such powerful agents of conformity is the youthfulness of the population they enroll" (Page 9). - This quote is a good quote to relate to my topic because it highlights the big picture that fraternities have such an influence on men without even knowing it.  They stem off each other to drink more and more that sometimes, bad things happen and give these fraternities a bad rap even though it was the individuals that did this to themselves.

"Fraternities help to illuminate the contested function of college during a time when faculties continued to train students as if they might all become ministers_colleges' traditional function-while some students began to insist upon an education that would better prepare them for other careers" (Page 14). - This quote shows how the influence of fraternities started.  It shows how strongly influential fraternities were and still are today.

This material will help me with my topic because it starts with the beginning of fraternities as a whole.  This will be helpful because it means that I basically have most of the information I need from when fraternities started.  Any other information I need should be easier to find because there will be easier access to the more recent aspects of fraternities.