Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An analysis of the transformation of American culture from post-Civil War to modern forms. Topics to be discussed will include industrialization, urbanization, foreign policy, cultural and political antagonisms. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

In the late nineteenth century, the United States began a great shift from the Victorian to the modern era, transforming American social, cultural, political, and economic institutions.  This course will focus on that transformation and its rationalization and institutionalization in the 20th century.  Lectures will be explorations of clusters of ideas or themes regarding this transformation, arranged primarily in a topical manner, but conforming in a general way to the chronology of the course readings.  The first set of lectures will deal with the "Gilded Age" in American society, when the American ideal of the autonomous farmer-freeholder was threatened by market and railroad industrialism, along with mass immigration, resulting in the enraged political response of populism.  The second set of lectures will focus on the emergence and rationalization of urban-industrial culture, those modern social forms in which we will still live.  Lectures will focus on the transformation from commercial to industrial cities, from boss rule and robber barons to progressivism and oligopolistic capitalism, and the growth of American imperialism.  We will conclude this section with the creation of the modern welfare state in the Roosevelt era with the depression, the New Deal and WWII.  The final set of lectures will concern American society and ideas since 1945, and American society in a time of the nation’s global economic, military, and cultural dominance growing out of its industrial development.  Lecture topics will include the Cold War and its demise, Vietnam, race relations, liberationist movements, and neo-liberalism.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: