Course Description
Economic, social, diplomatic, and political trends in the United States, 1877-1917.
Athena Title
THE US 1877-1917
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Industrialization, urbanization, immigration, Progressivism, imperialism, and the like--these forces in the decades overlapping the turn of the twentieth century all mark a society that we can recognize as the beginning of our own. As sweeping and well-known abstractions, however, these words can also hide both the contingency and human conflict of this formative era. They can misleadingly imply a too-obvious unfolding of “progress,” or inevitable structural shifts that involved no human decisions. This course will put a human face on such abstractions and in the process show that the origin of modern America was neither obvious nor inevitable, but involved competing social visions and possibilities. To study both those that won and those that lost is to understand the contingent, complex, and conflicted beginning of our own society. The course offers an in-depth look at the forty year period from the end of Reconstruction to the brink of participation in World War I. The principal objective of the course is to teach students to think critically for themselves about the relationships between the past and the present, to learn to ask questions of the past that enable them to understand the present and mold the future, and to become attuned to both the limitations and possibilities of change. The course seeks to acquaint students with the ways in which past societies and peoples have defined the relationships between community and individual needs and goals, and between ethical norms and decision-making. In general students will be expected to: 1. read a wide range of primary and secondary sources critically. 2. polish skills in critical thinking, including the ability to recognize the difference between opinion and evidence, and the ability to evaluate--and support or refute--arguments effectively. 3. write stylistically appropriate and mature papers and essays using processes that include discovering ideas and evidence, organizing that material, and revising, editing, and polishing the finished papers.
Topical Outline
Introduction The United States in 1877 The West: Cattle, Wheat, Silver and Gold Discussion: Calloway, ed. Our Hearts Fell to the Ground The Idea of the West “Civilizing” and the Dawes Act The Long Shadow of the Civil War: The Post-Reconstruction Political System The Populist Moment The Defeat of Populism Black Possibilities to 1900 Shrinking Options: Jim Crow, Disfranchisement, Lynching, Riots Industrialization: Steel as a Case Study, Part 1: In the Mines and Mills Conveying Goods and People on the Railroads Corporate Control Alan Trachtenberg, “Mysteries of the Great City” Organizing Labor The “Distinct” South: Birmingham The High Tide of Immigration Moody-Sankey Evangelicalism Protestant Reform Holiness-Pentecostalism Vaudeville, Baseball, Moving Pictures, and Medicine Shows White Solidarity: Watch “The Birth of a Nation” (excerpts) Black Migrations; second essay due The Victorian Ideal and Working Women’s Realities The Long Struggle for Women’s Suffrage The Progressive Sensibility Progressivism in the Cities Progressive Law-Making at the National Level Socialism and Anarchism To the Brink of World War
Syllabus