Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Morgan Day Frank
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00 - 5:00
This course examines a grand and tumultuous period in American history, the Gilded Age. Over the semester we will read about the rise of robber barons and the consolidation of a genteel leisure class, the birth of the department store and the invention of the mass market magazine. We will discuss the battle between labor and capital and the brutal closure of the Western frontier, the rise of Jim Crow in the South and America’s imperial ventures in the Pacific and Caribbean. We will also pay attention to the shifting meaning of art and literature under these turbulent conditions. What role did culture play in the United States as it rapidly industrialized? Did culture serve simply to reinforce social hierarchies, or could it transform them? Why produce art or literature at all when the world appeared pointless and manifestly unjust? Readings will include fiction by Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, Frank Norris, and Sarah Orne Jewett; essays by W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Jane Addams, Thorstein Veblen, and William James; paintings by Howard Pyle and John Singer Sargent; political cartoons; and a dime novel.