Catalogue Description: (Prerequisite: HST-11 or HUM-11) The development of nationalism after the War of 1812, new party alignment, Jacksonian democracy, the Civil War with its causes and ramifications and the process of Reconstruction. May satisfy the general education requirement in upper-level humanities.
The United States changed rapidly in the nineteenth century. residents of the United States began the 1820s as a mostly rural and agricultural people living in scattered settlements along the eastern seaboard. They lived by habits of local self-sufficiency, social deference, and household industry. By the 1890s the nation's people had settled coast-to-coast and become politically centralized, urban, and industrial. Americans of this later generation confronted problems of national culture, ethnic identity, urban poverty, mass political parties, corporate liberalism, labor unrest, mass-production, public health and state regulation completely unforeseen by citizens of the early republic. Along the way the nation endured a cataclysmic civil war and the challenges of emancipation and reconstruction. It is no surprise that the era's changes captivate historians. Heroic and tragic, these events, continue to shape the nation today.
We will also devote considerable time this term to the actual practice of history. Rather than being mere consumers of pre-packaged facts about the past, the topics and assignments in this class are designed to hone your powers of historical discernment. Working together, the class will determine what we think is most important about the nineteenth centur We will use this broad framework to frame our individual investigations of specific episodes from the period. You will work extensively with original documents and will contribute your results to a central scholarly repository (the History Engine) that will be used by students and scholars worldwide.
.There are several recurring topics, themes, and lines of inquiry that will serve as organizing concepts for a number of our assignments this term. In addition to our overall theme of "People, Places, and Episodes in Time," these include