American Cultural History

In this course we will explore several significant themes in American cultural history from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Through close readings of selected primary and secondary works (both written and visual) we will consider the meanings of popular, proto-mass, and mass culture as well as the nature of different levels of cultural tastes and styles in modern American history. Reflecting on the broader social and political context of these developments we will study a range of topics, including the myth of the self-made man, the role of the frontier and the cowboy, and critiques of mass consumer culture. Central to our historical examination of American culture will be an effort to appraise and describe: how American writers, artists, orators, cultural critics and everyday people constructed narratives (written, spoken, musical, visual) of identity for themselves along ethnic, racial, gendered, class-based and national lines, how the construction of those narratives were related to each other and, how those narratives changed over time depending on specific political and social contexts.