Courses

Pundits and scholars have in recent years dubbed our current era of heightened inequality “the second American Gilded Age.”  This course examines the first Gilded Age,  named by Mark Twain and Charles Warner Dudley  in 1873,  with a focus on issues that continue to resonate today: the structures of social inequality, technological innovation and the changing conditions of work, immigration, the power of corporations and banks, the origins of the Jim Crow regime, American polices toward Indian Country, international interventions, ecological degradation, the structure of government (from separation of powers to states’ rights and municipal initiatives),  political corruption, and grassroots political mobilizations. By comparing and contrasting both institutional change and the experiences of ordinary people in the two eras,  the course aims to sharpen our analysis of how debates over political economy and Constitutional rights at the turn of the twentieth century structured possibilities of democracy in the decades that followed.  Readings include novels, memoirs, diaries, and legislative hearings as well as  historical scholarship.