As soon as Europeans arrived in North America, they claimed land that belonged to Indians. By the 1820s Indians had been displaced from millions of acres, but about 120,000 Indians remained in the territories east of the Mississippi. White Americans saw them as an obstacle to national expansion, profit, and progress. They were “savages” who … Continued
Instead of “what caused the Great Depression,” we devote our attention to “what made the Great Depression ‘great'”? There are three key elements of this problem: 1) the failure of wages to keep pace with productive capacity; 2) the failure of trade policy to keep pace with economic change; and 3) the absence of a … Continued
“The chief business of the American people is business.” President Calvin Coolidge said those oft-quoted words in a speech to newspaper editors in 1925. Coolidge and many others went much further, claiming that business was nothing less than America’s religion. “Through business, properly conceived, managed, and conducted” wrote efficiency expert Edward E. Purinton in 1921, … Continued
In the decades after the Civil War the growth of urban markets, the creation of an efficient distribution system, the development of a highly motivated work force, and the availability of vast amounts of capital transformed the agricultural, craft-centered economy of the United States into a modern industrial powerhouse. But with this growth came instability. … Continued
Between 1845 and 1848 the United States acquired 1.2 million square miles of western territory. This expansion aggravated old tensions between the North and the South over the institution of slavery, and those tensions eventually tore the nation apart. But when the War ended, the United States found itself transformed. Not only was it united … Continued
This seminar explores strategies suffragists adopted and arguments they made to obtain the vote for American women as political and cultural currents shifted throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How did the Second Great Awakening affect the suffrage movement? How did women’s battle for the vote relate to other reform movements like abolition, temperance, … Continued
The close reading of challenging primary documents is central to the Common Core State Standards, yet many teachers may be unfamiliar with close reading as an instructional practice. What is it? How does it facilitate the reading and understanding of diverse kinds of texts? How is it done? This seminar addresses those questions by analyzing … Continued
How did the exiled governments of Nazi-occupied countries respond to the Allies’ war aims? How did the Allies assess their progress on the battlefield before the 1944 invasion of Europe? How did the Allies envision the end of the War? This seminar explores these and other questions as it examines three aspects of World War … Continued
How did the Union and the Confederacy explain what they were fighting for to the rest of the world? How did foreign politicians and intellectuals interpret the War? And what role did foreigners play in the conflict? This seminar addresses these and other questions as it places the Civil War in a global perspective. Through … Continued
The unprecedented scale of the U.S. Civil War, both in its massive mobilization and in its terrible human cost, presented a tremendous challenge to visual artists who had never experienced anything like this before and had few if any visual models to imitate. Winslow Homer was perhaps the most important and innovative “delineator” of the … Continued