History 201: The Craft of History

America in the Gilded Age

Jeff Roche

America in the Gilded Age is a historic examination of the United States during the last third of the nineteenth century. It was a time of mind-boggling change in society, in culture, in politics, in the economy, and in the spatial arrangement of the nation. Those changes unleashed carnage and chaos even as they ushered in the modern world. It was an era defined by inconceivable growth in immigration and urbanization and when the emergence of industrial capitalism and the development of new technologies transformed reality, creating staggering disparities in wealth, riotous western expansion, and a new political order. It was a time when Americans came to define and redefine and defend their conceptions of a moral economy, gender and race and space, political power, and the natural world. This is a writing-intensive course.