Michael R. H. Swanson, Ph. D.
Office: GHH 215
Hours: MWF, 1:00-2:00 T, 9:00 - 10:00
Phone: 254-3230
Focusing upon the period from the period from 1876 through 1903, this course will examine the rise of Populism and the precursors of Progressivism and a response to unprecedented technological and social change.
Catalog, Roger Williams University
It would be hard to imagine two paragraphs more different from each other than the two paragraphs with which I began this introduction. Both paragraphs really are written by the same person. Indeed, they appear within pages of each other. It is the contrast between good times and disasterous times which makes the The Gilded Age such an interesting period in American history. Change is a constant in American life, but few decades were as conscious of the pace of change as the nineties were. Consider for a moment the generation most like you... those who were emerging from their teens in 1890 or thereabouts. The Civil War was less a part of the distant past than the Viet Nam War is now. Native born Americans were likely to have parents or other relatives who had engaged in that conflict. At twenty, young people of the nineties had been raised with the horse and buggy. At forty, these same people (now middle aged) would likely have ridden in a motor car and may even have witnessed a "flying machine". At they would have witnessed flying machines applied to the art of war. At sixty, they may have been up in one themselves... they certainly would have heard radio.
Sorting out and coping with all that change must have been a mammoth task back then. Understanding the impact of that change will be our task over the next fourteen weeks. The fulcrum of our story will be the period 1880-1900, but we’ll flash back a bit before that to the year of the Centennial (1876) and stretch our necks forward to look at the years immediately before the First World War.
To help us with this task we have four textbooks, and I'm going to ask you to delve in some outside materials, as well. Chambers' The Tyranny of Change and Schlereth's Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life work nicely as a pair. I think we are all aware that we partake in two histories: on the one hand there are the major events, movements, and changes which sweep across the nation and which concern the larger society as a whole. These form the focus of Chambers' book. We will read something like the first two hundred pages. On the other hand, we have our private lives to live as well. Most of us don't spend every waking moment thinking about politics or economics: when we do think about them, we think about their impact on our lives--what we can do to capitalize on x or how we can avoid the negative impact of y. As the subtitle of Schlereth's book implies, we will become informed of the changes in everyday life through it.
This year I’m adding one universal period resource for us all, Jacob Riis’ famous How the Other Half Lives. One could fairly call this the first major piece of Investigative Journalism.
This course relies heavily on the Internet, as well. I will be providing a web syllabus for you, and this will direct your attention to many additional sources which I will expect you to use. The URL (Universal Resource Locator) is http://hist346gildedage.homestead.com/
Academic Honesty:
The twin supports of Academic Life are collaboration and independence of thought. In this class, there is no curve. In the largest sense, you’re not in competition with each other, and to the degree that you can assist each other in learning you’ll win nothing but praise from me. Yet it is equally important that each student exercise his/her own independent judgment, and have confidence in his/her own mind. Plagiarism defeats the whole purpose of the enterprise, and the University will not tolerate this particular form of intellectual theft.
For the university statement on plagiarism, and for a general exposition of standards of Academic Integrity, consult the Roger Williams University Website. You have learned appropriate techniques for incorporating ideas from others with your own in writing classes and elsewhere. When in doubt about something you’ve written, don’t hesitate to show it to me or any other professor and ask for an opinion. The Roger Williams University Writing Center is very helpful to those who make the effort to use it. It has also posted a number of helpful documents online.