Back to History 1378 Syllabus


Spring 2006

Themes for History 1378

Gilded Age America
 

Mark Twain called the late nineteenth century the "Gilded Age." By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In the popular view, the late nineteenth century was a period of greed and guile: of rapacious Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers, of shady business practices, scandal-plagued politics, and vulgar display. It was a time not unlike our own.

  • America in 1876

At the time that the United States celebrated its centennial, Reconstruction came to a formal end, the country experienced a bitterly disputed presidential election, General George Armstrong and his men were wiped out at the battle of the Little Big Horn, federal troops suppressed a nation-wide railroad strike, and 20 members of a mine workers organization, the Molly Maguires, were executed for terrorism.

  • A Distant Mirror

The late 19th century bears striking parallels with our time. It was a period of sweeping technological innovation and wrenching economic change. Along with efforts to reduce the scale of government, it had a drug crisis and attempts to uplift morality and solve social problems ranging from domestic violence to unwed pregnancy. In the 19th century, however, these efforts were more forceful than those today. States enacted “Blue Laws,” prohibiting most businesses from operating on Sunday. Lotteries, widely used by government in the early 19th century to raise revenue, were outlawed, by 1890, in 43 of the 44 states. A number of states forbade horse racing, boxing, and the manufacture of cigarettes. The earliest attempts to suppress narcotics were made. In 1872, Congress enacted the Comstock Act, which banned obscene literature from the mails. The law was interpreted broadly and was used to prevent the distribution of birth control information and contraceptive devices through the mails. The largest movement to enforce morality was the movement to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol.

  • The “Winning” of the West
The western frontier was bitterly contested space. Romanticized in countless western movies, the true story of the winning of the West is a story of struggles for dominance over labor, language, water, and land, as Anglos sought dominance over Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese Americans.
  • The Rise of Big Business
The late 19th century saw the creation of a modern industrial economy. Unlike the pre-Civil War economy, this new one was dependent on raw materials from around the world and it sold goods in global markets. Business organization expanded in size and scale. There was an unparalleled increase in factory production, mechanization, and business consolidation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the major sectors of the nation's economy--banking, manufacturing, meat packing, oil refining, railroads, and steel--were dominated by a small number of giant corporations.
The 1890s as a Turning Point

The 1890s brought crucial changes to American society. The 1890s witnessed the rise of the first instruments of mass communication—the tabloid, the mass-market magazine, the best-selling novel, million dollar advertising campaigns, and moving pictures. New forms of commercial entertainment proliferated, including the amusement park, urban nightclub, the dance hall, the nickelodeon, and the vaudeville stage. Competitive team sports, including basketball, bicycling, football, as well as golf and wrestling, were introduced to the United States. The New Music and Tin Pan Ally, and the New Woman also appeared.

The 1890s also witnessed the consolidation of a system of racial discrimination based on law and custom that was called "Jim Crow" after a mid-nineteenth century blackfaced minstrel act, and it was reinforced through violence, including thousands of lynchings. Diplomatically, the 1890s saw the United States emerge as a world power.

  • The Populist Insurgency
The most momentous political conflict of the late 19th century was the farmers’ revolt. Drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer. Many farmers blamed railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures dealers, mortgage companies, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of farm equipment for their plight. Farmers responded by organizing Granges, Farmers’ Alliances, and the Populist party. In the election of 1896, the Populists and the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for president. Bryan’s decisive defeat inaugurated a period of Republican ascendancy, in which Republicans controlled the presidency for 24 of the next 32 years.
  • Caste Society
In 1900, inequality was the rule. Class inequities were pronounced; 939 of every 1000 Americans died without any property to their name. Gender and racial inequalities were also marked. About 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South, 75 percent on farms, mostly as sharecroppers. 4,500 black men and women were lynched, more than a hundred a year. Indians were driven from the Great Plains and confined on reservations. Their numbers dropped to fewer than 200,000. For the first time there were concerted efforts to restrict foreign immigration. The first group to be excluded were Chinese immigrants in 1882. At no time in American history was diversity—in income, living standards, day-to-day experience, education, and rights—greater than at the end of the 19th century.
  • The United States Becomes a Global Power
At the turn of the 20th century, the United States became a world power. In 1898 and 1899, the United States annexed Hawaii and acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, parts of the Samoan islands, and other Pacific islands. The Spanish American War and the acquisition of the Philippines represented both an extension of earlier expansionist impulses and a sharp departure from assumptions that had guided American foreign policy in the past. For the first time, the United States made a major strategic commitment in the Far East, acquired territory never intended for statehood, and committed itself to police actions and intervention in the Caribbean and Central America.
Progressive America
  • Mass Immigration
The turn of the century brought a wave of immigration without parallel in American history. Coming primarily from southern and eastern Europe, the new immigrants congregated in the nation’s cities. Mass immigration prompted a debate over the meaning of America and Americanism: whether the United States was a melting pot, a pluralistic society, or a society essentially Anglo-Saxon in character.
  • Progressivism

Progressivism is an umbrella label for a wide range of economic, political, social, and moral reforms. These included efforts to outlaw the sale of alcohol; regulate child labor and sweatshops; scientifically manage natural resources; insure pure and wholesome water and milk; Americanize immigrants or restrict immigration altogether; and bust or regulate trusts. Drawing support from the urban, college-educated middle class, Progressive reformers sought to eliminate corruption in government, regulate business practices, address health hazards, improve working conditions, and give the public more direct control over government through direct primaries to nominate candidates for public office, direct election of Senators, the initiative, referendum, and recall, and women's suffrage.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, muckraking journalists were calling attention to the exploitation of child labor, corruption in city governments, the horror of lynching, and the ruthless business practices employed by businessmen like John D. Rockefeller. At the local level, many Progressives sought to suppress red-light districts, expand high schools, construct playgrounds, and replace corrupt urban political machines with more efficient system of municipal government. At the state level, Progressives enacted minimum wage laws for women workers, instituted industrial accident insurance, restricted child labor, and improved factory regulation.

At the national level, Congress passed laws establishing federal regulation of the meat-packing, drug, and railroad industries, and strengthened anti-trust laws. It also lowered the tariff, established federal control over the banking system, and enacted legislation to improve working condition. Four constitutional amendments were adopted during the Progressive era, which authorized an income tax, provided for the direct election of senators, extended the vote to women, and prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.

  • Modernism in the Arts
A profound shift took place in the visual and performing arts around the turn of the century. There was the “new music”—ragtime, blues, jazz, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley. There was the introduction of modern art into the United States. And there was the emergence of the most popular and influential new art form of all, the movies.
The Meaning of World War I
  • The War to End War and Make the World Safe for Democracy
The AP ranked WWI as the 8th most important event of the 20th century. In fact, almost everything that subsequently happened occurred because of World War I: the Great Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the collapse of empires all trace back to World War I. No event better underscores the utter unpredictability of the future. Europe hadn’t fought a major war for 100 years. At any point in the 5 weeks leading up to the fighting, the madness might have been averted. The war was a product of miscalculation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication. No one expected a war of such magnitude. No one wanted one. A continent at the height of its success descended into senseless slaughter. WWI destroyed four empires—German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Romanov—and it touched off colonial revolts in the Middle East and Vietnam. World War I shattered Americans’ faith in reform and moral crusades.
  • The Home Front
World War I carried far-reaching consequences for the homefront. These included prohibition, women’s suffrage, and a bitter debate over civil liberties.
The 1920s

We tend to think of the 1920s as a cynical, hedonistic interlude between the Great War and the Great Depression, a decade of dissipation, of jazz bands, bootleggers, raccoon coats, bathtub gin, flappers, flagpole sitters, bootleggers, and marathon dancers, when the younger generation rebelled against traditional taboos while their elders engaged in an orgy of speculation. The 1920s did witness a revolution in manners and morals. The younger generation rebelled against traditional taboos and popularized versions of the ideas of Sigmund Freud were widely disseminated. The trivial took the place of the consequential. Aided by a sensationalistic media, the public was fascinated by spectator sports, flagpole sitters, and marathon dancers.

But the 1920s was also a decade of bitter cultural conflicts, pitting religious liberals against fundamentalists, nativists against immigrants, and rural provincials against urban cosmopolitans. Prohibition, women’s roles, race, and the Ku Klux Klan became bitter points of contention.

Depression America
  • The Causes of the Great Depression

There have been three seminal events in American history: the Revolution, which instilled a commitment to liberty and equality into American culture as well as deep a suspicion of government authority; the Civil War, which ended slavery and removed the major obstacle to the growth of a industrial society; and the Great Depression, which vastly expanded the scope and scale of the federal government and created the modern welfare state.

The Depression was the watershed event of 20th century American history. It gave rise to a philosophy now under attack: that government had a duty to intervene to improve the quality of American life; that it should provide a safety net for the elderly, the jobless, the disabled, and the poor; and that the federal government was responsible for ensuring the health of the nation's economy and the welfare of its citizens.

  • The Depression in Comparative Perspective
Depression unemployment was higher in the United States and lasted longer than in any other industrialized nation. And yet the depression did not produce the radical or reactionary responses that one finds in countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, or Argentina. For a decade, unemployment in the United States averaged 20 percent. In three years, the value of U.S. corporations fell 89 percent. Nations responded to the depression in several ways: with totalitarian communism, fascist dictatorship, socialism, and welfare capitalism.
  • The New Deal
 
  • The Great Depression and American Culture
The Depression challenged certain basic precepts of American culture, especially the faith in individual self-help, business, the inevitability of progress, and limited government. The Depression encouraged a search for the real America. There was a new interest in “the people,” in regional cultures, and in folk traditions. The movies played a crucial role in sustaining American ideals in a time of social upheaval across Europe. Films projected images of a world in which financial success was possible and of a society in which class barriers could be overcome.
FIRST EXAMINATION
World War II

World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.

World War II was truly a global war. Some 70 nations took part in the conflict, and fighting took place on the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated, as soldiers, war workers, or victims of occupation and mass murder.

World War II cost the United States a million casualities and nearly 400,000 deaths. In both domestic and foreign affairs, its consequences were far-reaching. It ended the Depression, brought millions of married women into the workforce, initiated sweeping changes in the lives of the nation's minority groups, and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life.

Spring Break
The Cold War

During the early 1970s, films like American Graffiti and television shows like Happy Days began to portray the 1950s as a carefree era before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and Watergate--a decade of tail-finned Cadillacs, collegians stuffing themselves in phone booths, and innocent tranquility and static charm. In truth, the post-World War II period was an era of momentous changes.

Across the globe, the United States clashed with the Soviet Union over such issues as the Soviet dominance over eastern Europe, control of atomic weapons, and the Soviet blockade of Berlin. The establishment of a Communist government in China in 1949 and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 helped transform the Cold War into a global conflict, in which United States would confront Communism in Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, and elsewhere. In an atmosphere charged with paranoia and anxiety, there was deep fear at home about “enemies within” sabotaging U.S. foreign policy and passing atomic secrets to the Soviets.

Not only a period of anxiety, the postwar period was also a time of dynamic, creative change. During the 1950s, African Americans quickened the pace of the struggle for equality, by challenging segregation in court. A new youth culture emerged, with its own form of music, rock ‘n’ roll. Maverick sociologists, social critics, poets, and writers--conservatives as well as liberals--authored influential critiques of American society.

The Tumultuous 1960s

The 1960s was a decade when hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans gave new life to the nation’s democratic ideals. African Americans used sit-ins, freedom rides, and protest marches to fight segregation, poverty, and unemployment. Feminists demanded equal job opportunities and an end to sexual discrimination. Mexican Americans protested discrimination in voting, education, and jobs. Native Americans demanded that the government recognize their land claims and the right of tribes to govern themselves. Environmentalists demanded legislation to control the amount of pollution released into the environment.

Early in the decade, African American college students, impatient with the slow pace of legal change, staged sit-ins, freedom rides, and protest marches to challenge segregation in the South. Their efforts led the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination in public facilities and employment, and the 24th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, guaranteeing voting rights.

The example of the civil rights movement inspired other groups to press for equal rights. The women’s movement fought equal educational and employment opportunities and a transformation of traditional views about women’s place in society. Mexican Americans battled for bilingual education programs in schools, unionization of farm workers, improved job opportunities, and increased political power. Native Americans pressed for control over their lands and resources, the preservation of native cultures, and tribal self-government. Gays and lesbians organized to end legal discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In a far-reaching effort to reduce poverty, alleviate malnutrition, extend medical care, provide adequate housing, and enhance the employability of the poor, President Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society Program in 1964. But the Vietnam War, ghetto rioting, and the rise of a militant antiwar movement and the counterculture, contributed to a political backlash that would lead the Republican party to control the presidency for ten of the next fourteen years.

The Vietnam War

Between 1945 and 1954, the Vietnamese waged an anti-colonial war against France, which received $2.6 billion in financial support from the United States. The French defeat at the Dien Bien Phu was followed by a peace conference in Geneva, in which Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam received their independence and Vietnam was temporarily divided between an anti-Communist South and a Communist North. In 1956, South Vietnam, with American backing, refused to hold the unification elections. By 1958, Communist-led guerrillas known as the Viet Cong had begun to battle the South Vietnamese government.

To support the South’s government, the United States sent in 2,000 military advisors, a number that grew to 16,300 in 1963. The military condition deteriorated, and by 1963 South Vietnam had lost the fertile Mekong Delta to the Vietcong. In 1965, Johnson escalated the war, commencing air strikes on North Vietnam and committing ground forces, which numbered 536,000 in 1968. The 1968 Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese turned many Americans against the war. The next president, Richard Nixon, advocated Vietnamization, withdrawing American troops and giving South Vietnam greater responsibility for fighting the war. His attempt to slow the flow of North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam by sending American forces to destroy Communist supply bases in Cambodia in 1970 in violation of Cambodian neutrality provoked antiwar protests on the nation’s college campuses.

From 1968 to 1973 efforts were made to end the conflict through diplomacy. In January 1973, an agreement reached and U.S. forces were withdrawn from Vietnam and U.S. prisoners of war were released. In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the North and Vietnam was reunited

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America in Decline? 1973-1989
  • America in the 1970s
Many Americans think of the 1970s as a decade when “nothing happened,” apart from the Watergate scandal, the Fall of Vietnam, the Arab Oil embargoes, the Brady Bunch, and disco. In fact, the 1970s was one of the most important of the postwar twentieth-century decades. It saw a profound shift in the balance of power in American politics, economics, and culture, driven by the rapid growth of the Sunbelt.
  • The Reagan Revolution
As President, Ronald Reagan convinced a majority of Americans that the causes of America’s decline were high taxes, excessive welfare spending, insufficient military expenditures, excessively strong labor unions, and liberalism. He doubled defense spending in real terms, drastically reduced tax rates for the wealthy, and restored American confidence.
  • The Collapse of Communism
European Communism collapsed for many reasons. Partially, this was due to internal economic weaknesses and a crisis of confidence on the part of Communist government leaders. Partly it was the result of the Soviet Union’s inability to sustain high military spending. In part, it reflected the desire of ordinary East Bloc citizens to have a standard of living comparable to the West’s. For these and other reasons, a half century of Cold War confrontation came to a sudden and totally unexpected end.
America in Our Time
The end of the Cold War unleashed ethnic and religious conflicts in many parts of the world. Many of these conflicts were related to globalization, the massive movement of capital, resources, entertainment, and peoples across international borders. For Americans, the implications of these developments became glaringly apparent with the rise of international terrorism and the discovery that many people in various parts of the world hated the United States and what it represented. The United States was faced with difficult decisions: whether to focus on domestic or international affairs; and whether to address world problems unilaterally or multilaterally.
  • Ethnicity and Religion in the Post-Cold War World
 
  • Globalization
 
  • Terrorism in Historical Perspective
 
SECOND EXAM
   
   
   

 

 

 

     
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