Modern American Thought and Culture

Undergraduate

This course examines leading thinkers, writers, artists, and reformers as a way of understanding American intellectual and cultural history. Some of the issues explored include: the impact of Darwinism; social science and the modern university; responses to industrialization; the tension between self and society; debates over democracy; the challenge of civil rights and feminism; and recent debates over multiculturalism. Almost of all the reading will be drawn from primary sources (including material by Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., W.E.B. DuBois, John Dewey; Langston Hughes; Lionel Trilling; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Malcolm X). Open to all classes.