Cutting Class: Turn of the Cen

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

AMST-344 explores changes in cultural and intellectual life in America after the Civil War through the early 20th Century, with special attention to higher education as a reflection of those changes. We’ll reach for a feeling of the time period from a number of perspectives, but zeroing in on class and cultural stratification of the time, and the hardening boundaries between elite and popular, between high and low. With new outlets for leisure, consumption, and education, individuals and groups increasingly identified with particular slices of culture, including an increasingly prevalent “middlebrow” median. We will work through the lens of curriculum, what colleges (and then universities) were doing in the areas of teaching and learning, to understand the broader cultural history better. This course privileges and analysis of higher education as one way to read cultural history; students will work toward developing their own lens as well, exploring expressions of class and culture through many other means. Texts may include works by Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, WEB Dubois, HL Mencken, Matthew Arnold, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.