What a Way to Make a Living: Work, Politics, & Culture in the 20th Century United States

3 units

This course explores the lives, labors, and leisure of working people in the twentieth century United States. Students will focus on the seismic transformations and bitter conflicts that went into making a mass production, mass consumption society. How did working people experience and fight to exert control over jobs increasingly dictated by the unyielding pace of vast assembly lines? What happened when manufacturing jobs disappeared? Who left? Who got left behind? How were households and neighborhoods made and remade by huge movements of people from the countryside into cities, and then from urban centers to suburban sprawl? How have working people narrated their own stories from below, and, in turn, how has working life was narrated and (re)packaged from above? To answer these questions, and many more, we will pay close attention to how the organization of work under 20th century capitalism (re)defined social hierarchies, the meaning of citizenship, and racial, gendered, and sexual identity.