Class in the Anglo Atlantic

Graduate

This course addresses the ways in which the concept of class has influenced our understanding of the past, particularly in relation to the history of working people. It reviews the "new" labour history that emerged in British and North American history beginning in the 1960s, and documents the ways in which the history of identities (race, ethnicity and gender) and postmodernism have impacted the study of class. The course examines the rise of capital and labour from their roots on the farm and plantation and in the craft shop through to modern industrial society and the contemporary effects of deindustrialization and globalization. The course furthermore scrutinizes not only the history of that experience but also the theoretical and historiographical content of class studies. (2 lecture hours a week.)