Topics to expect in this class:

•     Aspects of urban life combined with the challenges of city planners to provide clean water from mid-19C forward while high immigration into poor city neighborhoods stressed water supplies, sewer systems, utilities, and employment opportunities. On the flip side, evaluations of poverty, race, and civil unrest in America is investigated throughout this class.   

•     American culture and society in a growing industrial and capitalist nation: discussion of economic, social, and political reforms of the 19C & 20C often times headed by women reform movements for clean food and drugs, safety in the workplace, & the restriction of child labor.  

•     Aspects of the American labor transition from its long standing 19C dominate feature of manufacturing to a post-1940s national economy centered on service-based jobs/industries: finance, insurance, health and well-being, banking, fast-food & more. This exported the responsibility of manufactured products (from fresh foods, to steel and ship building, war weapons and automobiles to home products and computers) desired by American consumers to foreign companies. The majority of American products purchased by Americans today are manufactured abroad; an historic change of the pattern of consumption—a 150 year reversal.  

•     Aspects of how the automobile has affected American society and culture along with computer technology, space travel, inventions, advances in medicine before and after the Cold War. 

•     Aspects of law and justice since the later part of the 19C through the 1990s. Special attention given to aspects of intercity America: poverty, urban crowding, substandard housing, inadequate educational programs, poverty, and labor. Moments of evaluation: 1890s and 1960s through books and journal articles.

•     Aspects of industrialism, imperialism, and militarism intertwined with changes in American society and politics since the end of the Civil War to the transformation of the USSR by 1991.