HIST 2400 - The Making of Modern America

Hours: 3
Surveying the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), the Gilded Age (1877-1890s), the Progressive Era (1890s-1920), the Roaring ‘20s (aka the Jazz Age), and the era of the Great Depression and the New Deal (1930s). During these decades, the United States transitioned from a primarily rural, traditional, and Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation with a small federal government to an urban, industrial, and multicultural nation with a large federal bureaucracy and a welfare state. This transition heralded the emergence of the modern United States. Modernization changed fundamentally the relationships between urban dwellers and rural folk, workers and their employers, citizens and their government, and the state and society. It also raised troubling questions about whether democracy could survive the transition to modernity. Investigating the major events of this period including the Second Industrial Revolution, the Great Migration, the Spanish-American-Filipino and First World Wars, the Great Depression, and the New Deal to understand how and why this transition took place and how it changed the political, social, economic, and cultural fabric of the country. The years 1865 to 1941 are bookended by the two bloodiest wars the United States has fought, but violence, the use of military force, and war were also chief characteristics of this period. Investigating why modernization produced so much violence in the United States.

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HIST 2400 - The Making of Modern America