Dec 21, 2024  
2023-2024 Catalog 
    
2023-2024 Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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HIST 411 - Junior Seminar


Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, 1865-1919
Contemporary historians and pundits proclaim a Third Reconstruction and a new Gilded Age, and question just how Progressive early-twentieth-century reformers really were. This class will survey recent historical scholarship on the period from 1865 after the American Civil War (Reconstruction), through the rise of corporate industrial capitalism and inequality (the Gilded Age) and imperialist expansion through the end of World War I. We will trace postwar reforms and racist retrenchment, examine industrial and corporate capitalism, and consider those who favored and opposed immigration. We will also study changing debates about democracy, suffrage, and citizenship from U.S. expansionist ventures through World War I. Students will review and apply necessary skills in how to locate relevant library, archival, and digital sources. Students will practice close reading, taking and organizing notes, and using the proper format for history essays, footnotes, and bibliographies. Students will formulate a research topic, then use secondary and primary sources to write, revise and present a substantial history paper.

Writing History in Viceregal Mexico
In the centuries following the defeat of Tenochtitlán and the establishment of the viceroyalty of Mexico, clerics, scribes, nobles, intellectuals, and adventurers all wrote accounts of Mexican history-both human and natural. Focusing on the politics, methods, and genres of history writing, this course explores central questions in colonial Mexican intellectual and social history, and emphasizes the close reading of early modern Spanish and Indigenous-language texts (in translation). Students will develop, research, write, and present a substantial research paper using primary and secondary sources.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, 1865-1919
Junior standing, plus two Reed history courses

Writing History in Viceregal Mexico
Junior standing, and two history courses at Reed
Restriction(s): History and Interdisciplinary-History majors only
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Not all topics offered every year. Review schedule of classes for availability.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.



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