996008 Reform, Progress, and the Modern in the United States—part 1, to 1898. (S) (WiSe 2010/2011)

This is the first half of a year-long seminar on the theme of the United States as a progressive nation and a modern society. It is designed to assist students with the sources, methods, and concepts for studying and discussing these contentious themes in English and within historical context. This segment of the course concentrates on components of the grand notion of a progressive America that took shape between the American Revolution and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Several large clusters of thought, discourse, and imagery on American progress prevailed in the 1800s. These included a liberal and republican line of thought with roots in the Enlightenment and the Revolution; a romantic/transcendental and evangelical cluster of thought apparent in such contradictory movements as abolitionism, temperance, and Manifest Destiny; and an evolutionary mindset evident by the late 1800s, a mindset usually associated with pseudo-Darwinist notions of an expansive Anglo-American civilization but also available to reformist critics of an aggressive, individualistic Anglo-America. These themes would endure into the twentieth century, when they would weave into more familiar ideas about progress rooted in technology, cultural modernization, corporate industrialism, and mass communications and society.