996006 Workshop: The United States as a Developing Society: Analytical Perspectives (WS+BS) (SoSe 2011)

This three-week workshop is intended to provide historians and social scientists with an intense introduction to theoretical, historiographic, transnational, and comparative approaches that scholars of the United States use when examining the decades between the Civil War and World War I, the period of rapid economic development and cultural and political transformation when the foundations of the country’s twentieth-century power took shape. Participants should gain a basic understanding of the assumptions, at times unspoken, behind the ways that American historians write about and analyze the United States as a developing society. Participants will also have opportunities to present and discuss their own works-in-progress discuss them with visiting experts versed in the relevant themes.

Week 1, 17-18 June: Political Economy, Geography, Institutions, Culture
Instructors: Alan Lessoff (Illinois State University), BGHS Guest Professor and editor, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; with Anna-Lisa Müller, BGHS.

Week 2, 24-25 Juni: American Development in Theoretical Perspective
Instructors: Richard Schneirov (Indiana State University), Fulbright Professor, University of Münster, with Alan Lessoff.

Week 3, 1-2 Juli:
1. “New Theoretical Approaches to Reconstruction and the Post-Civil War Era
Instructor: Kate Masur (Northwestern University)
2. “Immigration Policy, Ethnicity, and Racial Identity in the Post-Reconstruction Era”
Instructor: Jørn Brøndal (University of Southern Denmark)

Requirements for participation, required level

People wishing to participate should write Prof. Alan Lessoff at alan.lessoff@uni-bielefeld.de or Anna-Lisa Müller at anna-lisa.mueller@uni-bielefeld.de.

Bibliography

Preliminary reading suggestions:
Closer to the date, we will provide a detailed schedule with specific readings for each unit. These readings introduce the various participants or were suggested by them. We will make these available via the StudentIP system or in a Semesterapparat as soon as possible:

Lessoff, Alan, with Catherine Cocks and Peter Holloran. Introduction to Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Pp. xxvii-l

Lessoff, Alan. “Progress before Modernization: Foreign Interpretations of American Development in James Bryce’s Generation.” American Nineteenth Century History 1, n. 2 (Summer 2000): 69-96.

Masur, Kate. “‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States.” Journal of American History 93 (March 2007): 1050-84.

Schneirov, Richard. “Class Conflict, Municipal Politics, and Governmental Reform in Gilded Age Chicago, 1871-1875.” German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850-1910. Eds. Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983. Pp. 183-205.

Schneirov, Richard, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873-1898,” and rejoinder to responses by Rebecca Edwards and James L Huston, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (July 2006): 189-240.

Zolberg, Aristide R. “Seward’s Other Follies.” In Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 166-98. (Suggested by Jørn Brøndal.)