HIST 233-03, U.S. in the 20th Century, Fall 2012

Abstract

During the early 1900s, Americans celebrated the prospect of a new century with world’s fairs and international expositions that displayed emblems of modernity like the automobile and the telephone. At the same time, Wild West shows appealed to crowds with nostalgia for things pastoral, like cowboys and Indians on horseback, tipi camps, and bison. World’s fairs and Wild West shows dramatized a rift in the American mind, between an urban industrial future, global in scope; and a preindustrial past of local accountability. As the century unfurled, Americans would grapple with the problems of a new age-- world wars and undeclared wars, economic depression, an emerging welfare state, and social revolution. Letters, novels, autobiographies, oral histories, and film provide a route into these themes, through the lived experience of Americans from the recent past.