SUMMER A SESSION 2009

140A HIST LEC 1: U.S., 20th Century: 1900 to 1928

MW 1:00A ‑‑ 3:05  DODD 147

MARY F. COREY

OFFICE: BUNCHE 9345                    

310-825-2416

OFFICE HOURS: W 11:30-12:30

MCOREY@UCLA.EDU

 

This course will survey major cultural, economic, social intellectual and political trends from roughly the end of the 19th century until 1930. Americans living in this period witnessed enormous change as the United States underwent sweeping urbanization, industrialization, absorbed millions of new immigrants, fought a world war, invented jazz and developed a motion picture industry with a global impact. Americans in this brief period experienced the joys and the discontents of mass markets, street lights, automobiles and radios. Topics include: American Imperialism , immigration, ethnicity, and the Harlem Renaissance;  industrial work and labor; everyday life in the new century; leisure and popular culture; gender and sexuality; modernism; the World War One home front; the expansion of industrial capitalism and the roaring twenties.

 

REQUIRED READING    

Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance

Michael  Parrish, Anxious Decades (AD)

John Milton Cooper, The Pivotal Decades (PD)

Anzia Yezierska, The Bread Givers

 

Week One: Life at the Turn of the Century; The Many Faces of Progressivism

Reading:  PD, pp 1-157;  start The Bread Givers

 

Week Two: Strangers in the Land

Reading: PD, pp 157-246. Keep reading The Bread Givers

 

Week Three: WWI & Woodrow Wilson and The Transition to a Modern Nation

Reading: Finish The Bread Winners; PD pp: 247-318

 

Week Four: The Great Boom

Reading: DA ch. 1-5

 

Week Five: Race and the Rise of Harlem; A Society Divided; The Cult of Celebrity and The Rise of Hollywood

Reading: Harlem Renaissance; ; AD, Ch, 6-10

 

Week Six: The Party’s Over; The Great Crash

Reading: AD pp, 217-269

 

THERE IS NO MIDTERM IN THIS CLASS. YOUR ENTIRE GRADE WILL REST ON THE FINAL. THE FINAL WILL BE POSTED AT THE BEGINNING OF WEEK 6 AND BE DUE ON FRIDAY OF WEEK SIX.