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Additional Class Topics

For Further Interest: Additional Class Topics
Chapter 25: America Moves to the City, 1865 - 1900

  • Use Jane Addamss experiences to demonstrate how some Americans encountered the problems of new industrial metropolises like Chicago.

  • Examine the myths and the realities of immigration. A good starting point might be Emma Lazaruss Statue of Liberty poem, which says, Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but also called the immigrants wretched refuse.

  • Analyze the impact of urban life, immigration, Darwinism, and biblical higher criticism (literary scholarship) on religion, including the immigrant religions like Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Judaism.

  • Consider the impact and meaning of new popular amusements like the circus, baseball, vaudeville, and so on.

  • Conduct a class debate over the following topics, e.g., Blacks Should Stop Agitating for Political Equality and Racial Segregation Is Constitutional; primary source readings will come from the following book: Opposing Viewpoints in American History Volume II: From Reconstruction to the Present, San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Another good source of debate topics is Larry Madaras and James M. SoRelle, Taking Sides Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in American History, Volume II: Reconstruction to the Present, Connecticut: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

  • Have students read William James, Pragmatism (1907). Use the book to explore the criticisms James had of both the transcendental and rational traditions in American philosophy; in this work, James argues for the concept that any idea must have validity only in terms of its practical consequences.

  • Have students read Edward Bellamys Looking Backward: 2000 1887 (1888). Use the novel to explore a number of key issues of late nineteenth-century economic and political thought; the proper role of government, the nature of humanity, cooperation versus competition, the practicality of utopian thought, and the merits of socialism.

  • Have students look at art slides from the American Realists tradition. Especially, Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899), Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875), George Bellows, The Lone Tenement (1909), Pennsylvania Station Excavation (1906), Cliff Dwellers (1913), Stag at Sharkeys (1909), and Tennis at Newport (1920). Use the slides as visual primary sources have students discuss the ways in which artists used visual critiques as guides to implement change within society.

  • Have students read Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890). Long ago it was said that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives. That was true then. It did not know because it did not care.

  • Have the students read selections from W.E.B. Du BoisThe Souls of Black Folk (1903) in David A. Hollinger and Charles Cappers (Editors) The American Intellectual Tradition: Volume II 1865 to the Present, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

  • Have the students read Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Natural Law (1918) in David A. Hollinger and Charles Cappers (Editors) The American Intellectual Tradition: Volume II 1865 to the Present, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.



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