History

Family and Community in American History, 1600-1900

History 2128 / GSWS 2248 Reading Guide with e-reserve and online database links

• Week 1
  • Introduction
• Week 2
  • Patriarchal Families in England and Europe
  • Native American Families and Communities
• Week 3
  • New England Towns in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries:  The Intensification of Familiar Ideals and the Seeds of Change
  • Discussion:  Puritan Families and Well-Ordered Communities
• Week 4
  • White Society in the Chesapeake, 1607-1750
  • African American Communities and Culture in the Colonial Chesapeake:  The Origins of the Slave System
• Week 5
  • The Revolutionary Era:  The Rise of New Domestic Values and the End of the Old Hierarchy
  • Discussion:  Family, Community, and the Law on the Massachusetts Frontier in 1806
• Week 6
  • Child Rearing and Education in the Colonial Period and the Early Republic
  • The Rise of the City:  New Forms of Community
• Week 7
  • Fall break
  • Middle Class Families in the Northeast:  Urbanizing Families and “Provincial” Folks
• Week 8
  • Industrialization:   New Technologies, the Reorganization of Production, and Cultural Change and Conflict for Workers
  • New Ideals and Realities:  Womanhood and Manhood
• Week 9
  • Cultural Frontiers in the Rural Midwest and the West
  • Discussion:  The Transmission of Ideals to the Trans-Mississippi West
• Week 10
  • Utopian Alternatives to Family in the Nineteenth Century
  • Utopian Alternatives to Community in the Nineteenth Century
• Week 11
  • Slavery and the Shaping of Ante- and Post-bellum Southern Society
  • Discussion:  African American Families and Neighborhoods in Urban Society
• Week 12
  • Immigration, Assimilation, and Nativism:  Becoming “American” in the Nineteenth Century?
  • Discussion: “How the Other Half Lives”
• Week 13
  • TBA
  • Thanksgiving break
• Week 14
  • Strains in Middle-Class Family Life in the Late Nineteenth Century
  • Family, Welfare, and the State
• Week 15
  • Suburbanization, Segmentation, and Consumerism:  The Evolution of Mass Culture in America
  • The Changing Boundaries of Family and Community