Native Americans
  • Origin myths and Native American culture
/
  • Origin Myths
  • Leslie Marmon Silko
  • Susan Power
  • Joseph Bruchac
  • Maxine Hong
  • Louise Erdrich
  • N. Scott Momaday
  • Sarah Vowell
  • Black Elk
  • Mourning Dove

  • Trail of Tears

  • Displacement

  • Cultural mythology of the west

  • Indian Schools

  • Social Issues on Reservations (modern)

  • Modern movement to reclaim culture, ritual and stories

Revolutionary
  • Rebellion and democracy – Boston Tea Party
/
  • Thomas Paine
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • Benjamin Franklin
  • Patrick Henry

  • Contradiction of democracy – “all men” or white men?

  • Rationalism and The Enlightenment

1820-1900
  • Urbanization: slums, tenement houses
/
  • Herman Melville
  • Upton Sinclair
  • Walt Whitman
  • Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart”

  • Immigration Explosion

  • Escapism into Nature and Antiquarianism
/
  • William Cullen Bryant
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • Washington Irving

  • Fear/disdain of science
/
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne “The Birthmark”
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne “Dr. Heidegger's Experiment “
  • Walt Whitman “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

  • Progressive Movements: Abolition, Suffrage, Prohibition, Labor, Education
/
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Slave’s Dream”
  • Margaret Fuller
  • Frederick Douglass

Industrialization
  • Invention and innovation

  • Labor and the rise of Labor Unions
/
  • Upton Sinclair

  • Urbanization and the rise of the cities (architecture and innovation)
/
  • Edith Wharton

  • Urbanization and the great migration (from rural to urban)

Slavery and Emancipation
  • Underground Railroad
/
  • OlaudahEquiano
  • Sojourner Truth
  • Harriet Jacobs
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Frederick Douglass
  • Abraham Lincoln
  • Walt Whitman
  • Slave Spirituals
  • W.E.B. Du Bois

  • Slave protests and revolts

  • Slave spirituals as communication and carrier of culture

  • Slave trade

  • Abraham Lincoln and Emancipation Proclamation

Civil War
  • Breaking of bonds of brotherhood
/
  • Ambrose Bierce
  • Stephen Crane
  • Paul Lawrence Dunbar

  • Civil War Photography

  • African American soldiers

  • Political developments leading to Civil War

The Movement West and the Mythology of the West
  • Manifest Destiny and the movement west
/
  • Willa Cather
  • Jack London
  • Ambrose Bierce
  • Sherwood Anderson

  • The Settlement of the West and the Homestead Act

  • Transcontinental Railroad

Women’s Rights
  • Repression of the Victorian era (and previous eras)
/
  • Kate Chopin
  • Edith Wharton
  • H. D.
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  • Suffrage

  • Seneca Falls

  • Women and Hysteria (19th century)

  • Flappers
/
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • After Rosie the Riveter: women after WWII
/
  • Sylvia Plath

World War I
  • Technology: Trench warfare, mustard gas, machine gun
/
  • Ernest Hemingway

  • Shell Shock and Fragmentation
/
  • T.S. Eliot
  • e.e. cummings
  • Robert Frost
  • Carl Sandberg

  • Art: Modernism and Surrealism
/
  • T.S. Eliot
  • Ezra Pound

1920s
  • Harlem Renaissance and the flowering of African American culture
/
  • Langston Hughes
  • Countee Cullen
  • Claude McKay
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • Richard Wright
  • Ralph Ellison
  • Gwendolyn Brooks
  • James Baldwin

  • African American Jazz and Literature

  • Flappers and Women’s Liberation
/
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • Women’s Fashion and Literature

  • Prohibition

  • Speak Easy Culture

  • Mob and Mafia violence

  • Race and Eugenics

The Great Depression
  • Unemployment

  • Stock Market Crash

  • Hoovervilles

  • Dust Bowl

  • Works Progress Administration (art, photography, writing, and archival research – Lomax project)

World War II
  • Reaction to Hitler, fascism and tyranny

  • Xenophobia/isolationism and resistance to joining the war

  • Warfare
/
  • Joseph Heller
  • John Hersey, Hiroshima

  • Technology – bombing planes

  • Atomic Bomb (testing, Manhattan project, Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
/
  • Ray Bradbury
  • Ursula Le Guin
  • Thomas Pynchon

  • D-Day Invasion, Shell Shock (PTSD)

  • African American soldiers in France find the “color line” less noticeable, people more accepting and less discriminatory (W.E.B. Du Bois)
/
  • W.E.B. Du Bois
  • Langston Hughes

  • America’s rise as a world power

Civil Rights Movement
  • King and the potential of the dream
/
  • Toni Morisson
  • Alice Walker
  • Maya Angelou
  • Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”
  • Richard Wright
  • Ralph Ellison

  • Violence of clashes and race riots

  • Passive resistance countering the violence of racism

  • Birmingham Bus Boycott

  • Birmingham church bombings

  • Death of Emmitt Till

  • Voter Registration Drives

  • Violence and Lynchings

  • School desegregation – Brown vs. the Board of Education

  • Jim Crow Laws

The Space Age and the 1950s
  • Sputnik

  • Man on the Moon

  • The rise of youth culture and youth revolt
/
  • J.D. Salinger

  • The birth of rock and roll

  • Car Culture

  • Guise of Normalcy

  • Cold War, Red Scare, Nuclear Threat

  • Cuban Missile Crisis

  • McCarthyism

1960s and 70s
  • Counter culture
/
  • John Updike
  • Rita Dove
  • Kurt Vonnegut

  • Viet Nam War Protest

  • Kent State

  • Conscientious Objectors

  • Hippie and commune culture

  • Summer of Love

  • Woodstock

  • Youth Revolution

  • Feminism and Women’s Lib

Biography
  • Anne Bradstreet

  • Benjamin Franklin

  • Thomas Jefferson

  • Thomas Paine

  • Arthur Miller

  • Fireside Poets: William Cullen Bryant, Longfellow

  • Edgar Allan Poe

  • Herman Melville

  • Henry David Thoreau

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

  • Ambrose Bierce

  • Jack London

  • Ernest Hemingway

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald