The Rise of Modern American Culture

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Essential Questions: 
  1. How did mass production transform work and leisure?
  2. How did immigrant cultures adapt and resist mainstream American culture?
  3. What forces led to the "New Woman" of the twentieth century?
  4. How were racial categories central to creating an American identity, and how did these categories influence foreign policy?
  5. In what ways did American politics respond to the rise of plutocrats and labor strife?
Resources: 

Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976.

Black, George, The Good Neighbor: How the United States Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean. New York: Pantheon Press, 1988.

Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

Fox, Stephen. The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and It Creators. New York: Morrow Press, 1984.

Gorn, Elliot. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize-Fighting in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986

Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. “Sexual Geography and Gender Economy: The Furnished Room Districts of Chicago, 1890-1930,” in Barbara Melosh, ed., Gender and American History. London: Routledge Press, 1993.

Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Rodgers, Daniel T. The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.