Making Knowledge in the Progressive Era: Institutions, Spaces, and Ideas

Catalog description

Who makes knowledge? How is it shaped by intellectual, political, and material ambitions and constraints? These current concerns also preoccupied U.S. society at the turn of the 20th century. During the Progressive Era – a time of massive technological change, social upheavals, and racial tensions – educators, researchers, and artists charted new ways of producing and disseminating knowledge. Students will analyze American knowledge cultures by reading fictions, memoirs, and philosophical/scholarly writings by Henry Adams, Jane Addams, Willa Cather, John Dewey, and W.E.B. Du Bois and by exploring other cultural artifacts and media, including visual representations, maps, architectural plans and archives.