SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE 19TH-20TH CENTURY RUST BELT

Catalog description

(Slashed with HIST 62505 ) This course explores the national and global history of social movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lens of the great lakes region. While many social movements have focussed on the coasts, in fact the "Rust Belt" played a disproportionate role in fostering and populating radical movements from abolitionism to temperance to labor unionism as well as repressive movements like the Ku Klux Klan. Alternating between classic historical monographs and regional studies, the class interrogates the meaning of the region's sympathy to radical movements and also suggests a reconception of these movements through a new geographic focus.