- The Machine in the Garden

Catalog description

An introduction to the relations between agricultural industrialization and the American pastoral ideal. In the early twentieth century, the longstanding association of American identity with an agrarian paradise was challenged, reconfigured, and/or redirected by newly emerging discourses in sociology, domestic and industrial labor, eugenics, and advertising, among others. At the same time, rural life was radically altered as many small family farms gave way to agribusiness. This course traces these shifts, focusing primarily on the transformative period between 1900 and 1945, and considers efforts to retain the notion of an American Arcadia in the face of the Machine Age.