The "Gilded Age" takes its name from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's scathing 1873 satire of the greed and corruption of US society after the Civil War. It's now understood to be the period between the end of the Civil War to the early twentieth century: a period of endemic political corruption, robber barons operating with impunity, massive industrial expansion fueled by increasing immigration, radical union organizing and subsequent violent union busting, the failure of Reconstruction and the institutionalizing of segregation, government policies designed to destroy Indigenous nations and extra-continental US imperialism. The "Progressive Era" follows, from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War I, and has been characterized by historians as a period of backlash to that corruption, through the struggle for workers' and womens' rights, reform efforts to protect the environment, working conditions, and the economy, and the formation of civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Society of American Indians.

This course looks at a cross-section at what writers in the US were publishing from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War I, including muckraking journalism, sensationalist popular writing, literary realism and regionalism, and writing by immigrants, African Americans, and Indigenous people. We will be looking at the bifurcation of literary and popular writing in the period, the significance and effects of investigative journalism, the popularity of genres like the western and crime writing, and the emergence of cinema. Our main focus will be on how the different forms of writing in question represent the political, cultural, and economic conflicts of the era and on what kinds of analyses or solutions they offer.

Writers include Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Zitkala Sa, John Muir, Jacob Riis, Upton Sinclair, WEB Du Bois, Charles Eastman, Ida B. Wells, Lincoln Steffens, Sui Sin Far.

Assignments include two papers, two tests, and participation in a variety of in-class and online activities.