Dear Gilded Age/Progressive era readers. In response to the call for syllabi, I have appended the syllabi for a graduate-level bibliography course on "State and Society in Victorian America" [1850s-1910s] that I am teaching this fall. In the interest of selectivity, I have limited the recommended readings to three readings per week.

Richard R. John
University of Illinois at Chicago
U15167@UIC.EDU

History 551: State and Society in Victorian America

History 551                                                     Richard R. John
Fall 1994                                                       office:
SEO 619
Thurs 5:00-8:00 PM                                      phone:  6-8569
office hours:  Tu:  1:00-5:00 and by appointment        E-Mail:  U15167@UIC.EDU

This course introduces graduate students to the historical literature on state and society in the United States, 1877-1920. All students are expected to: (1) participate actively in classroom discussions; (2) prepare a two-page meditation on some aspect of each of the week's readings (after the first week); and (3) prepare a ten-page historiographical essay on a subject of the student's choice. The paper will be due on December 5. The topic must be approved by the instructor.

Readings:

Daniel Walker Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
Philip Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994).
Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., eds., The Facts of Reconstruction : Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1991).
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late-Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Random House, 1955). Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967). Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, ed. James Hurt (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990; orig. pub. 1910). Recommended
Leon Fink, ed., Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Lexington: Heath, 1993).

Week 1: Introduction (August 25)

Recommended: Michael Mann, "The Autonomous Power of States: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results," in John A. Hall, ed., States in History (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 109-136; Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 3-43; Bernard Bailyn, "The Challenge of Modern Historiography," American Historical Review (February 1982): 1-33.

Week 2: Political Culture in the Victorian Age (September 1) Required: Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs.

Recommended: Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Howe, "Victorian Culture in America," in Howe, ed. Victorian America (Philadelphia: Univresity of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 3-28.

Week 3: The Civil War: Administration (September 8) Required: Paludan, Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

Recommended: James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

Week 4: NO CLASS (September 15)

Week 5: The Civil War: Politics (September 22) Required: Bernstein, New York City Draft Riots.

Recommended: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

Week 6: Reconstruction (September 29)
Required: Anderson and Moss, Facts of Reconstruction.

Recommended: Steven Hahn, "Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective," American Historical Review (February 1990): 99-123; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Harold M. Hyman and William Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).

Week 7: The Coming of 'Big Business' (October 6) Required: Chandler, Visible Hand, introduction, parts 1-4.

Recommended: Herbert Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 1836-1937 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., "Government versus Business: An American Phenomenon," in Thomas K. McCraw, ed., The Essential Alfred D. Chandler: Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1988), pp. 425-431.

Week 8: Public Administration in the Late-Nineteenth Century (October 13) Keller, Affairs of State, part 2.

Recommended: Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); John G. Sproat, The 'Best Men': Liberal Reformers in the GIlded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).

Week 9: Labor's Last Stand? (October 20) Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor.

Recommended: Melvin Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Week 10: The Reform Impulse (October 27) Hofstadter, Age of Reform.

Recommended: Robert C. McMath, American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993); James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Week 11: The Legacy of Reform (November 3) Wiebe, Search for Order.

Recommended: Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); Albro Martin, Enterprise Denied: The Origins of the Decline of American Railroads, 1897-1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).

Week 12: Corporate Liberalism (November 10) Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism.

Recommended: Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U. S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Berk, "Corporate Liberalism Reconsidered: A Review Essay," Journal of Policy History (Winter 1991): 70-84.

Week 12: The Victorian Origins of the Modern Welfare State? (November 17) Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers

Recommended: Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michael Lacey, ed., The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple, eds., The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Week 14: NO CLASS--Thanksgiving (November 24)

Week 15: Women and Reform (December 1) Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House.

Recommended: Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Katherine Kish Sklar, "Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers," Signs (Summer 1985): 657-677.

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