America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

America stands at a dramatic crossroads: Massive corporations wield disturbing power. The huge income gap between the one percent and the other 99 percent grows wider. Astounding new technologies are changing American lives. Sound familiar? These and other issues that characterize the early 21st century were also the hallmarks of the transformative periods known as the Gilded Age (1865-1900) and the Progressive Era (1900-1920). Before the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, America was a developing nation, with a largely agrarian economy and virtually no role in global affairs. Yet by 1900, within 35 years, the US had emerged as the world's greatest industrial power. Explore these tumultuous times in America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Over decades marked by economic, political, social, and technological upheavals, the US went from an agrarian, isolationist country to the world's greatest industrial power and a nascent geopolitical superpower. In a time rife with staggering excess, social unrest, and strident calls for reform, these and other remarkable events created the country that we know today: industrialization gave rise to a huge American middle class; voluminous waves of immigration added new material to the "melting pot" of US society; the phenomenon of big business led to the formation of labor unions and the adoption of consumer protections; electricity, cars, and other technologies forever changed the landscape of American life. In taking the measure of six dramatically innovative decades, you'll investigate the economic, political, and social upheavals that marked these years, as well as the details of daily life and the cultural thinking of the times. In the process, you'll meet robber barons, industrialists, socialites, reformers, inventors, conservationists, women's suffragists, civil rights activists, and passionate progressives, who together forged a new United States.

All Lectures:
1. 1865: "Bind Up the Nation's Wounds"
2. The Reconstruction Revolution
3. Buffalo Bill Cody and the Myth of the West
4. Smokestack Nation: The Industrial Titans
5. Andrew Carnegie: The Self-Made Ideal
6. Big Business: Democracy for Sale?
7. The New Immigrants: A New America
8. Big Cities: The Underbelly Revealed
9. Popular Culture: Jazz, Modern Art, Movies
10. New Technology: Cars, Electricity, Records
11. The 1892 Homestead Strike
12. Morals and Manners: Middle-Class Society
13. Mrs. Vanderbilt's Gala Ball
14. Populist Revolt: The Grangers and Coxey
15. Rough Riders and the Imperial Dream
16. No More Corsets: The New Woman
17. Trust-Busting in the Progressive Era
18. The 1911 Triangle Fire and Reform
19. Theodore Roosevelt, Conservationist
20. Urban Reform: How the Other Half Lives
21. The 17th Amendment: Democracy Restored
22. Early Civil Rights: Washington or Du Bois?
23. Over There: A World Safe for Democracy
24. Upheaval and the End of an Era