Experimentation, Innovation, Excess: America during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era

The Gilded Age and the Progressive Era span the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – a time of intense change due to large-scale industrialization, intense urbanization and mass immigration, and an age characterized by immense progress in the sciences, as well as by new anxieties. The closing of the frontier, the invention of color photography and the telephone, the building of the first skyscrapers and the transcontinental railway as well as the ongoing electrification transformed the way Americans looked at the nation, including its massive social problems resulting from rapid economic growth and the formation of big business.

This class engages with the literature and culture of this thrilling time from its excesses to its contestations about urban poverty, child neglect and the growing demand for women’s rights. Tracing the legacy of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era until today, we will study photographs and maps, paintings and political speeches.

Readings will include Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, Booker T. Washington and Jacob A. Riis. A reader with material will be made available at the start of the semester. Please purchase Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth (1905).