The 19th century was a period of great transformation, and the United States experienced it in a dramatic way. Nineteenth-century Americans witnessed the birth of the nation-state, the emergence of a global market, the multiplication of industrial enterprises, the apex and the downfall of slavery, the consolidation of wage labor, the intensification of imperial expansion, the upsurge in mass migration, the organization of revolutionary movements, the eruption of civil wars, the creation of brutal color lines, and other seismic processes. This course examines how the inhabitants of the United States reinvented their cultures within this most turbulent context. But American culture did not exist in isolation then. In this course, we will go beyond national borders, reexamining the history of the 19th-century United States from a hemispheric perspective and placing American culture in conversation with other cultures of the Americas. |