Department of History

Level: 2

Semester: 2

Prerequisite: None

Course Description:

This course is the corollary to HIST 2201.  Whereas in the first semester the emphasis was on the building of a nation and its demise through civil war, HIST 2202 is largely dominated by the economic activity of the US/ American industrial revolution. Before students delve into the history of American industrialization, however, they analyse the political, economic and social ramifications of the reconstruction process of 1865 to 1877.  Thereafter students delve into the people, machines, resources and industries that turned the wheels of America’s ‘Gilded’ or industrial age.  They will study the immigration, urbanization and bossism or politics of the ‘Gilded Age’.  ‘How the West Was Won’ is another intriguing topic covered in the course.  Cattle driving, mining, farming on the western prairie land and wars, treaties and reservations for the Native American people as well as extermination of the buffalos will capture the students’ attention here.  By the very end of the nineteenth century, the students’ attention wil be turned to American imperialism followed by the boom and bust in the American economy in the 1920s and 1930s, the African American Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War from 1954 to 1975.