This site investigates what the American Dream has meant over the years to poets, politicians, comedians, musicians, photographers, lawyers, reporters, and others. Students may contribute to the Student Gallery and post their dreams on a Wall of Dreams.
This class examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the “good life” through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. We will explore how such things as department stores, nationally advertised brand-name goods, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics. The course is organized both thematically and chronologically. Each period deals with a new development in the history of consumer culture. Throughout we explore both celebrations and critiques of mass consumption and abundance.
In conjunction with a unit on Puritanism, students will define and illustrate their personal definition of "The American Dream" or their concept of the dream in general.
Americans have historically preferred to think of the United States in classless terms, as a land of economic opportunity equally open to all. Yet, social class remains a central fault line in the U.S. Subject explores the experiences and understandings of class among Americans positioned at different points along the U.S. social spectrum. Considers a variety of classic frameworks for analyzing social class and uses memoirs, novels and ethnographies to gain a sense of how class is experienced in daily life and how it intersects with other forms of social difference such as race and gender.
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