| Reading Guide for Week 13 | |
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The material for this week shall also serve as the foundation for your last two writing assignments. Last week we examined the elusive nature of masculine independence for white men and black men both before and after the American Civil War. Before the Civil War saw dramatic changes in the elaboration of economic life, with less making by families and instead more purchasing, and with mechanization taking away more skilled artisanal jobs from lower middle-class white men. After the Civil War saw the emancipation of enslaved black men, but also the immediate emergence of white-inflicted terror in the South and the intensification of legal discrimination in both South and North toward severely restricting the economic opportunities of black men. American economic life across the nineteenth century featured expanding economic opportunities for some, and shrinking economic opportunities for many, culminating in the glaring inequality of the “First Gilded Age.” (Alas, you are embedded in the worse inequality of the “Second Gilded Age.”) Tuesday The Merchants’s Magazine was the leading business magazine in the 1840s, published in the leading commercial city in the country: New York City. Meant to serve whatever it imagined to constitute the business community, the magazine featured a wide range of more descriptive reportage, and it featured prescriptive editorial commentary like this article. By 1904 the magazine universe was much larger than in 1841, and there were many more magazines that included prescriptive editorial commentary like this article by Henry Stimson in the Atlantic Monthly. One could notice historical change in the simple fact that articles and editorials tended to be unattributed in 1841, whereas their authorship was likely to be attributed in 1904. In both instances, it was a middle-class white man’s world, as if little else existed in the business world. (You might note such discourses very much alive in the present-day, tokenism notwithstanding.) Thursday Today we will meet not in our usual classroom but at the Wylie House Museum, built in 1835 to house the first president of Indiana University, and restored starting in the 1960s to serve as a historic house museum. |