Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening.
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
IT never did and never will. Douglass, Abolitionist This interdisciplinary seminar explores major turning points in history which involved collective attempts by ordinary people to substantially improve their economic, political, and social position within American society, and how these efforts were expressed in art, music, literature, politics, and cultural outlooks. In the process of discussing economic protest and political outcomes we will emphasize how race, ethnicity, gender, and class intersected to produce group solidarity or conflict. By examining the variety of ways Americans sought to change their environment and negotiate power relations, this seminar seeks to find the relationships between actions which range from individual to collective, spontaneous to highly scripted, reactionary to progressive. We purposefully have selected topics that have roots in the early twentieth century but have contemporary reverberations.