The American Renaissance in Context
What was the literary context in which American Renaissance writers wrote and published? How did now-canonical writers respond to popular literary forms?
Literature of the American Civil War
What literature was published and read during the Civil War? How did literature help make sense of the war and the profound changes it brought to the nation?
Home Front: The Visual Culture of the Civil War North
How did images shape the meaning of the war for people at home and the meaning of the home during wartime?
The Jungle and the Community: Workers and Reformers in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
What did it mean to live in the neighborhood of the Union Stock Yard around 1900? How does Upton Sinclair’s representation of this community in The Jungle compare to the accounts of sociologists and reformers?
The World of Don Quixote
How did Cervantes’ Don Quixote respond to the social conditions and literary traditions of early modern Spain?
Mapping Chicago and the Midwest, 1688–1906
How do maps tell the early history of Chicago and the Midwest? How have maps been used by different empires and nations to secure control of the region?
Maps and the Beginnings of Colonial North America
What can maps tell us about how people from different times, places, and cultures make sense of their world? How did maps and mapmaking influence the development of colonial North America?
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and Race in Postbellum America
How did Twain’s Huckleberry Finn engage and challenge popular ideas about slavery and race in nineteenth-century America? Can a text be offensive and still be worth reading?
Raising Support for World War I
World War I in U.S. Popular Culture
How did popular publications in the United States respond to World War I? How did artists, writers, publishers, and advertisers work to promote the war effort? What criticisms of the war did dissenting artists make?