The New Deal in Chicago and the Midwest
Collection Essays
In-depth explorations of humanities topics accompanied by primary source sets and discussion questions
The French Colonial Empire, 1500-1800
Why did France’s empire expand to so many parts of the world in the early modern period? How did its expansion shape the history of the United States, Canada, Haiti, and other modern-day countries?
Art of Conflict: Portraying American Indians, 1850–1900
How did U.S. and American Indian artists portray Indian peoples of the West in the late nineteenth century? What relationships exist between representations of American Indians in art and the histories of U.S. settlement?
Victorians and the Hidden Self: Cultural Contexts for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray
How did writers and audiences in late Victorian England and America explore the idea of a hidden or double self? In what ways did representations of this self speak to changing understandings of sexuality, gender, and class?
Commodities and the Transformation of the North American Landscape
How are commodities extracted, produced, and exchanged? How have those processes shaped the physical and cultural landscape of North America? How might the way we see and study those processes alter our understanding of ourselves, the environment, or the history of North America?
Perspectives on the Mexican Revolution
What social conditions contributed to the revolution? How did the United States seek to influence events in Mexico? How did artists and writers respond to the war?
The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Urban North
What does de facto segregation in the urban North look like? How is it similar and different from de jure segregation in the South? How did African Americans respond to the segregation and racism they faced in the North? How did the civil rights movement in the urban North connect to the movement in the South?
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?