The Gilded Age and the Shadow of Jim Crow | Teacher Seminars Online

This seminar explores the transformative decades between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century. We will consider how the United States emerged from a shattered slaveholding republic to become an urban-industrial powerhouse marked by both extraordinary opportunity and profound inequality. We will draw on the most recent scholarship on Reconstruction and the Gilded Age to discuss how Americans debated the most fundamental questions of the time: the meaning of citizenship, labor, and equality. We will consider the promise of landmark legislation including the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, as well as the violent backlash that culminated in the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877 and the rise of Jim Crow. Turning to the Gilded Age, we follow a rapidly changing nation transformed by industrial capitalism, mass immigration, rapid urbanization, and soaring wealth inequality. The goal of this seminar is to understand the late nineteenth century not simply as a time of dramatic change, but as the seedbed of modern America, an era whose unresolved conflicts over citizenship, race, labor, inequality, and democracy resonate powerfully today.

Begin Registration

Allyson Hobbs, Lead Scholar

Allyson Hobbs is an associate professor of United States history and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker.com and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Nation. Hobbs’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. She has won several teaching awards, including the Walter J. Gores Award, which is Stanford’s highest prize for excellence in teaching, as well as the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award.