This course will explore British and American culture during the nineteenth century based on material culture (housing, food, clothing), leisure activities, social interaction and social ritual. We will examine the ways in which industrialization transformed class and gender relations, patterns of consumption and styles of life in Victorian England and America. Britain and America were the earliest industrial societies and as such the first to experience the problems and pleasures of city life, mass culture and the mass market.

Through the use of material artifacts and literary sources we will approach the past as archeologists and anthropologists.What, for example, can we deduce about people from the style and furnishings of their homes, the music they listened to, the things they ate? We will submit the usually unexamined articles and rituals of daily life to critical scrutiny, and in the process we will hopefully gain a better understanding of past lives and of our own lives as well.

The course will consist primarily of class discussions based on weekly reading assignments. Students will also write a series of interpretive essays based on the assigned readings and conduct an independent research project on a topic of their own choosing.