Extensive reading of works by a few major poets. Emphasizes the evolution of each poet's work and the questions of poetic influence and literary tradition. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic for Fall: Does Poetry Matter? Topic for Spring: Gender and Lyric Poetry.

During the "Gilded Age" of the 1880s and 1890s, the influence of large-scale corporations dominated not just the U.S. Congress but also the courts. Nowhere was this more evident than in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the 1886 Wabash case, excerpted below. With Wabash, the Court overturned its 1879 decision ( Munn v. Illinois ) allowing states to regulate railroads. Perverting the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court decreed that corporations were legally "persons" entitled to the Amendment's protections. (Just three years earlier, the Court had ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional on the basis that the Fourteenth Amendment was binding only on states, not individuals, thereby severely jeopardizing the very rights--of freed slaves--the amendment was explicitly designed to protect.) The Wabash case barred states from regulating interstate commerce, asserting that only the federal government could do so. In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which railroad barons found more appealing than the more restrictive state laws.

This unit focuses on teaching students about the many aspects of biomedical engineering (BME). Students come to see that BME is a broad field that relies on concepts from many engineering disciplines. They also begin to understand some of the special considerations that must be made when dealing with the human body. Activities and class discussions encourage students to think as engineers to come up with their own solutions to some of medical challenges that have been solved throughout the history of BME. Class time iincludes brainstorming and presenting ideas to the class for discussion. Specific activities include examination of the material properties and functions of surgical instruments and prosthetics, a simulation of the training experience of a surgical resident, and an investigation of the properties of fluid flow in vascular tissue.

In 1918 the Spanish influenza hit the United States and then the rest of the world with such swiftness that it sometimes went unnoticed until it had already passed. By mid-1919 it had killed more people than any other disease in a similar period in the history of the world. Kentucky coal miner Teamus Bartley was interviewed at ninety-five years of age and vividly recalled the impact of the flu pandemic on his community. With a dearth of healthy laborers, the mines shut down for six weeks in 1918 and miners went from digging coal to digging graves.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the polio epidemic and vaccine. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

The introduction of new technologies has always altered the relationship between managers and workers, often by eliminating the need for skilled laborers. Helen Zalph and her colleagues in the printing division of the New York Daily News discovered this fact for themselves when computers revolutionized the way they put together the paper during the 1970s. What management gained in efficiency, workers lost in terms of their control over the production process, a sense of community and teamwork, and the sense of pride that comes with skilled craft work. They also lost many of their co-workers, who were no longer needed, and the power of their union. Now working largely in isolated cubby-offices, Zalph and many of her colleagues miss the older methods.

In 1981, the U.S. medical community noticed a significant number of gay men living in urban areas with rare forms of pneumonia, cancer, and lymph disorders. The cluster of ailments was initially dubbed Gay-Related Immune Disease (GRID), but when similar illnesses increased in other groups, the name changed to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The mid-1980s saw a number of advances toward understanding and treating the disease, but no vaccine or cure was forthcoming. Gay advocacy and community-based organizations began providing services and pressuring government to increase funding for finding a cure and helping victims. Despite further drug therapy breakthroughs and prevention campaigns, in 1995 AIDS became the leading cause of death for Americans aged 25 to 44. By 2002, while the annual rate of new HIV cases dropped in the U.S. to 40,000 (from a 1980s high of 150,000), more than 20 million people worldwide had died from the disease, and 40 million were living with HIV. In the following 1983 testimony before a congressional committee, three AIDS patients described their personal experiences during the early years of the disease.

In 1981, the U.S. medical community noticed a significant number of gay men living in urban areas with rare forms of pneumonia, cancer, and lymph disorders. The cluster of ailments was initially dubbed Gay-Related Immune Disease (GRID), but when similar illnesses increased in other groups, the name changed to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The mid-1980s saw a number of advances toward understanding and treating the disease, but no vaccine or cure was forthcoming. Gay advocacy and community-based organizations began providing services and pressuring government to increase funding for finding a cure and helping victims. In the following 1983 testimony before a congressional committee, three representatives of social service organizations sharply criticized the Reagan administration's limited response to the AIDS crisis, advocated increased federal funding, and warned that AIDS was a societal "time bomb" likely to have grave consequences beyond the gay community. In 1995 AIDS became the leading cause of death for Americans aged 25 to 44. By mid-2002, while the annual rate of new HIV cases dropped in the U.S. to 40,000 (from a 1980s high of 150,000), more than 20 million people worldwide had died from the disease, and 40 million were living with HIV.

The emergence of Western science: the systematization of natural knowledge in the ancient world, the transmission of the classical legacy to the Latin West, and the revolt from classical thought during the scientific revolution. Examines scientific concepts in light of their cultural and historical contexts.

The work of anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict did much to popularize the notion that accepted American standards of behavior were not found universally in other cultures. Traditional gender norms therefore were culturally and historically determined rather than derived from nature. In the following Collier's article from 1952, Dr. Judson T. and Mary G. Landis invoked Mead's work to investigate contradictory assessments of the "typical" American male as either dominant and aggressive or blundering and dependent. The authors examined findings of social scientists that compared male and female survival rates, achievement, and sexual performance. They argued that while men were, in fact, the "weaker" sex biologically, their struggle to conform to cultural ideals of superiority and dominance often led to failure and difficulties in relationships. Their conclusion--that "in most families the man is, and has to be, the 'stronger,' he has to be the bulwark for the family" because of greater fluctuations in "endocrinological functioning" of women than in men--shows the power that ideas of biological determinism held even in the social science community.

In 1904, in the midst of a bitter stockyard strike, socialist writer Upton Sinclair's two-month visit to Chicago's "Packingtown" area provided him with a wealth of material that he turned into his best-selling novel, The Jungle. The book is best known for revealing the unsanitary process by which animals became meat products. Yet Sinclair's primary concern was not with the goods that were produced, but with the workers who produced them. Throughout the book, as in this chapter, he described with great accuracy the horrifying physical conditions under which immigrant packing plant workers and their families worked and lived, portraying the collapse of immigrant culture under the relentless pressure of industrial capitalism. Despite his sympathies, as a middle-class reformer Sinclair was oblivious to the vibrancy of immigrant communities beyond the reach of bosses, where immigrants found solidarity and hope. Sinclair's graphic descriptions of how meat products were manufactured were an important factor in the subsequent passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Act in 1906. Sinclair later commented about the effect of his novel: "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach."

The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, known informally as the McMahon Act, established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) as a federal institution to have total control of developments in the field of atomic energy. To replace the predominate image of atomic weapons as destructive, the AEC began a public relations campaign to show the atom's positive side. Hopes for a utopian society with atomic-powered cars and airplanes had died down by the late 1940s. But the promise of atomic energy for medical research, diagnosis, and treatment and for preventing starvation through duplicating photosynthesis remained. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a revision to the McMahon Act opening development to private industry. In the following article from the popular magazine Look published a year later, David O. Woodbury reprised the "utopian promise" rhetoric of the late 1940s, as he discussed the potential of radioisotopes for health, food production, and industry, as well as the production of electric power through atomic energy. The first nuclear power plant began operation in 1957 and facilities proliferated during the next two decades. Due to a drop in demand for electricity, a strong grassroots antinuclear movement concerned about safety and the disposal of nuclear waste, and national anxiety after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, no new facilities were built after 1979 and many have been shut down.

In April 1940 Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins convened a conference in Missouri concerning the silicosis crisis that had emerged in the late 1930s. The differing perspectives on the disease and workers' health are apparent in these excerpts from the Tristate Silicosis Conference. Evan Just, representing industry, claimed that silicosis is a social, not an industrial, problem. Ex-miner Tony McTeer disputed Just's analysis, arguing that he, himself, contracted silicosis even though he had worked only in mines that employed the improved "wet drilling" method. The legendary public health advocate Dr. Alice Hamilton, representing the Public Health Service, spoke on the medical aspects of industrial hygiene and showed that, despite industry's claims, little had improved over the past twenty-five years.

Racism remained potent in the 1920s, but ideas about race were changing, particularly among intellectuals. Almost without exception, social scientists and scholars in the 1890s assumed that race was one of the central ways of understanding human beings. But a profound change in American thinking occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century. A new philosophy, that today might be termed "cultural relativism," began to influence American intellectuals and their students. The emergence of this philosophy in the U.S. owes a great deal to Franz Boas, a German-Jewish anthropologist who taught at Columbia University from 1896 through the 1930s. In this essay, "The Instability of Human Types," delivered at an academic conference on race in 1911, Boas boldly argued against assumptions of innate racial inferiority; insisting that culture, not nature, explained differences among the people of the world. Boas's students included the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the writer Zora Neale Hurston.

Those who built the atomic bomb at the secret Los Alamos, New Mexico, facility understood very well the potential for destruction and death they had created, though individual reactions of the scientists varied widely. Some argued that America needed to develop nuclear weapons before the Germans did. Others argued that a war against fascism demanded the most lethal measures. Still others, as they witnessed the blast on July 16, 1945, were appalled at what they had unleashed. In this excerpt from a 1980 interview, Bernard Feld recalled his work as a graduate student at Los Alamos. While he had few reservations about the bomb's development and its first use at Hiroshima, he had profound reservations about using the second bomb against Nagasaki.

Photographers covered the Civil War, following the Union Army in wagons that served as traveling darkrooms. Their equipment was bulky and the exposures had to be long, so they could not take action photographs during battle. But photography was graphic; this picture taken on the morning of July 4th, 1863 after three days of heavy fighting during the Battle of Gettysburg, showed the northern public that dying in battle lacked the gallantry often represented in paintings and prints.

In the 1820s, operatives in the Lowell cotton mills, mostly women, worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. Holidays were few and short: July Fourth, Thanksgiving, and the first day of spring. In the 1830s, with increased competition, conditions worsened as owners cut wages, raised boarding house rents, or increased workloads. To protest these changes, women went out on strike in 1834 and 1836. This promotional engraving showed a mill woman standing in unlikely repose beside a Fale and Jenks spinning frame. The benign relationship of the figure to the machine may have served to reassure nineteenth-century observers that factory work would not debase virtuous womanhood.""

A worker performs his job for efficiency experts with small lights attached to his arms and hands. This "cyclegraph," a photograph taken by an open-shutter still camera, was invented by time-and-motion specialist Frank Gilbreth to chart workers' movements in mass-production jobs. Gilbreth claimed that the device would help to eliminate useless movement and turn work into a rigid arrangement of "efficient" motions. Many managers embraced this and other techniques for "scientific management" in the early twentieth century to increase productivity by simplifying and standardizing the tasks of workers. Scientific management also gave managers better control over their workforce, since it meant that formerly skilled jobs could be broken into tasks and divided amongst several easily replaceable unskilled workers.