History Senior Seminar

Abstract

These papers were written for a History 498 class, the Senior Seminar. The class was based on Utopian and Dystopian novels from the Industrial Age: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. I wrote on electricity at the close of the nineteenth century, birth control in the early twentieth century, behaviorism and its critics in the 1920s, and The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog in comparison to Ecotopia, both from the 1970s. The four papers constitute one project as they represent a quarter long process of research on themes found in Utopian and Dystopian literature.