HIST 310
The Automotive Age: History, Technology, Culture, and Environment
History
College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences
Course Description
Explores the most consequential technology of the 20th century, the automobile. Topics may include the car’s impacts on economic growth, civic life, human death, pop music, public transit, and non-human nature.
When Taught
Contact Department
Grade Rule
Grade Rule 8: A, B, C, D, E, I (Standard grade rule)
Fixed
3
Fixed
3
Title
Knowledge of Competing Historiographical Approaches
Learning Outcome
Students will describe the most significant global, historical work on the car and be able to place scholarship in various schools of thought or in their particular thematic approaches. They will become aware of what is known so they can ask questions and engage in research that will not simply reinvent the wheel, so to speak, but contribute to the field’s advance.
Title
Creativity and Original Thinking
Learning Outcome
Students will produce an original piece of historical research, using primary sources, to advance our knowledge about the social, technological, environmental, or cultural impacts of the automobile.
Title
Revision and Critique of Arguments
Learning Outcome
Students will be able to effectively critique the strength and weakness of one’s own arguments and do the same with generosity and constructive intent toward fellow students and scholars.
Title
Interdisciplinary Skills
Learning Outcome
As the automobile’s impact is so broad, students will develop interdisciplinary, synthetic, thinking skills, noting in readings, discussions, and their writings how technology, society, politics, art, and nature intersect and shape one another.
Title
Deeply Seeing the Mundane and Imagining Alternatives
Learning Outcome
In the last century, the automobile and its infrastructure have become ubiquitous and hence almost invisible. Students will utilize this invisible ubiquity to demonstrate the power to see, analyze and deconstruct the world as it is, its hidden assumptions, and think radically about alternative presents and futures.
