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Promotional Poster from the 1880s
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Jack the Ripper and Mr. Hyde stalking grimy streets in the 1890s. Midwives cycling through shipyards and visiting tenements in the 1950s. Immigrants joining dreamy cults and enduring racial snubs in the swinging 1970s. This course will introduce you to London and its history through a focus on changes in the city across three eras: Victorian (1830s-1900), Modern (1900- ~1970), and Post-Modern (~1970-present). In order to understand how London has changed over time, we will study people on the margins of power as they experienced the forces of industrialization, modernization, and colonization. By looking at people on the margins, we will start to see the tensions that accompanied change, and will achieve a critical understanding of the city and its meaning for the people who have been and who are its residents. You will first visit London through the readings for this course. These readings were chosen to provide you with a basic understanding of the place, its history, and its peoples. Here at Berkeley we are distant from London; we are on its geographical margins, as it were. But the margins we'd like you to envision are not only spatial ones, but historical and political ones as well.
