MCD 3350 - U.S. MEDIA REVOLUTIONS

credits: 3.0
Crosslisted/Same As: AMS 3350
Crosslisted/Same As (2): ENG 3350
AMS 3350-ENG 3350-MCD 3350. A history of the United States from the Jacksonian Era to the contemporary based upon the nation’s adaptive media infrastructure. Will examine documents, which exemplify mediums associated with this infrastructure, including genres of print, cinema, broadcast, and digital media, as well as study institutions and individuals with disproportionate impact on the emergence and perpetuation of each medium, including the New York Herald, NBC, and Apple. Efforts will be made to distinguish historically specific effects of media technology on U.S. politics, commerce, and culture, while also treating media revolutions as recurring phenomena. What can we learn about current and future media environments by studying historical ones? Objectives: A) Attain a broad knowledge of U.S. history from 1835 to 2020, as well as a more specific history of media technologies and media companies during the same period; B) Recognize and describe relationships between media and the political economic system in which they are embedded; C) Deploy the disciplinary vocabulary of Media Studies in historicist writing. Method of Instruction: Multimedia Curation, Collaborative Research, Discussion, and Lecture. Method of Evaluation: Short Writing Assignments, Research Prompts, Participation Surveys, and Multimedia Projects. Meets *WEP Distribution Requirement.