STSC 182 Social Science and American Culture
Offered:Spring 2007
Kuklick TR 3-4:30
This course examines the role of social science in popular culture in the twentieth century United States. There have been popular social scientific theories at least since the early nineteenth century, when the craze spread for interpreting individuals’ character from the bumps on their heads. But popular social science is really a twentieth-century phenomenon, growing especially after World War I, involving dissemination of versions of thought in psychology, anthropology and (most important in the recent past) economics to popular audiences. This course explores what happened to social science and to the public’s understanding as these theories moved from academia to popular culture.
