Enchanted Capitalism: Myths, Monsters, and Markets (original) (raw)

2020, The History Teacher

A FEW YEARS AGO, the Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at my university asked faculty in each of its four departments (Psychology, Arts and Humanities, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences-where I am housed) to propose and develop online interdisciplinary General Education (GE) honors courses that would be offered as a series of four classes with a shared thematic emphasis. Challenging, engaging, and thematically focused, the courses were meant to help recruit majors, provide a shared experience for first-year students that exposed them to some of the disciplines and disciplinary approaches in each of our four departments, build student relationships with faculty, and develop student skills in line with GE core competencies in reading comprehension, writing, critical thinking, and historical awareness. As honors courses, the coursework and readings assigned had a greater degree of difficulty than standard GE courses. The idea was to challenge students who were already performing at a high level to develop their critical thinking and analytical skills even further. Taking a lead from recent articles in The History Teacher, I placed history, popular culture, and historical literacy at the core of a proposed history course entitled "Enchanted Capitalism: Myths,