Topics to be explored include: witchcraft, frontier, genocide, war, and imperialism; slavery, racism, and blackface minstrels, night and its modernization, ethnicity and assimilation, women's rights and feminism, gender identity, sexuality, pornography, contraception, abortion, prostitution, courtship, marriage, child-rearing, domestic violence, divorce, poverty and consumerism, "high" vs. "low-brow" culture and humor, Darwinism, Marxism, anti-Communism, Psychoanalysis, jazz, and the counter-culture, drug use, pugilism and extreme sports, gun control and hunting, animal rights, "wellness," exercise, and dieting, mental illness, eccentricity and the "other," gothic horror, serial and mass killing, gangs, and religious cults. Primary sources used are newspaper and magazine articles, diaries, autobiographies, hygiene and etiquette manuals, novels, short stories, poems, and popular songs, films, and works of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Written requirements are a midterm and final exam, and two 3-5 page "thought" papers.