Decades ago, historians Eugene and Elizabeth Genovese advised that the discipline of history should focus on the questions of “who rides whom, and how?” In this readings seminar, we will examine how power operated, how it felt, and how it has been negotiated and challenged — on both the personal and institutional levels — throughout U.S. history. The actualization, accumulation, and transmission of wealth — and its translation into political power — will be central questions in our seminar discussions and in the projects that students will devise. As students use history and historiography to develop their own approaches to the study of power and wealth, they will consider how that study might inform their political engagements in their own daily lives.