These papers were written for a History 498 class, the Senior Seminar. This particular 498 was "non-traditional" because we wrote four shorter papers rather than a single longer paper. The class was based on Utopian and Dystopian novels from the Industrial Age: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. For each paper, the initial research topic was to originate from a theme from the novel, staying within the contemporary time of the novel and using primarily primary resources. I wrote on electricity at the close of the nineteenth century, birth control in the early twentieth century, behaviorism and its critics in the 1920s, and The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog in comparison to Ecotopia, both from the 1970s. Even though the four papers focus on very different themes and time periods, they constitute one project as they represent a quarter long process of research on themes found in Utopian and Dystopian literature.

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