Project Summary: This week, we will consider the economic conditions that organized society after the American civil war. Through periods of high industrialization and then deindustrialization, globalization, and the rise of the digital age, we can track the transformation of racial and ethnic relations in the United States, as well as patterns in immigration. We will explore the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, the persistence of racial inequalities, and the policies and actions that have attempted to rectify these inequalities. In doing so, we will lay the historical and theoretical foundations for more detailed discussions of particular racial and ethnic groups’ experiences in the United States in the weeks ahead.