Syllabus—US Since 1929

seminar @ suny brockport, spring 2021.

Course Overview

In this research-intensive course, we explore US history from 1929 to the present. Building on your basic understanding of US history, the course helps you develop six aspects of your liberal arts education and historical study:

1. a more sophisticated understanding of US history, particularly the historiographic debates among scholars about how to interpret the American past since 1929;
2. learn about history itself as a discipline focused on empirically driven and theoretically sophisticated interpretive narratives and conversations about the past;
3. notice the arc of key themes in twentieth-century American history such as race, gender, class, sexuality, region, culture, the law, the state, politics, economics, and ideas;
4. improve your research, writing, and communication skills;
5. work on your capacity to synthesize and handle informational complexity;
6. consider how you might draw upon the knowledge you acquire in this course for teaching and other professional pursuits.

We will be doing a lot of reading, but you will learn how to read for historical understanding more efficiently. We will also divide up the readings and use our discussion to bring together the different ideas and information they contain. Each student will complete a weekly response worksheet, a final project proposal, and a final historiographic essay based on readings in the course and additional material. Weekly online synchronous meetings are run as a synchronous seminar, and will focus on discussion with occasional lectures from the instructor.

How This Course Works

This is a synchronous online course. That means you need a computer with a camera and microphone or some device that allows you to access the course and a decent Internet connection. Please confer with SUNY Brockport if you do not have access to this equipment and technical requirements. Please show up for class at our regular meeting times (there are a few built-in breaks throughout the semester too). Ideally you can turn your camera on and keep your microphone muted except when you wish to speak. A headset or earbuds with microphone often help a lot too for blocking out extraneous noise. You will also be well-served by finding a quiet, calm place from which to attend class online.

Digital learning during the pandemic is challenging for all of us and I will be as flexible as possible with your particular needs and situations according to SUNY Brockport policy. So long as you are participating in the course in good faith, we can still learn a lot together even though we are doing so under these extraordinary circumstances.

Digital Tools

We will use a few digital tools in the course to facilitate our study together:

1. Computer with Camera and Microphone/Internet Access

• A computer with a camera and microphone or some similar device that allows you to access the course.
• A decent Internet connection.
• A headset or earbuds with microphone.
• A quiet place from which to attend class.

2. Canvas (Not Blackboard)

I use Canvas instead of Blackboard. In most ways, it works the same as Blackboard, but I think its design, navigation, and performance are far superior. You will receive an invitation to join the course Canvas website at the start of the semester. Think of our Canvas website as the central syllabus, schedule, and assignment submission tool for the course—home base.

3. Google Doc

We will use a basic Google Doc to sign up for and organize together the specific reading assignments in the course (explained below). This means you need a gmail account of some sort. They are free, most of you probably already have one, but if you do not, then create one at the Google Docs website.

4. Zoom

We will use Zoom as our online classroom for synchronous discussions. You can sign up for a free Zoom account if you do not already have one.

If you have questions about the technical requirements for the course, or about the hybrid nature of the course, please feel free to contact me.

Reading

We will be doing a lot of reading, but you will learn how to read for historical understanding more efficiently. We will also divide up the readings and use our discussion to bring together the different ideas and information they contain. Each student will complete a weekly response worksheet, a final project proposal, and a final historiographic essay based on readings in the course and additional material. See my “Gutting” Books and Sharing Work for Historical Understanding” for more tips and instructions on reading for this course.

Writing

• Weekly Response Worksheets help me to gauge how you are processing and making sense of course content.
• Final Historiographic Essay proposals and development help me aid you in shaping your final project.
• Your Final Historiographic Essay gives you the opportunity to develop your ability to write a graceful, argument driven piece of writing, driven by research into debates about how we interpret a specific aspect of US history since 1929.

Discussion

• We will join together remotely to practice the art and craft of historical discussion. How do we share ideas, articulate perspectives, ask good questions, and develop both individual and shared understandings of the past we are studying together.

Required Materials To Purchase

• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017) ISBN: 978-1631492853
• W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Second Edition with a New Preface (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) ISBN: 978-0674008731
• Michael J. Kramer, The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) ISBN: 978-0190610753
• Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009) ISBN: 978-0674057401
• Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020) ISBN: 978-1982145620
• Additional readings, viewings, and more on Canvas

Schedule

Due Dates

• Required readings are generally discussed at Tuesday meetings.
• Response Worksheets are generally due by end of Wednesday.
• Crowdsourced readings are generally discussed at Thursday meetings.
• Weeks 6, 10, 13, 14 focus on final project research.

WEEK 01 The 1930s New Deal as Starting Point and Framework

• Required Reading Week 01
  • Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74, 1 (Fall 2008): 3-32
  • Kevin Boyle, “Why Is There No Social Democracy in America?,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74, 1 (Fall 2008): 33 – 37
  • Michael Kazin, “A Liberal Nation In Spite of Itself,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74, 1 (Fall 2008): 38-41
  • Jennifer Klein, “A New Deal Restoration: Individuals, Communities, and the Long Struggle for the Collective Good,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74, 1 (Fall 2008): 42-48
  • Nancy MacLean,  “Getting New Deal History Wrong,”  International Labor and Working-Class History 74, 1 (Fall 2008): 49-55
  • David Montgomery, “The Mythical Man,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74, 1 (Fall 2008): 56-62
  • Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “History, Complexity, and Politics: Further Thoughts,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74, 1 (Fall 2008): 63-69
  • Jefferson Cowie, “We Can’t Go Home Again: Why the New Deal Won’t Be Renewed,” New Labor Forum, 25 January 2011
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 01 (pick one of the following on the Google Doc, read to share with class in seminar):
  • Daniel T. Rodgers, “Forum: Modern American History—The Social-Ethnography Tradition,” Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 67-70
  • Madeline Y. Hsu, “Forum: Modern American History—Asian American History and the Perils of a Usable Past,” Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 71-75
  • Adam Rome, “Forum: Modern American History—Crude Reality,” Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 77-82
  • Kim Phillips-Fein, “Forum: Modern American History—Our Political Narratives,” Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 83-86
  • Leigh E. Schmidt, “Forum: Modern American History—Pluralism, Secularism, and Religion in Modern American History, Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 87-91
  • Michael Sherry, “Forum: Modern American History—War as a Way of Life,” Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 93-96
  • Regina Kunzel, “Forum: Modern American History—The Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality,” Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 97-100
  • Natalia Molina, “Forum: Modern American History—Understanding Race as a Relational Concept,” Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 101-105
  • Philip Scranton, “Forum: Modern American History—The History of Capitalism and the Eclipse of Optimism,” Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 107-111
  • Kevin K. Gaines, “Forum: Modern American History—The End of the Second Reconstruction,” Modern American History 1, 1 (January 2018): 113-119
• Assignment: Course Contract and Student Info Card
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet

WEEK 02 The 1930s—The New Deal

• Required Reading Week 02
  • Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017)
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 02
  • Richard Hofstadter, “From Progressivism to the New Deal,” in The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage Books, 1955): 272-328
  • Lizabeth Cohen, “Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s,” American Quarterly 41, 1 (March 1989): 6-33
  • Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997): 1-50
  • John Kasson, “Introduction” and “Smile Like Roosevelt,” in The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (New York: WW Norton, 2014): 1-45
  • Romain Huret, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Jean-Christian Vinel, “Introduction. The New Deal: A Lost Golden Age?,” in Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies, eds. Romain Huret, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Jean-Christian Vinel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020): 1-18
  • Louis Hyman, “The New Deal Wasn’t What You Think,” The Atlantic, 6 March 2019
  • Lawrence Glickman, “Donald Trump and the Anti-New Deal Tradition,” Process: A Blog for American History, 8 December 2016
  • Lawrence Glickman, “The left is pushing Democrats to embrace their greatest president. Why that’s a good thing,” Washington Post, 14 January 2019
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet
• Optional Viewing and Online Resources 1930s
  • The Great Depression (7 Episodes, dir. Henry Hampton and others, 1993)
  • The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (4 episodes, dir. Ken Burns, 2014)
  • The Living Deal
  • Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America

WEEK 03 The 1940s—World War II

• Required Reading Week 03
  • Samuel Zipp, “Dilemmas of World-Wide Thinking: Popular Geographies and the Problem of Empire in Wendell Willkie’s Search for One World,” Modern American History 1, 3 (September 2018): 295-319
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 03
  • John W. Dower, “Race, Language, and War in Two Cultures: World War II in Asia,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 169-201
  • – Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “Traditions from Home: African Americans in Wartime Richmond, California,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 263-283
  • – Edward J. Escobar, “Zoot-Suiters and Cops: Chicano Youth and the Los Angeles Police Department during World War II,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 284-312
  • Keisha N. Blain, “‘We Want to Set the World on Fire’: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in the New Negro World, 1940–1944,” Journal of Social History 49, 1 (Fall 2015): 194-212
  • Alan Brinkley, “World War II and American Liberalism,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 313-330
  • Carol Miller, “Native Sons and the Good War: Retelling the Myth of American Indian Assimilation,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 217-240
  • Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” The Journal of American History 90, 3 (December 2003): 935-957
  • Thomas Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964,” Journal of American History, 82, 2 (September 1995): 551-578
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet
• Optional Viewing and Online Resources 1940s
  • The War (7 episodes, dir. Ken Burns, 2007)

WEEK 04 1950s—Conformity, Consumerism, and Cool During the Cold War

• Required Reading Week 04
  • W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Second Edition with a New Preface (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 04
  • Elizabeth Fraterrigo, “The Answer to Suburbia: Playboy’s Urban Lifestyle,” Journal of Urban History 34 (July 2008): 747-774
  • David Austin Walsh, The Right-Wing Popular Front: The Far Right and American Conservatism in the 1950s,” Journal of American History 107, 2 (September 2020): 411–432
  • Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement, Journal of American History 75, 3 (December 1988): 786–811
  • Manfred Berg, “Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War,” Journal of American History 94, 1 (June 2007): 75–96
  • Mary L. Dudziak, “Brown as a Cold War Case,” Journal of American History 91, 1 (June 2004): 32-42
  • Erik S. McDuffie, “Black and Red: Black Liberation, the Cold War, and the Horne Thesis,” Journal of African American History 96, 2 (Spring 2011): 236-247
  • Ashley D. Farmer, “‘All the Progress to Be Made Will Be Made by Maladjusted Negroes’: Mae Mallory, Black Women’s Activism, and the Making of the Black Radical Tradition,” Journal of Social History 53, 2 (Winter 2019): 508-530
  • Katherine Turk, “Out of the Revolution, into the Mainstream: Employment Activism in the NOW Sears Campaign and the Growing Pains of Liberal Feminism,” Journal of American History 97, 2 (September 2010): 399–423
  • Michelle Nickerson, “Women, Domesticity, and Postwar Conservatism,” OAH Magazine of History 17, 2: Conservatism (January 2003): 17-21
  • Katherine Rye Jewell, “Gun Cotton: Southern Industry, International Trade, and the Rise of the Republican Party in the 1950s,” in Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why, and How the South Became Republican, ed. Glenn Feldman (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011)
  • Emily S. Rosenberg, “‘Foreign Affairs’ after World War II: Connecting Sexual and International Politics,” Diplomatic History 18, 1 (Winter 1994): 59-70
  • Timothy Mennel, “A Fight to Forget: Urban Renewal, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, and the Stories of Our Cities,” Journal of Urban History 37, 4 (2011): 627–634
  • Lizabeth Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America,” American Historical Review 101, 4 (1996): 1050-1081
  • Eric Avila, “The Folklore of the Freeway: Space, Identity and Culture in Postwar Los Angeles,”” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 23, 1 (Spring 1998): 15-31
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet
• Optional Viewing and Online Resources 1950s
  • David Halberstam’s The Fifties (7 episdoes, dir. Alex Gibney and others, 1997)
  • Rebel Without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955)
  • A Raisin in the Sun (dir. Daniel Petrie, screenplay by Lorraine Hansberry, 1961)

WEEK 05 The 1960s–Citizenship and Unrest in the Great Society

• Required Reading Week 05
  • Michael J. Kramer, The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 05
  • Rick Perlstein, “Who Owns the Sixties? The Opening of a Scholarly Gap,” in Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca, ed. Alexander Star (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002): 234-246
  • Alice Echols, “’We Gotta Get Out of This Place’: Notes Toward a Remapping of the Sixties,” in Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press): 61-74
  • Steven Lawson, “The View From the Nation,” in Steven Lawson and Charles Payne, Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968, Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 2006): 3-48
  • Charles Payne, “The View from the Trenches,” in Steven Lawson and Charles Payne, Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968, Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 2006): 115-158
  • Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 96, 3 (December 2009): 751-776
  • Van Gosse, “Defining the New Left,” in Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (New York: Palgrave McMillian, 2005): 1-8
  • Michael W. Flamm, “The Liberal-Conservative Debates of the 1960s,” in Michael W. Flamm and David Steigerwald, Debating the 1960s: Liberal, Conservative, and Radical Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007): 99-168
  • Christian G. Appy, Introduction, “Facing the Wall” and Ch. 1, “Working Class War,” in Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993): 1-43
  • Alice Echols, “Nothing Distant About It: Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism,” in Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press): 75-94
  • Beth Bailey, “Sexual Revolution(s),” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 235-262
  • Robyn Spencer, “Communalism and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California in the 1970s,” in West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, eds. Iain Boal, Janferie Stone, Michael Watts, and Cal Winslow (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 92-121
  • Thomas Frank, “Of Commerce and Counterculture,” in The Conquest of Cool Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
    – Jeremi Suri, “The Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960–1975,” American Historical Review 114 (February 2009): 45-68
  • Rebecca Klatch, “The Counterculture, the New Left, and the New Right,” Qualitative Sociology 17, 3 (September 1994): 199–214
  • Robert M. Collins, “The Economic Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the ‘American Century’,” American Historical Review 101, 2 (April 1996), 396–422
  • Adam Rome, “‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American History 90, 2 (September 2003): 525–554
  • Paul C. Rosier, “’Modern America Desperately Needs to Listen’: The Emerging Indian in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” Journal of American History 100, 3 (December 2013): 711–735
  • Eric Zolov, “Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties,” The Americas 70, 3 (January 2014), 349-62
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet
• Optional Viewing and Online Resources 1960s
  • Eyes on the Prize (14 episodes, dir. Henry Hampton and others, 1987-1990
  • Berkeley in the Sixties (dir. Mark Kitchell, 1990)
  • July ’64 (dir. Carvin Eison, 2006)
  • The Vietnam War (10 episodes, dirs. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, 2017)
  • Monterey Pop (dir. DA Pennebaker, 1968)
  • Woodstock (dir. Michael Wadleigh, 1970)
  • Gimme Shelter (dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 1970)

WEEK 06 Research Week

• Assignment: Final Project Exploration

WEEK 07 The 1970s—”It Seemed Like Nothing Happened,” Or Did It?

• Required Reading Week 07
  • Craig Phelan, Gerald Friedman, Michael Hillard, Kevin Boyle, Joseph A. McCartin, and Judith Stein, “Labor History Symposium: Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade,” Labor History 52, 3 (September 2011): 323-346
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 07
  • Peter Carroll, “It Seemed like Nothing Happened,” The Antioch Review 41, 1 (Winter 1983): 5-19
  • Heather Ann Thompson, “Introduction: State Secrets,” Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016)
  • Jefferson Cowie, “That ’70s Feeling,” New York Times, 5 September 2010
  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Introduction: Homeowner’s Business,” Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
  • Robert T. Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 102, 1 (June 2015): 73–86
  • Paul Sabin, “Crisis and Continuity in U.S. Oil Politics, 1965–1980,” Journal of American History 99, 1 (June 2012): 177–186
  • Ashley D. Farmer, “”Abolition of Every Possibility of Oppression”: Black Women, Black Power, and the Black Women’s United Front, 1970–1976,” Journal of Women’s History 32, 3 (Fall 2020): 89-114
  • Josiah Rector, “The Spirit of Black Lake: Full Employment, Civil Rights, and the Forgotten Early History of Environmental Justice,” Modern American History 1, 1 (March 2018): 45-66
  • Kathryn Cramer Brownell, “Watergate, the Bipartisan Struggle for Media Access, and the Growth of Cable Television,” Modern American History 2-3 (December 2020): 175-198
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet
• Optional Viewing and Online Resources 1970s
  • Frost/Nixon (dir. Ron Howard, 2008)
  • Network (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1976)
  • Nashville (dir. Robert Altman, 1975)
  • All the President’s Men (dir. Alan Paluka, 1976)
  • The Candidate (dir. Michael Ritchie, 1972)
  • Saturday Night Fever (dir. John Badham, 1977)

WEEK 08 The 1980s—The Rise of the New Right

• Required Reading Week 08
  • Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 08
  • Daniel T. Rodgers, “Prologue,” Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)
  • Michael Rogin, “‘Make My Day!’: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics,” Representations 29 (Winter, 1990): 99-123
  • Lawrence B. Glickman, “The Liberal Who Told Reagan’s Favorite Joke,” Boston Review, 5 August 2019
  • Lawrence B. Glickman, “How Did the GOP Become the Party of Ideas?,” Boston Review, 9 December 2020
  • Jefferson Cowie and Lauren Boehm, “Dead Man’s Town: ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ Social History, and Working-Class Identity,” American Quarterly 58, 2 (June 2006)
  • Kevin Mattson, “Remember Punk Rock? Probably Not…: The Real Culture War of 1980s America,” History News Network, 30 August 2020
  • Jonathan Bell, Rethinking the “Straight State”: Welfare Politics, Health Care, and Public Policy in the Shadow of AIDS, Journal of American History 104, 4 (March 2018): 931–952
  • Various authors, “Interchange: HIV/AIDS and U.S. History,” Journal of American History 104, 2 (September 2017): 431–460
  • Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Heather Ann Thompson, “Introduction: Constructing the Carceral State,” Journal of American History 102, 1 (June 2015): 18–24
  • Donna Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs,” Journal of American History 102, 1 (June 2015): 162–173
    – Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98, 3 (December 2011): 723–43
  • Keisha N. Blain, “‘We will overcome whatever [it] is the system has become today’: Black Women’s Organizing against Police Violence in New York City in the 1980s,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 20, 1 (December 2018): 110-121
  • James Morton Turner, “‘The Specter of Environmentalism’: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right,” Journal of American History 96, 1 (June 2009): 123–148
  • Kathleen Belew, “Introduction,” Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1-18
  • Laura Smith, “Lone Wolves Connected Online: A History of Modern White Supremacy,” New York Times, 26 January 2021
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet
• Optional Viewing and Online Resources 1980s
  • Do the Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee, 1989)
  • Roger and Me (dir. Michael Moore, 1989)

WEEK 09 The 1990s—America at the end of “The American Century”

• Required Reading Week 09
  • Lily Geismer, “Agents of Change: Microenterprise, Welfare Reform, the Clintons, and Liberal Forms of Neoliberalism,” Journal of American History 107, 1 (June 2020): 107–131
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 09
  • Andrew Hartman, “Introduction,” A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015): 1-8
  • Michael Hirsh, “America Adrift: Writing the History of the Post Cold Wars, Review of War in a Time of Peace by David Halberstam,” Foreign Affairs 80, 6 (November-December 2001): 158-164
  • David Fitzgerald, “Support the Troops: Gulf War Homecomings and a New Politics of Military Celebration,” Modern American History 2, 1 (February 2019): 1-22
  • Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste,” Guernica, 9 March 2010
  • Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97, 3 (December 2010): 703–734
  • María Cristina García, “National (In)security and the Immigration Act of 1996,” Modern American History 1, 2 (April 2018): 233-236
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet
• Optional Viewing and Online Resources 1990s
  • Bob Roberts (dir. Tim Robbins, 1992)
  • Bulworth (dir. Warren Beatty, 1998)
  • Primary Colors (dir. Mike Nichols, 1998)
  • Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999)

WEEK 10 Research Week

• Final Project Proposal

WEEK 11 The 2000s—9/11 and Its Fallout

• Required Reading Week 11
  • Terry H. Anderson, “9/11: Bush’s Response,” in Beth Bailey and Richard H. Immerman, eds. Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York: NYU Press, 2015): 54-73
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 11
  • Michael A. Reynolds, “The War’s Entangled Roots: Regional Realities and Washington’s Vision,” in in Beth Bailey and Richard H. Immerman, eds. Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York: NYU Press, 2015): 21-49
  • Slavoj Zizek, “The Desert and the Real,” Lacan.com, 17 September 2001
  • Thomas Frank, “Lie Down For America,” Harper’s, April 2004, 33-46
  • Thomas Frank, “The Wrecking Crew,” Harper’s, August 2008, 35-45
  • Ellen Willis, “Escape from Freedom: What’s the Matter with Tom Frank (and the Lefties Who Love Him)?,” Situations 2006, 5-20
  • Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Amnesty or Abolition?: Felons, illegals, and the case for a new abolition movement,” Boom: A Journal of California 1, 4 (2011): 54–68
  • Melani McAlister, “A Cultural History of the War without End,” Journal of American History 89, 2 (September 2002): 439–455
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet
• Optional Viewing and Online Resources 2000s
  • The Matrix Trilogy (3 films, dir. The Wachowskis, 1999, 2001, 2003)
  • September 11 Digital Archive
  • Hacking Democracy (dir. Russell Michaels and Simon Ardizzone, 2006)

WEEK 12 The 2010s—Thinking Through The History of the Now

• Required Reading Week 12
  • Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020)
  • Lawrence B. Glickman, “Forgotten Men: The Long Road from FDR to Trump, Boston Review, 12 December 2017
• Crowdsourced Readings Week 12
  • James T. Kloppenberg, “Obama’s American History,” in Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012): 151-248
  • Gary Gerstle, “Civic Ideals, Race, and Nation in the Age of Obama,” in The Obama Presidency: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018): 261-280
  • Peniel E. Joseph, “Barack Obama and the Movement for Black Lives: Race, Democracy, and Criminal Justice in the Age of Ferguson,” in The Obama Presidency: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018): 127-143
  • Sarah R. Coleman, “A Promise Unfulfilled, an Imperfect Legacy: Obama and Immigration Policy,” in The Obama Presidency: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018): 179-194
  • Matthew B. Crawford, “Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy,” American Affairs III, 2 (Summer 2019)
  • Michelle Alexander, “The Injustice of This Moment Is Not an ‘Aberration’,” New York Times, 17 January 2020
  • Jill Lepore, “The Hacking of America,” New York Times, 14 September 2018
  • George Derek Musgrove, “The Ingredients for ‘Voter Fraud’ Conspiracies,” Modern American History 1, 2 (April 2018): 227-231
  • Julian E. Zelizer, “Tea Partied: President Obama’s Encounters with the Conservative Industrial Complex,” in The Obama Presidency: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018): 11-29
  • Gary Gerstle, “America’s Neoliberal Order,” in Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, eds. Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2019): 257-278
• Assignment: Weekly Reading Response Worksheet
• Optional Viewing and Online Resources 2010s
  • The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010)
  • The Circle (dir. James Ponsoldt, 2017)
  • The Facebook Dilemma (dir. James Jacoby, 2018)
  • The Social Dilemma (dir. Jeff Orlowski, 2020)

WEEK 13 and 14 Research

• Final Essay Draft
• Final Essay Workshops

WEEK 15

• Final Essay Due