Content

Politics in the United States in the twentieth-first century is highly divisive. Americans are torn along ideological and regional lines and by class, race and gender. The roots of these divides are not new; they were formed as the U.S. became significantly restructured after the Civil War, economically, politically and socially. This class begins with the remaking of American society from the 1870s through World War II and then treats the fracturing that marks the history of the U.S. in the last seventy years. Topics to be addressed include: the unfinished business of the Civil War; the rise of corporate and bureaucratic institutions; the effects of continual waves of immigration and internal population movements; the outcomes of different periods of reform initiatives (the so-called Progressive, New Deal and Great Society eras); the weight of on-going engagements in overseas wars; the social and political impacts of urbanization and suburbanization; the outcomes of periodic economic crises, including the recent decline in manufacture and meltdown of financial institutions; the historic role of protest politics; and the shifting prospects of liberalism and conservatism.

Course material

- Slides (Toledo)

- Own notes

- Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Thomas J. Sugrue, These United States. A Nation in the Making: 1890 to the Present, Norton 2016. (compulsory reading)