Prerequisite
English 100/101 and History 220B
Course Description
This upper-division course explores the social, economic, cultural and political contours of modern America from 1920 to the present. Major attention is given to the factors and developments contributing to economic disorder, cultural shift, and social transformation. These include the crisis, collapse, and restructuring of the capitalist order in the 1930s, the social fluidity that accompanied mobilization for World War II, the affluence and anxieties of the early postwar period, the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s, and the international and domestic challenges the U.S. faced as it attempted to structure a new global political economy in the 1970s and after. The course includes an evaluation of the role of American interest and power in establishing an international system in the aftermath of Cold War bi-polarism.