HIST 3822 is also offered in Summer 2023
HIST 3822 is also offered in Summer 2022
HIST 3822 is also offered in Fall 2021
HIST 3822 is also offered in Summer 2021
Fall 2018 | HIST 3822 Section 001: Making America Modern: 1945 to Present (21576)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
Tue,
Thu 01:00PM - 02:15PM
UMTC, West Bank
Blegen Hall 145
- Enrollment Status:
Open (32 of 40 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- American politics and society in the postwar era, the diplomacy of the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, cultural clashes in the 1960's, Watergate, the conservative resurgence, and the end of the Cold War.
- Class Description:
- This course begins with the United States' decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. These events ended the war and shaped an atomic age at home and abroad. In the wake of a war that devastated Europe and Russia, the United States emerged as a superpower. In these hopeful decades, the United States? military and economic superiority was undisputed, but there was little consensus about how they should use their military might as the Cold War heated up or about the larger impact of affluence, consumption, and rights consciousness upon the Baby Boom generation. While the prosperity and vision of the nation seemed boundless, internal struggles about the rights of blacks, Latinos/as, Asian Americans, women, and workers both challenged the enduring narrative of the American Dream and evinced the possibility that such a dream might finally be accessible to the vast majority of Americans for the first time in the nation's history. The optimism of the postwar period was shaken by a series of crises from the brutalities of racial oppression, and the tragedies of the Vietnam Wars, to the eventual resignation of President Nixon, and the energy crises and economic recessions that plagued the 1970s. Notwithstanding the post-1975 perception that the nation was in decline, evidence of economic, social, and cultural progress was as readily available as were signs of stagnation. Growth in the West and the South and suburban and exurban expansion put the American Dream within reach of a new generation even as the Rust Belt and the growth of a segregated urban underclass in the North evinced continuing inequities. The Cold War ended with little violence and the United States retained its military superiority. Yet the lessons learned from Vietnam complicated U.S. foreign policy, encouraging an isolationism that offered little in the way of international leadership in the face of a series of brutal civil wars. Globalization opened new marketplaces and the nation's imports and exports expanded as did legal and illegal immigration, but low wages also proliferated. This course examines the tensions between the complicated perceptions and realities of postwar U.S. history through an examination of the political, cultural, racial, gender, and class cleavages and convergences of the post-war period; the impact of hot and cold wars on domestic and foreign relations; the development and deployment of anti-communism; the Civil Rights, Black Power, New Left, American Indian, Chicano, Asian American, Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation movements; the Vietnam Wars; post-1965 immigration and the role of the United States in the global marketplace; the rise of the New Right and Evangelical politics; the culture wars; and the role of the United States in the Middle East from the CIA's participation in the 1953 coup in Iran and the oil crises to the advent of the War on Terror.
- Grading:
- 20% Midterm Exam
30% Final Exam
50% Reports/Papers
- Class Format:
- 75% Lecture
10% Film/Video
15% Discussion
- Workload:
- 100 Pages Reading Per Week
10 Pages Writing Per Term
2 Exam(s)
2 Paper(s)
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/21576/1189
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 5 November 2007
ClassInfo Links - Fall 2018 History Classes