HIST 345 - New Deal and Modern America (US)

A survey of the social and political history of the “long New Deal”. The long New Deal refers to the period of United States history from the election of President Roosevelt in 1932 to the election of President Eisenhower in 1952. Across this time period, the people of the United States lived through the crises of economic catastrophe, global war, reconversion from total war, and the Cold War’s beginning. American society then, as now, was divided and stratified along fractures of race, class, gender, sexuality, physical ability, geographic location, and political ideology. The American people did not experience or respond to the crises and
transformations of this era in a unitary fashion. Nor did they share a single vision of how the United States government should steer the country through this era of uncertainty and into the future. Our course will examine how, across this prolonged period of crisis, different Americans thought up and fought to implement different configurations of the relationship between citizen, state, and society. In our course we will repeatedly return to the possibilities, limits, unexpected consequences, and contradictions of these varied efforts to reshape American society. (US)

Credits: 1.0
Prerequisites: None
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: None
Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents
Liberal Arts CORE: None

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