U.S. History: Modern America | Master Course Outlines | Academics

HIST152 U.S. History: Modern America

3 credits

2250

None

This course meets the General Education requirement for Arts/Humanities.
This course meets the General Education requirement for Diversity.
This course meets the General Education requirement for Critical Thinking.

Students explore America's transformation into an industrial and global power since the Reconstruction era. Topics critically examined include: immigration, modernization, struggles for race, class, gender, and sexual equality, nationalism, world war, and broad social, economic, and cultural change.

Course Learning Goals

Students will:
1. demonstrate an understanding of the history of the United States, and the relationships and conflicts between diverse Americans, from the Reconstruction era to the beginning of the twenty-first century;
2. critically analyze and evaluate competing points of view and voices in modern American history [Critical Thinking];
3. identify events, politics, social systems, economic arrangements, and ideologies that set the framework for modern race relations in the U.S. [Diversity];
4. examine the Reconstruction Era's broad effects in setting the framework American politics, economics, and social systems in the 20th century;
5. identify the major intellectual, technological, and cultural developments of the Progressive Era and World War I [Arts/Humanities];
6. demonstrate an understanding of intellectual and cultural history of the Roaring 20s and the Great Depression [Arts/Humanities]; and
7. demonstrate an understanding of the WW II homefront and warfront; and demonstrate an understanding of the cold war and post-cold war periods.
Planned Sequence of Topics and/or Learning Activities
1. Reconstruction: the framework for modern U.S. race relations
2. Becoming a modern society: Western conquest and Eastern industrialization
3. Imperial America: competing foreign policy visions
4. Progressivism: a reform response to modernization
5. World War I: the U.S. becomes a world power
6. The Twenties: a culture in conflict (Harlem Renaissance, the Lost Generation, Christian fundamentalism)
7. The Great Depression: New Deal and the creative cultural response
8. World War II, on the homefront and warfront
9. Postwar domestic social change
10. Cold War foreign policy
11. The Vietnam War and 1960s social dissent
12. Postwar liberalism and social reform (Civil Rights, 2nd Wave Feminism, Chicano Rights, Gay Rights, Environmentalism and other social movements)
13. The re-emergence of the conservative tradition
14. America in the global age
15. Competing visions of the U.S. in the post-cold war world
Assessment Methods for Course Learning Goals
Course learning goals are assessed with exams, essays, written assignments, multi-media projects, and/or participation in classroom/online discussions.
Reference, Resource, or Learning Materials to be used by Student:
See course syllabus.