History 1378
The United States to 1877:
Places in Time
Spring 2004


Professor Steven Mintz

548 Agnes Arnold Hall
Voice: 713-743-3109
E-Mail: SMintz@uh.edu

Online Resources

Extensive online resources are available through the class' Web-CT site at:

http://www.uh.edu/webct/

Places in Time is an interactive, collaborative History and English course in which students will become historians who will conduct research and present their findings through multimedia technologies. The students will build web pages, create Power Point presentations, and look at works of arts – paintings, sculpture, photography and architecture – that reflect, support, and challenge the historical themes of American history from the late 19th century into the early 21st century. A major objective is to provide students with the range of skills to succeed inside and outside of the university, including research, analytical, presentation, and writing skills.

Each week, students will engage in a “hands-on history” project, focusing on particular primary sources—music, newspaper articles, paintings, photographs—and at significant places in time—Chicago in 1893, Greenwich Village in 1913, Harlem in 1925, and others—that illustrate broad historical themes.

Victoria Burke of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will incorporate the visual arts and architecture into the course. Sara McNeil and Bernard Robin, from the College of Education, will lead the technology component. Mary Gray of the Department of English will offer the literature and composition elements.

Hands-On History

In this class, you will not be a passive recipient of knowledge. You will be an active learner who will actually do history.  You will be an investigator, a detective, and a researcher.  You will learn how to dig up evidence, determine its value, analyze it, and write up your findings in clear, coherent, and usable form that will appear on a class website.

Required Reading:

John Lienhard, INVENTING MODERN

James Kirby Martin et al., AMERICA AND ITS PEOPLES, Vol. 2, UH Custom Edition, 2nd Edition

For the first exam:
Lienhard, INVENTING MODERN, chapters 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14
Martin et al., AMERICA AND ITS PEOPLES, 17-23

For the second exam:
Lienhard, INVENTING MODERN, chapters 15, 16
Martin et al., AMERICA AND ITS PEOPLES, 24-32

EXTRA-CREDIT ASSIGNMENT 1 (Due in class February 23)
Attend the lecture Monday evening, February 16, 7-9 p.m., by filmmaker Spike Lee, in either Cullen Performance Hall or the Houston Room in the University Center, and write a one-to-two page double-spaced printed essay, analyzing his talk.

EXTRA-CREDIT ASSIGNMENT 2 (Due in class March 12)
Read three “Engines of Our Ingenuity” episodes that deal with some aspect of American history and that are not covered in INVENTING MODERN.  Write a 2-page essay that addresses the following questions:

•  What do we learn about history when we study the history of technology?
•  Evaluate how these episodes make you look at history differently.

EXTRA-CREDIT ASSIGNMENT 3 (Due in class April 30)
View the exhibition “African American Art from the MFAH Collection” which opens February 22, 2004 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Bissonnet at Main).  Then write a 2-page essay analyzing ONE of the works from the exhibition. Among the questions to you should discuss:

•  In what respects does the work express a distinctive African American sensibility?
•  What messages or themes does the work convey? 
•  What does the work tell viewers about African American life and history?
•  In what ways does the work reflect the time and context in which it was created?

Some of the film clips that we will watch contain scenes of explicit violence, sexual brutality, ethnic and gender stereotyping, nudity, obscenity, adult themes, profanity, and offensive language that might be found objectionable by some. There may be also be ideas or practices endorsed by specific motion pictures that some might consider immoral or amoral. All of these films, however, were already in wide circulation in the culture at large and are, in the instructor’s opinion, essential to understanding American cultural history. If these clips will make you uncomfortable, please do not enroll in the course.

Attendance:

Class attendance is essential and attendance will be recorded. Any student who misses class, arrives late, or leaves early will be penalized. Those who are consistently absent, tardy, or leave early will be dropped from the class.

Academic Honesty:

All work must be your own. In any case of cheating or plagiarism, the penalty will be flunking the course. For written work, keep your preparation materials, and be prepared to explain the meaning of everything you write.

Any unacknowledged use of the words, ideas, insights, or the original research of another is strictly prohibited. Cheating includes (but is not confined to): 

• passing off someone else's work as your own
• giving or receiving any assistance during an examination

As a condition of taking this course, all required papers may be subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com or a similar service for the detection of plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers.

Accommodations for Students with Disabilities:

Your instructor is committed to ensuring that students with health impairments, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, psychiatric disorders, or other disabilities are able to successfully compete with non-disabled students. Students requesting an accommodation must contact the instructor at the beginning of the semester.

Under UH’s policy, only students who are registered with the Center for Students with DisAbilities may request academic accommodations; students must also have an approved recommendation from UH’s Academic Accommodations Evaluation Committee.  UH’s disabilities policy is available at: http://www.uh.edu/provost/documents/disability.html.

Cell Phones and Pagers:

Cell phones, beepers, or pages are a significant distraction and must be placed on vibrate or silent mode prior to coming to class.  Do not answer phones during class. If you are expecting an emergency phone call, you must make arrangements with the instructor prior to class. Those using a cell phone must leave the classroom for the remainder of the class period. Students who repeatedly violate this policy will be dropped from the class.

Disruptive Behavior: 

Any behavior that adversely affects the normal educational functioning or the professional standards of the class will result in failure for the course.

Calendar of Topics

Part I.  Introduction to the Course: Learning to Look and Listen
Weeks 1 and 2.  January 21-30

America History Through Art
American History Through Film
American History Through Music
American History Through Photography

Overview

This class will use art, film, music, and photography as windows into the social and cultural history of the past century and a half. We will not treat these sources simply as “illustrations” of past events, but as complex documents that actively shape meanings, values, and attitudes. Through these sources, we will explore the shifting values, attitudes, hopes, and fears of Americans, from the nation’s emergence as a world power and an industrial titan in the late nineteenth century to the present. Among other things, we will study Americans’ evolving attitudes toward masculinity and femininity, sexuality, ethnicity and race, and America’s role in the world. Above all, we shall explore an ongoing cultural civil war to determine what to believe and to define what this country stands for. 

Part II.  The Problems and Promise of American Life, 1876-1900
Weeks 3 and 4.  February 2-13

Setting the Scene: America in 1876
A Distant Mirror
The West as Contested Space
The Rise of Big Business
Social Conflicts
Caste Society
Visions of the Future
The Making of Modern America

Overview

Mark Twain called the late nineteenth century the "Gilded Age." By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In the popular view, the late nineteenth century was a period of greed and guile: of rapacious Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers, of shady business practices, scandal-plagued politics, and vulgar display. It was a time not unlike our own.

It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism. But it is more useful to think of this as modern America’s formative period, when an agrarian society of small producers was transformed into an urban society dominated by industrial corporations. By looking at the Gilded Age, we can see the forces that created modern America: the drive for national consolidation, the hierarchies of class, race, and gender, and the quest for economic order.

1.  The West as Contested Space

The western frontier was bitterly contested space.  Romanticized in countless western movies, the true story of the winning of the West is a story of struggles for dominance over labor, language, water, and land, as Anglos sought dominance over Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese Americans.

2. A Distant Mirror

The late 19th century bears striking parallels with our time. It was a period of sweeping technological innovation and wrenching economic change. Along with efforts to reduce the scale of government, it had a drug crisis and attempts to uplift morality and solve social problems ranging from domestic violence to unwed pregnancy. In the 19th century, however, these efforts were more forceful than those today. States enacted “Blue Laws,” prohibiting most businesses from operating on Sunday. Lotteries, widely used by government in the early 19th century to raise revenue, were outlawed, by 1890, in 43 of the 44 states. A number of states forbade horse racing, boxing, and the manufacture of cigarettes. The earliest attempts to suppress narcotics were made. In 1872, Congress enacted the Comstock Act, which banned obscene literature from the mails. The law was interpreted broadly and was used to prevent the distribution of birth control information and contraceptive devices through the mails. The largest movement to enforce morality was the movement to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol.

3. The Rise of Big Business

The late 19th century saw the creation of a modern industrial economy. Unlike the pre-Civil War economy, this new one was dependent on raw materials from around the world and it sold goods in global markets. Business organization expanded in size and scale. There was an unparalleled increase in factory production, mechanization, and business consolidation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the major sectors of the nation's economy--banking, manufacturing, meat packing, oil refining, railroads, and steel--were dominated by a small number of giant corporations.

4.  Social Conflict

The Gilded Age was an era of intense social conflict. Labor conflict was never more contentious or violent; bloody confrontations wracked the railroad, steel, and mining industries. Race was another source of conflict, as southern states subjected African Americans to a degrading system of social segregation and deprived them of the right to vote and other prerogatives of citizenship. This system of racial discrimination based on law and custom was called "Jim Crow," after a mid-nineteenth century blackfaced minstrel act, and it was reinforced through violence, including thousands of lynchings.

The most momentous political conflict of the late 19th century was the farmers’ revolt. Drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer. Many farmers blamed railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures dealers, mortgage companies, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of farm equipment for their plight. Farmers responded by organizing Granges, Farmers’ Alliances, and the Populist party. In the election of 1896, the Populists and the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for president. Bryan’s decisive defeat inaugurated a period of Republican ascendancy, in which Republicans controlled the presidency for 24 of the next 32 years.

5.  Caste Society

In 1900, inequality was the rule. Class inequities were pronounced; 939 of every 1000 Americans died without any property to their name. Gender and racial inequalities were also marked. About 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South, 75 percent on farms, mostly as sharecroppers. 4,500 black men and women were lynched, more than a hundred a year. Indians were driven from the Great Plains and confined on reservations. Their numbers dropped to fewer than 200,000. For the first time there were concerted efforts to restrict foreign immigration. The first group to be excluded were Chinese immigrants in 1882. At no time in American history was diversity—in income, living standards, day-to-day experience, education, and rights—greater than at the end of the 19th century.

6.  The Making of Modern America

The Gilded Age was a period of extraordinarily technological innovation. It saw the rise of the skyscraper and the advent of new technologies of communication, including the phonograph and the telephone. But it was also a period of intense social conflict. No one could be certain whether the future would bring progress or rinding conflict. Many Americans sought simple nostrums that would solve the nation’s problems and created fantasies about an ideal society.

Part III.  Becoming Modern, 1900-1929
Week 5, 6, 7:  February 16 – March 5

The 1890s as a Turning Point
Revolts Against Tradition
Modernism and Modernity: The Origins and History of Modern Art
Immigrants and the American Dream
Progressivism
The Meaning of World War I
Harlem and the Jazz Age
Cultural Conflicts over Race, Gender, and Immigration

Overview

The 20th century was a century of revolutions.  Apart from political revolutions, like the Russian and Chinese revolutions, social, cultural, and scientific revolutions reshaped every aspect of life: art, entertainment, fashion and design, science, technology, work, and the size and scope of government.  The 20th century would reveal all the extremes of human nature. It was scarred by some of history's most horrific examples of brutality and violence. But it also demonstrated humanity's idealism, inventiveness, and humanitarianism. It was the most technologically advanced century; it was also the most ideological and most destructive.

1.  The 1890s as a Turning Point

During the 1890s, one epoch in American history gradually came to an end and a new era began. Diplomatically, the United States became a world power. Economically, business consolidation accelerated. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the major sectors of the nation's economy--banking, manufacturing, meat packing, oil refining, railroads, and steel--were dominated by a small number of giant corporations. Scientifically, X-rays, radiation, and quantum mechanics were discovered. 

The 1890s also witnessed the rise of the first instruments of mass communication—the tabloid, the mass-market magazine, the best-selling novel, million dollar advertising campaigns, and moving pictures. New forms of commercial enterainment proliferated, including the amusement park, urban nightclub, the dance hall, the nickelodeon, and the vaudeville stage. Competitive team sports, including basketball, bicycling, football, as well as golf and wrestling, were introduced to the United States. The New Music and Tin Pan Ally, and the New Woman also appeared. Meanwhile, a new reform movement, known as Progressivism emerged, committed to using government as an agency of social betterment.

2.  Revolts Against Tradition

Dissenting artists, architects, and novelists led a revolt against the genteel tradition, the set of values that dominated the 19th century.  The early 20th century also brought concerted challenges against caste society. Contesting Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of racial accommodation, W.E.B. DuBois issued a call for political and social equality.  A new generation of women leaders agitated for reform, founding settlement houses, entering the profession of social work, and transforming suffrage into a mass movement.  Young women bobbed their hair, cut their skirts, swung tennis rackets and golf clubs, and smoked in public.

3.  Immigrants

The turn of the century brought a wave of immigration without parallel in American history.  Coming primarily from southern and eastern Europe, the new immigrants congregated in the nation’s cities.  Mass immigration prompted a debate over the meaning of America and Americanism: whether the United States was a melting pot, a pluralistic society, or a society essentially Anglo-Saxon in character.

4.  The Meaning of World War I

The AP ranked WWI as the 8th most important event of the 20c. Everything that happened in the 20c happened because of WWI: the Depression, WWII, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the collapse of empires all trace back to WWI. No event better underscores the utter unpredictability of the future. Europe hadn’t fought a major war for 100 years. At any point in the 5 weeks leading up to the fighting, the madness might have been averted. The war was a product of miscalculation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication. No one expected a war of such magnitude. No one wanted one. A continent at the height of its success descended into senseless slaughter. WWI destroyed four empires—German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Romanov—and it touched off colonial revolts in the Middle East and Vietnam. World War I shattered Americans’ faith in reform and moral crusades.

5.  The 1920s

We tend to think of the 1920s as a cynical, hedonistic interlude between the Great War and the Great Depression, a decade of dissipation, of jazz bands, bootleggers, raccoon coats, bathtub gin, flappers, flagpole sitters, bootleggers, and marathon dancers, when the younger generation rebelled against traditional taboos while their elders engaged in an orgy of speculation. The 1920s did witness a revolution in manners and morals.  The younger generation rebelled against traditional taboos and popularized versions of the ideas of Sigmund Freud were widely disseminated. The trivial took the place of the consequential. Aided by a sensationalistic media, the public was fascinated by spectator sports, flagpole sitters, and marathon dancers.

But the 1920s was also a decade of bitter cultural conflicts, pitting religious liberals against fundamentalists, nativists against immigrants, and rural provincials against urban cosmopolitans.  Prohibition, women’s roles, race, and the Ku Klux Klan became bitter points of contention.

Review, Wednesday, March 3

Midterm Examination: Friday, March 5

Part IV.  Depression America, 1929-1941
Weeks 8:  March 8-12

The Depression in Comparative Perspective
Challenging Traditional American Precepts
The Arts and the Great Depression
Depression America and its Films

Overview

There have been three seminal events in American history: the Revolution, which instilled a commitment to liberty and equality into American culture as well as deep a suspicion of government authority; the Civil War, which ended slavery and removed the major obstacle to the growth of a industrial society; and the Great Depression, which vastly expanded the scope and scale of the federal government and created the modern welfare state.

The Depression was the watershed event of 20th century American history. It gave rise to a philosophy now under attack: that government had a duty to intervene to improve the quality of American life; that it should provide a safety net for the elderly, the jobless, the disabled, and the poor; and that the federal government was responsible for ensuring the health of the nation's economy and the welfare of its citizens.

1.  The Depression in Comparative Perspective

Depression unemployment was higher in the United States and lasted longer than in any other industrialized nation. And yet the depression did not produce the radical or reactionary responses that one finds in countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, or Argentina.

For a decade, unemployment in the United States averaged 20 percent. In three years, the value of U.S. corporations fell 89 percent. Nations responded to the depression in several ways: with totalitarian communism, fascist dictatorship, socialism, and welfare capitalism.

2.  Challenging Traditional American Precepts

The Depression challenged certain basic precepts of American culture, especially the faith in individual self-help, business, the inevitability of progress, and limited government.

3.  The Arts and the Great Depression

The Depression encouraged a search for the real America. There was a new interest in “the people,” in regional cultures, and in folk traditions.

4.  Depression America and its Films

The movies played a crucial role in sustaining American ideals in a time of social upheaval across Europe. Films projected images of a world in which financial success was possible and of a society in which class barriers could be overcome.

SPRING BREAK: March 15-19

Part V.  Wartime America, 1941-1945
Week 10:  March 22-March 26

The Greatest Generation
A Good War
The Holocaust
A Total War
The War’s Impact
The Dawn of the Atomic Age

Overview

Americans are deeply sentimental about World War II.  It was, we are told, the last good war, and the people who fought it were this country’s greatest generation. The country, according to a best seller by journalist Tom Browkaw, was united. "They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest," reads a typical quote, and they didn't quit when they made the world safe for democracy, either. "They helped convert a wartime economy into the most powerful peacetime economy in history," Brokaw writes. "They made breakthroughs in medicine and other sciences. They gave the world new art and literature. They came to understand the need for federal civil rights legislation. They gave America Medicare." All of this sounds too good to be true.  And it is. Our memories are selective and self-serving.

World War II was a spectacular affirmation of American ideas and industry. The United States produced vast quantities of arms (296,000 planes, 102,000 tanks, 88,000 ships), organized a global alliance and triumphed over evil. The war ended the Depression and restored the nation’s self-confidence.

All this is true, but it is not the whole truth. World War II was a preventable tragedy, and in this sense, its occurrence represented an immense political failure. Hitler could have been stopped many times before he unleashed history's greatest slaughter. (No one knows how many people died; a common estimate is nearly 55 million.) American isolationism abetted the timidity of England and France, while also leaving the United States woefully underarmed once war came. Our wartime conduct was marred by glaring moral failures, from the internment of Japanese Americans to our near ignoring of the Holocaust.

The battle against Nazi racism exposed America's own prejudices as peacetime never could. The ironies were glaring: Why should minorities fight a "white man's war" in segregated armed forces on behalf of a country that denied them equal rights and, in some cases, citizenship? That they fought anyway--with conspicuous gallantry--put the country in their moral debt.

2.  A Good War

World War II was a “good war,” but it was also a race war.  Hitler, it is sometimes said, gave racism a bad name.  He took to an extreme ideas, like eugenics and race, that had arisen in many western societies. During the war, there were some serious efforts to address the nation’s racial problems, like Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. At the same time, Japanese Americans were interned on account of their race.

World War II gave many minority Americans--and women of all races--an economic and psychological boost. The needs of defense industries, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's desire to counter Axis propaganda, opened skilled, high-paying jobs to people who had never had a chance at them before. Minority workers and soldiers made unprecedented contact with other minorities as well as with whites. Feelings of self-confidence and belonging, once enjoyed, were not easily relinquished. In short, the war jump-started the civil rights movement.

3.  A Total War

World War II produced massive dislocations in American society.  It transformed the lives of women and minorities.  The federal government attempted to use the mass media to engage Americans in the wartime struggle. Many minorities sought to prove Americanism through military service and wartime sacrifice.

The wartime bred anxiety and social conflict.  Riots, pitting whites against blacks and against Mexican Americans broke out in many cities.  Meanwhile, there were deep misgivings about the changes that the war produced, especially in the lives of women and of the young.

4.  The War’s Impact

The shared experiences of scrap drives, rationing (everything from gasoline to meat), anxiety and personal loss inspired a generational solidarity that still endures. The need to finance the war led to the adoption of income-tax withholding. In 1941 only 7 million Americans filed tax returns; by 1944, 42 million did. The war boom stimulated mass migration to California and northern cities. World War II affirmed U.S. economic power. By 1944, average family incomes were perhaps 25 percent higher than in 1941.

The country’s experience in World War II prepared the way for the future—and not always in a good way. The regimentation of military life -- not to mention the mindless, by-the-book bureaucracy of its day-to-day operation -- prepared many vets for corporate life. The war also spawned a belief that the 20th century was to be the American century, and that Americans could wage war and defeat all enemies: Communists, poverty and drugs, to name a few.

Part VI.  Happy Days: Tail Fins, Grey Flannel Suits, and Blue Suede Shoes, 1945-1960
Week 11 and 12: March 29-April 1

Myths and Realities
A Decade of Fear and Conformity
A Decade of Farreaching Transformations
Cultural Critiques

Overview

Many Americans look back upon the 1950s as a golden age, a time of stable families and rising real incomes. In retrospect, the postwar era seems like a more innocent time. This view is not completely wrong, but neither is it completely correct. For one thing, the stable families, relatively low divorce rate, and high birth rates of the 1950s were a product of conditions unlikely to return. Many groups failed to share in the prosperity of the 1950s.  And fundamental changes were transforming the country that would surface in the 1960s.

1.  A Decade of Fear and Conformity

American memories of the 1950s are highly selective.  We remember Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and forget Joseph McCarthy.  The 1950s were a decade of anxiety and fear—over Communist subversion, juvenile delinquency, and a host of other alleged threats.  In response, a heavy emphasis was placed on coercive conformity.

2.  A Decade of Farreaching Transformations

We may think of the 1950s as a decade of stability, but in fact it was a decade of farreaching transformations. These included suburbanization, the growth of a consumer society, and the emergence of a true automobile society.  Equally important were television, the rise of a modern youth culture, and the beginnings of the modern Civil Rights Movement.  Each of these developments carried vast consequences for society.  Residence patterns shifted; urban sprawl and pollution increased;  shopping malls and fast food and motel chains proliferated.  Meanwhile, television reinforced dominant gender and family arrangements.

3.  Cultural Critiques

The 1950s saw the rise of a series of maverick social critics. These included William H. Whyte, author of the Organization Man, and David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd, who critiqued the “man in the gray flannel suit” and a conformist society.  The Beats, radical poets and novelists, also offered a critique of affluence and complacency born of affluence. Youth culture provided the most widespread symbol of widespread disaffection with the values of the dominant culture.  Rock n roll, forged out of a mixture of urban black culture and white working class culture, combined rhythm and blues, country music, gospel, and rockability into a new blend, and became the emblem of a rebellious new youth culture.

Part VII.  The Tumultous 1960s
Week 13:  April 5-9

A Revolutionary Decade
Seeds of the ‘60s
Social Movements
Reemergence of Feminism
Counterculture
Backlash

Overview

Historians are hesitant to use the word revolution.  Most changes take place slowly and gradually.  But the 1960s truly was a decade of revolutionary change.  The Third World witnessed decolonization and revolutionary violence.  Upheavals also took place in the developed world, including the sexual revolution, Civil Rights Revolution, and the student revolt. In the United States, the postwar consensus came under attack.  At the very beginning of the decade, there were ban the bomb demonstrations; Michael Harrington’s The Other America revealed the persistence of poverty.

1.  Seeds of the ‘60s

The vanguard of the radical movements of the 1960s did not consist of baby boomers; the leaders of the radical movements of the ‘60s were born in late 30s and World War II.  Some were red diaper babies, who had been influenced by the Old Left and radical currents of the New Deal.  But they found a mass following among the baby boomers, who had been raised with enormous expectations for personal fulfillment.

2.  Social Movements

The Civil Rights movement was the seedbed for the political movements of the 1960s.  It provided a prototype for other liberation movements; it also provided a new idiom in politics and a new vision of community. Activists in the Free Speech and antiwar movements underwent an apprenticeship in the Civil Rights movement.

Black Power provided a model of militancy and cultural affirmation for other oppressed groups. The Black Power movement repudiated the dominant culture's negative valuation of blackness and affirmed the value of black’s African heritage and of a separate, African-American culture. Its goal was political, economic, and cultural empowerment.  Chicanos, Gays, and Native Americans sought to invert the negative cultural valuation that had been imposed upon them by the dominant culture.

Red Power represented the struggle for Native-American liberation from poverty, assimilationism, and political invisibility. It adopted innovative, confrontational tactics, including the takeover of Alcatraz island in 1968. It affirmed the value of a separate pan-Indian culture. The Chicano Power took several forms. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union adopted the civil rights model, while younger Chicano and Chicana activists adopted Black Power model.

The Women's Liberation was started in 1967 by female veterans of civil rights and antiwar movements. It repudiated negative cultural valuation of femininity and introduced the principle, "The personal is political," and consciousness raising. The Gay Power movement began with riot at Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969.  Its emergence as broad-based, grassroots movement owes much to earlier gay rights activities and to the influence of other liberation movements.

3.  Reemergence of Feminism

White, middle-class women's experience was marked by a series of contradictions. More women received higher education than ever before, and more married women were working.  Yet feminism ebbed to its lowest point in the 1950s as Americans celebrated domesticity.  In the home, women carried the double burden of wage work and housework.  Suburbanization created a female ghetto.  On the job, women confronted sex and wage discrimination.

4.  Vietnam War

The Vietnam war, one of the most traumatic events in the nation’s history, produced social upheaval at home and radicalized the social movements of the 1960s. 

5.  Counterculture

Joan Didion wrote:

It would hardly seem an exaggeration to call what we see arising among the young a ‘counter culture’: meaning, a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all, but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbarian intrusion.

The counterculture gained momentum with the escalation of the war in Vietnam.  Its style drew upon the Beats and pop-culture rebels of the 1950s.  Dominant themes of the counterculture were cultural rebellion and personal fulfillment.  It pursued altered states of consciousness and unconventional lifestyles. Drugs were central to the counterculture reflecting influence of the Beat movement. Hallucinogenics, such as LSD and mescaline, were the drugs of choice. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters staged "acid tests" and promoted the psychedelic craze. Fashion, hair, and drugs became vehicles for expressing dissent from the postwar consensus. Some joined communes or tribes and many rejected conventional ideals of order, monogamy, and social responsibility.

Shifts in popular music mirror shifts in 1960s youth culture from early-decade social engagement (such as Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind"), to Beatlemania in 1964, and acid rock.

6.  Backlash

The high points of the counterculture occurred during the summer of love in Haight-Ashbury and New York's East Village in 1967 and at the Woodstock music festival in April 1969.  The low points were soon to come: the murder spree committed by Charles Manson and his “family,” and the Altamont music festival near San Francisco.

Part VIII.  The 1970s and 1980s: America in Decline?
Week 14:  April 12-16

Watergate, Vietnam, and Economic Decline
The Bicentennial
America Held Hostage
The Reagan Revolution
The Collapse of Communism

Overview

The Watergate affair instilled a sense of cynicism and disrespect for government. Paranoid fears of conspiracy began to dominate popular culture, evident in such films as All the President's Men, The Marathon Man, Three Days of the Condor, and The Conversation, and ultimately JFK. America’s defeat in Vietnam was a traumatic event that challenged the nation’s conception of itself.  It, too, fostered skepticism about government and instilled a sense that the nation had lost its way and that the country had lost its ability to shape world events.

Compounding the sense of skepticism and disillusionment was the end of economic growth, as a result of the energy crisis, stagflation, and deindustrialization.  The American economy underwent a two-decade-long restructuring, shifting from an industrial to a post-industrial economy.

1.  Bicentennial

In 1876, many Americans wanted to reaffirm a sense of national identity in the wake of the Civil War. The Centennial celebrated “a century of progress.”  In 1976, many hoped to overcome disunity and reassert a common identity in the wake of recent social and political turmoil.  There was no central event to mark the Bicentennial.  The film Rocky, however, seemed to touch a chord.

2.  America Held Hostage

The Iranian hostage crisis served as a popular symbol of America’s decline.  Terrorism, inflation, declining international competitiveness, urban decay, and crime all contributed to a profound sense of crisis.

3.  The Reagan Revolution

As President, Ronald Reagan convinced a majority of Americans that the causes of America’s decline were high taxes, excessive welfare spending, insufficient military expenditures, excessively strong labor unions, and liberalism.  He doubled defense spending in real terms, drastically reduced tax rates for the wealthy, and restored American confidence. 

4.  Collapse of Communism

European Communism collapse for many reasons.  Partially, this was due to internal economic weaknesses and a crisis of confidence on the part of Communist government leaders.  Partly it was the result of the Soviet Union’s inability to sustain high military spending.  In part, it reflected the desire of ordinary East Bloc citizens to have a standard of living comparable to the West’s.  A half century of Cold War ended.

Part IX.  Post-Cold War America
Week 15.  April 18-30

A Global Colossus
Emerging Threats
A Sense of Vulnerability

Overview

During the 1990s, the United States presided over the world like a colossus.  The nation assumed a position of military and economic hegemony unmatched since the end of World War II, reflecting the disintegration of the Soviet Union, protracted economic problems in Germany and Japan, the globalization of the world economy, American dominance over high technology, and rapidly falling energy prices. In a sharp reversal of the pessimism of the 1970s and ‘80s, there was a growing sense that the United States could impose its will and create a more just and democratic world.

1.  Emerging Threats

Yet while the United States spent more on defense than all other nations put together, new threats were arising that Americans largely ignored.  Domestically, there was the growth of extreme anti-government groups. Abroad, there was the rise of extremist groups motivated by religion or secular ideologies.

2.  A Sense of Vulnerability

The stock market collapse, the disintegration of Enron, and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks punctured the triumphalism that Americans felt during the boom of the late 1990s and produced a new sense of vulnerability and insecurity.

Wednesday, April 28      Review

Friday, April 30              Second Examination

Special Session:            Monday, May 3—Presentations