HIST3467 — US History:From Nixon to Trump
This course will examine American history from the Vietnam War to the election of Donald J. Trump. Although it will paint a broad picture of American history and engage a wide variety of issues--ranging from foreign policy and the American role in the world to technological and cultural change--the course's primary focus will be on social change and how it played out in American electoral politics. More precisely, the class centers on America coming apart on the wide array of interrelated historical forces whose aggregation beginning with the presidency of Richard Nixon posed severe challenges to American social arrangements. Thus, the 2016 election of Donald Trump is seen less as a singular political event and more as the product of long-term historical trends. The goal then is to challenge those popular narratives that privilege the significance of certain events, the personality of the candidates and the interworkings of their campaigns and offer a more complicated history based on a deeper understanding of America's recent past.