AMH 6290

Professor Jacobs

Meeting Time and Location

Wednesdays, periods 8-10 (3:00-6:00), Flint 0013

Contact Information

Office: 206 Keene-Flint Hall
Email: mjacobs@ufl.edu
Telephone: 352-273-3371
Fax: (352) 392-6927
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 10:00-1200, and by appointment

Course Description and Goals

This seminar introduces graduate students to a variety of approaches, methodologies, and major themes in twentieth-century U.S. history through some of the most influential recent scholarship on the subject. The readings and topics for discussion are arranged both chronologically and thematically, and offer a sampling of cultural, diplomatic, intellectual, political, and social history. It is important to note, however, that the list of readings below (both required and supplemental) is in no way exhaustive, and that we will not be able to cover a number of important topics. Rather, the readings are intended to provide an entrance point to the various issues they address. Moreover, even a cursory look at the readings will reveal that there is a great deal of overlap in the categories and divisions I have made below. Lastly, be aware that this course is a readings seminar, not a research seminar, which means we will spend our time analyzing, discussing, and interpreting professional historical writing on a range of topics and issues.

Beyond these general goals, this course is designed with the following more specific objectives in mind:

• To help prepare students to teach courses in modern U.S. history, especially the survey course, by encouraging critical thinking about organizing and making sense of the existing historical literature.
• To help prepare students for the preliminary exam (or MA exam) in modern U.S. history by presenting students with an appropriate survey of themes and works in the field.
• To nurture skills in both critical reading and writing by focusing on argument, sources, organization, and methodological approach.

Organization and Assignments

Grades for the class will be based on the following assignments and class structure.

Participation (25%): As with any graduate readings course, classes will be centered around the discussion of the week’s materials. Each student will need to read all the materials listed under the “Common Readings” heading and participate in and contribute to the weekly class discussions in a thoughtful and respectful manner.

Class leadership, author biography, and review presentation (10%): Each student will be responsible for leading class discussion once during the semester. In preparation for each class, the class leader must send out via email a list of 5-6 focused and interesting questions that will guide our discussion. These questions must be submitted to all class members and the professor no later than 9:00 pm the Tuesday night before each Wednesday class. Then, in addition to actually leading the discussion, the class leader will be responsible for presenting a brief biography of the author (what else has the author written, at what point in his/her career did they write the book under discussion, what issues, beyond those discussed in the book, is he/she interested in, etc.), and for bringing to class copies for everyone of one published scholarly review of the book under discussion. While students will only be asked to lead discussion once, they may be asked to present the biography and book review a second time depending on the number of students enrolled in the course.

Book reviews (30%): Each student will be responsible for writing two reviews (3-4 typed, double-spaced pages each) of books found on the lists of supplemental readings. These reviews should be more than just summaries of the readings: they should evaluate the argument, try to place the works in a larger scholarly context, connect the works to the common readings, and also explore their various strengths and weaknesses. Students should also include at the end of the review a word count of the main text. Students writing a review for any given week will also have the opportunity to spend a few minutes talking about the book and/or their review of it. All reviews should be circulated via email to the rest of class and the professor no later than 9:00 pm the Tuesday night before each Wednesday class. Doing so will give all members of the class, but especially the professor and the class leader, time to read the review before class and to utilize it in class preparation. When choosing which supplemental books to write on, students should of course take into consideration their own research interests, and if possible choose topics or works that might be of use to them beyond this specific class.

Historiographical essay (30%): Finally, each student will be responsible for writing one historiographical essay of approximately 12-15 pages in length. These papers should identify the dominant trends in the chosen area of research, the major questions scholars have sought to answer, the arguments that have been put forth in response to those questions, and possible gaps in the scholarship and areas for further research. Though students will not submit these papers to the class for review, we will set aside class time toward the end of the semester for each student to discuss their topic and their progress. These papers will be due by noon on Monday, 29 April.

Final day of class assignment (5%): Each student will be responsible for identifying one article (scholarly or more journalistic in nature), that will serve as a reading for our final class on the United States at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. Each student must provide a link or copy of the article no later than noon on the Friday before the last class, and include with it a short assessment or explanation (1-2 pages or 2-3 paragraphs) for why they have selected that article.

Note: In no instance will a student be allowed to submit a book review and to be a class leader on the same day.

Policies and Procedures

As noted above, students are expected to come to every class having completed and thought about the readings and prepared to participate in the class discussion. Attendance is mandatory, and students will be penalized for unexcused absences. Assignments must be turned in by the scheduled deadlines, as they will be used for class preparation. Unexcused late assignments will be penalized. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about any of the assignments or about any other aspect of the class or your performance in it.

Course Schedule

Please note: It is assumed that students will acquire through their own means the books listed under “Required Readings” for each class.

Week One (9 January): Course Introduction

Week Two (16 January): The Emergence of the Modern United States, I

This week is the first of two that deal with the emergence of the “modern” United States. Here we will tackle the rise of the United States as a global power and analyze the factors that allowed the United States to move so rapidly from Civil War to being the world’s greatest power in roughly half a century, and then to build on that position of strength in the ensuing decades.

Required Reading:
Michael Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance

Recommended Readings:
Walter Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy
Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy
Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century? 

Week Three (23 January): The Emergence of the Modern United States, II

In this second week on the emergence of the “modern” United States we will focus more explicitly on domestic issues, and specifically on the question of how race, class, ethnicity, and gender identities became integrated into a broader sense of national identity over the course of the twentieth century.

Required Reading:
Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

Recommended Readings:
Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America
Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy
Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City
Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism

Week Four (30 January): Progressive Reform and Politics

Here we take on the Progressives and their drive for reform, and try to identify and make sense of the contours and ideas of the movement.

Required Reading:
Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age

Recommended Readings:
Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution
Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment
Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933
William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
John Louis Recchuiti, Civic Engagement: Social Science and Progressive-Era Reform in New York City
Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917

Week Five (6 February): Women, Labor, and the Politics of Reform

This week we examine how historians have considered women’s roles and authorities in social welfare and politics, read through the lens of household workers in New York City. This week’s reading is also the first of several that will expose us to urban history, and the first of two weeks in a row that will highlight New York City.

Required Reading:
Vanessa May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940

Recommended Readings:
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917
Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Power, and Space in Boston, 1870-1940
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920
Nancy Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s
Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America
Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935
Louise Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States

Week Six (13 February): Culture, Identity, and “Modernity”

Our focus turns for the first time to culture, and specifically what it meant to be “modern” in the early twentieth century. This is also our second week looking at New York City in particular.

Required Reading:
Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

Recommended Readings:
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity
Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s
Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945
Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945

Week Seven (20 February): Ethno-racial Difference, Immigration, Culture, and Identity Formation

This week’s reading adds immigration into the mix by looking at the formation of a unique Mexican-American identity, and continues our exploration of urban history by taking us to Los Angeles.

Required Reading:
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945

Recommended Readings:
William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture
Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II
Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture
William O’Neill, A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad
Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans

Week Eight (27 February): The New Deal and Modern Liberalism

Here we will investigate one of the dominant features of the mid-twentieth-century United States: the “liberal” state. How can we define the New Deal, and what were its implications, both during the 1930s and for post-World War II domestic policy?

Required Reading:
Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War

Recommended Readings:
Anthony Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State
Karen Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta
Michael Johnston Grant, Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945
David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
William Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal

Week Nine (6 March): Spring Break–No Class

Week Ten (13 March): The Cold War at Home and Abroad

This week we will look at one of the defining features of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy, which also had an enormous impact on domestic politics.

Required Reading:
Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War

Recommended Readings:
Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line
John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War
John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History
Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954
Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War
Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

Week Eleven (20 March): Mass Consumer Culture and Economic Citizenship

This week we will tackle the emergence of consumer culture and its implications. Here it is important to remember that although the book will read will focus mostly on the post-World War II era, the emergence of consumer culture was a process that played out over a much longer period of time, as the recommended readings make clear.

Required Reading:
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

Recommended Readings:
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth Century Europe
Kristin Hoganson, Consumer’s Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920
Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979
Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
Sharon Zukin, Point of Purchase: The Transformation of Shopping into Public Culture

Week Twelve (27 March): Building Postwar America, Suburban Growth, and Urban Decline

The postwar dynamic of suburban growth and urban decline defined many areas of the country after World War II. Self offers a powerful and provocative analysis of that process in Oakland. This week also continues our earlier analysis of the role of cities as sites of cultural, economic, political, and social conflict and change.

Required Reading:
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland

Recommended Readings:
John Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940
Howard Gillette, Jr., Camden after the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City
Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
Michael Johns, Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965
Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

Week Thirteen (3 April): The Fight for Rights

There are of course many ways to make sense of the Civil Rights movement. Payne’s work takes us to the heart of the struggle in the deep south.

Required Reading:
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle

Recommended Readings:
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
Robyn D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class
Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality
Steven Lawson, Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power 

Week Fourteen (10 April): The 1960s

This week we will take on the 1960s and their implications. The primary reading will focus on the women’s movement, but we need to place that in the broader context of the times.

Required Reading:
Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America

Recommended Readings:
Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America
Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975
Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s
David Levy, The Debate Over Vietnam

Week Fifteen (17 April): The Rise of Modern Conservatism

Late twentieth-century U.S. politics were characterized in part by conservative dominance, and Kevin Kruse’s work offers a partial explanation for how that came to pass. It will be important for us to place his work in a broader context, though, if we are to truly understand the rise of modern conservatism.

Required Reading:
Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism

Recommended Readings:
William Berman, America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton
Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism
Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics
Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics
John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994
William Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right

Week Sixteen (24 April): The United States at the Turn of the Century

To wrap up the course, each student will provide one article that highlights a particular aspect of the United States at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. These readings, along with a short explanation of the choice, must be sent out to the class no later than noon on the Friday preceding this class.

Required Reading:
TBA

Final Paper Due: Noon, Monday, 29 April