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Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
1. Examine, discuss, and evaluate the experiences, roles, achievements, and contributions of
European Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and new immigrants after World War II.
2. Use the social historical approach to analyze the past and identify an awareness of historical
methods used by historians to interpret the past.
3. Identify examples of how class, race, and gender have shaped and reproduced power relations
in American society since 1945.
4. Employ appropriate vocabulary to analyze American political history and political parties
after 1945.
5. Assess major social movements including labor, civil rights, feminism, environmentalism,
religious fundamentalism, neo conservatism, and their impacts on American society and
politics in the postwar era.
6. Compare and contrast different historical interpretations that explain major historical events
and social change over time.
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1. Social History: methods of inquiry
2. Study of history: methods of inquiry and promoting critical thinking
3. The Legacy of World War II: Race, Class and Gender on the homefront
a. "Double V" and A.P. Randolph's March on Washington Movement
b. G.I. Forum and League of United Latin Americans
c. Bracero program
d. "Rosie the Riveter" goes home
4. Extending the New Deal reform agenda
a. G.I. Bill
b. Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and postwar labor-liberalism
c. Interstate Highway Bill
5. Origins of the Cold War
a. NATO and the Warsaw Pact
b. Global Arms Race
c. Korean War
6. McCarthyism, the anticommunist crusade, and postwar liberalism
a. Civil rights
b. Organized labor
c. The disarmament movement
7. "Crabgrass Frontier": the suburbs
a. Consumer culture
b. The new Cult of Domesticity
c. Redlining, restrictive covenants, and racial/ethnic exclusion
8. The Civil Rights Movement
a. Wartime and postwar migration and the black vote
b. Brown versus Board of Education
c. Montgomery Bus Boycott
d. From "sit-ins" to "freedom rides" to Mississippi Freedom Summer
9. Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and community organizing in the West
10. The "Rights Revolution" and Ethnic America
a. Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965
b. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
c. Fair Housing Act of 1968
d. Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 and postwar immigration of Asians and Latinos
11. American Indian Movement
a. Occupation of Alcatraz 1969
b. Trail of Broken Treaties
c. Wounded Knee 1973
12. The Cold War in the 1960s
a. Kennedy and The Bay of Pigs
b. Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis
c. Vietnam: From Dien Ben Phu to the Tet Offensive
13. Escalation and the Anti-War Movement
a. LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin
b. Students protesters
c. The Chicano Moratorium
d. G.I. resistance,
e. Martin Luther King
f. The National Mobilization to End the War
g. "Credibility Gap" and the Tet Offensive
14. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society: successes and failures
a. The liberal reform agenda
b. The War on Poverty
c. Structural inequality and urban riots
15. Second Wave Feminism
a. Betty Friedan and NOW
b. Women's Liberation
c. Black and Latino feminism
16. The Environmental Justice Movement
17. The Gay Liberation Movement
18. Richard Nixon and the Cold War
a. Vietnamization and "peace with honor"
b. Détente and normalization of relations with China and the Soviet Union
19. Nixon and Watergate
a. Expansion of presidential power and authority
b. "Plumbers," COINTELPRO, and constitutional crisis
20. Deindustrialization and economic decline
a. Decline of domestic manufacturing
b. Oil crisis of the mid-1970s
c. Rising competition in the global economy
21. Demographic change
a. White flight to the suburbs
b. Inner cities
22. Rise of the New Right
a. Neoconservatism, electoral realignment, and resistance to the liberal agenda
b. Evangelical Christianity as political movement
c. "Morning in America:" the election of Ronald Reagan
23. The Reagan Era
a. Deregulation and "supply side" economics
b. Decline of organized labor
c. Assault on the welfare state and its impact
24. Cold War in the 1980s
a. Intervention in Central America
b. Iran-Contra scandal
c. Collapse of the Soviet Union
25. Conflict in the Middle East
a. Camp David Accords
b. 1991 Gulf War
26. The New Immigration
a. Immigration and Reform Act of 1986
b. Amnesty and continued demand for undocumented labor
c. Militarization of the border
d. Changing face of African, Asian, and Latino America
27. The Clinton Era
a. 1992 Los Angeles Riot
b. The Information Revolution
c. The New Economy: from General Motors to "Wal-Mart economy"
d. Welfare reform and the feminization of poverty
e. 1990s boom and growth across the socio-economic spectrum
28. The Bush Era
a. Response to 9/11
b. Patriot Act and the debate over civil liberties
c. Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
29. The Election of Barack Obama