Required Reading:

1) Assorted Documents posted on Class Schedule Page and on Moodle

2) Additional Readings, posted on Class Schedule Page and uploaded to Moodle. These Readings include excerpts from Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch; Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs by Wallace Stegner; Streets, Railroads, and the GreatStrike of 1877 by David O. Stowell, The Power Broker by Robert Caro, The Warmth of other Suns by Isabelle Wilkerson, and The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. You will enjoy these readings, many from Pulitzer Prize-winning books, guaranteed to transport you to the past.

3) Text Book Chapters from James Henretta, Rebecca Edwards, Robert O.Self, America: A Concise History V. 2 1865 to the Present, Fifth Edition (Bedford St.Martins, 2012)

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Welcome to the Lower Division Survey of U.S. History, 1865 to the present. This course is a topical survey of U.S. economic, social, and political history. Your task is to comprehend and to find patterns in the broad sweep of our past, and as with most introductory courses, you will be challenged by the work required. Toward a general understanding of American history from the Civil War to the present, serious students should work to accomplish three important goals:

1-knowledge of the significant events, people, and trends;

2-an understanding of major interpretations and different perspectives;

3-the development of your own opinions, and an awareness of the way in which you yourself interpret history. Do you find the economy to be the most defining of changes and continuities in the American past, or politics? On the other hand, is the American past best characterized by social changes from the bottom up, or by the ways in which mass culture is constructed in the twentieth century? I urge you to consider your own approach to the past, to be aware of your own interpretation, and to understand why you think some events, people, institutions, or movements are more important than others.

The best way to accomplish these goals is to spend thoughtful time with lectures, reading, and assignments, then to ask your own questions of the material. Lectures and assignments will provide you with themes and significant questions. Thinking about the historical themes and questions, and outlining answers, should lead you to your own questions and ideas. I suggest you read over each chapter a couple times, then prepare lists of events, people, and issues you find to be most critical, which you can also use to analyze assigned documents.

Beginning at the crossroads of the years following the American Civil War, we will follow American expansion in time and space to the post Vietnam years, a time in which most of you were born. You might also find your way through American history via the generations of your own family. What have been the experiences of your own parents? Their parents? Which people, issues, and events have been most defining in your own family, and why?