United States History since 1865 - Honors

Catalog description

This course is a historical survey of the United States from the end of the Civil War to the present. The course also introduces students to historical reasoning skills. This is an honors course. This honors course examines the development of the United States across more than 100 years of history, from Reconstruction to the present, with attention to the entire geographic area now included in the United States of America. Rather than treating historical events as isolated episodes, the course emphasizes continuity and change in the American experience, including the ways the South, Northeast, Midwest, West, borderlands, Pacific, and urban and rural regions shaped one another over time. Students consider how relationships with external regions and powers, including Indigenous nations, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the broader global community, influenced the political, economic, social, cultural, and geographic development of the United States. The course also examines the roles of major ethnic and social groups in shaping modern American history and explores how the American experience since 1865 emerged from Indigenous, African American, European, Latin American, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and other cultural traditions and transnational influences. Through historically significant texts, speeches, narratives, legal documents, public arguments, and cultural works, students analyze how ideas about democracy, citizenship, labor, race, immigration, reform, civil rights, war, empire, globalization, and national identity developed from Reconstruction to the present. As an honors course, students engage these topics through advanced scholarly and primary-source reading, seminar-style discussion, independent historical research, and formal written and oral presentation. Honors work emphasizes historiography, source evaluation, competing historical interpretations, and the development of evidence-based historical arguments. Formerly HIST 108H (UC, CSU, AVC) Students may take either HIST C1002 United States History since 1865 or HIST C1002H United States History since 1865 - Honors. Duplicate credit will not be awarded.