Mass Movements, Modern Politics: From Labor to the New Right in America

Catalog description

From the rise of the labor movement in the 1930s through the ascendancy of the New Right in the 1980s, this course considers how mass movements have shaped politics, lifeways, and culture in the twentieth-century United States. We explore how mass movements form, their structural and organizational character, their inclusions and exclusions, their intersection with identities, and their contestations with power. Topics include trade unions, feminisms, Black Freedom, racial nationalisms, anti-communism, and the New Left, among others. The course is fundamentally about how mass movements engaged with, and sought to transform, political culture in the modern United States.