American Political Thought

Catalog description

This course surveys the various ideas and practices associated with the term “democracy” in the course of American political history. Its chief purpose is to give you an idea of how contested this term was in the course of our political tradition, as a means of situating our present political disputes in historical context. We examine rival conceptions and applications of democracy in the Revolutionary era, at the Founding, in Jacksonian and antebellum America, during the Civil War, in the Gilded Age and the Progressive era, through the New Deal, the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1980s.