History of American Democracy

Catalog description

(AM) Offered Intermittently. What does it mean for “the people” to rule? Who should be able to vote? Should social equality be guaranteed to all? This course explores how Americans have battled over these and other ethical questions of democratic governance and society from the founding of the United States to the recent past. It highlights fundamental struggles over political, socio-economic, and cultural power and their relationship to governance as well as tensions between the United States’ professed democratic commitments to equality and its persistent practices of, for example, imperialism, racism, sexism, and labor exploitation.