U.S. Politics and Society since the 1960s

Catalog description

This course explores significant political and social developments that shaped the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States, an era of declining faith in political institutions, ideological and partisan polarization, and accelerating inequality. The course will consider a variety of perspectives, developments, and movements across the political spectrum as well as others that defy easy ideological or partisan categorization. Topics will include the evolution of the post-1960s civil rights movement and the rise of mass incarceration; the rise and transformation of the religious right and the emergence of the populist right from the 1970s through the Tea Party and MAGA movements; the evolution of liberalism and the Democratic Party and its relationship to the left; the AIDS crisis and the LGBTQ movement; 9/11 and the war on terror; the financialization of the global economy and the causes and effects of the mortgage crisis of 2008; and bipartisan paths toward the emergence of “neoliberalism” and the concept of the "free market" as ways of reordering not just social and political commitments but perhaps even society itself.