Università Roma Tre

This course intends to offer students an insight on American history and culture both in international and transnational perspective. The role played by the United States in international affairs in the 20th century is such that scholars have come to label the intervening period between the Spanish-American War and the end of the Cold War, the American Century. Actually, the U.S. still plays a major role in international relations while its position and interaction with the rest of the world was already prominent in the 19th century. Moreover, U.S. history, like the history of other countries, was forged by the country’s interaction with other parts of the world and by the inevitable transnational connections with other nations. The course therefore offers an interpretation of American history in a transnational perspective while familiarizing the students with some of the major historians of the past century and with the more recent historiography, methodology and critical analyses of American history.

REQUIRED READINGS:
Joshua Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945-2000 (New York: Penguin, 2013).

Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955) (or any later edition).

The Constitution of the United States of America. http://archives.gov/exhibits/charters/ constitution.html

For the in class discussion and presentations, students can choose one among the following six essays:

Thomas Bender, “The Boundaries and Constituencies of History,” American Literary History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 267-282 + “Global History and Bounded Subjects: A Response to Thomas Bender” by Peter Fritzsche, American Literary History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 283-287

David Ekblad , “Meeting the Challenge from Totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Authority as a Global Model for Liberal Development, 1933–1945,” International History Review, 32 (March 2010), pp. 47–67.

John Higham, “The Future of American History,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 80, No. 4 (Mar., 1994), pp. 1289-1309

David A. Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle of the "We"? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos since World War II,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), pp. 317-337.

Hilde E. Restad, “Old Paradigms in History Die Hard in Political Science: US Foreign Policy and American Exceptionalism,” American Political Thought, Vol. 1, No. 1 (May 2012), pp. 53-76.

Thomas W. Zeiler, “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Mar., 2009), pp. 1053-1073.


RECOMMENDED READINGS:
Bacevich, Andrew, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Belmonte, Laura, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

Bender, Thomas, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in the World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

Borstelmann, Thomas The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2003).

de Grazia, Victoria, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Gerstle, Gary, American Crucible: Race and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton
University Press, 2001).

Hunt, Michael, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987).

Jackson Lears, T., Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America (New York: Harper Colins, 2010).

Kennedy, David M., Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929- 1945 (Oxford History of the United States) (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Perlstein, Rick, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Rodgers, Daniel, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (New York: Belknap, 2000).

Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).