Università Roma Tre

The course offers 8 credits and is divided into 8 parts:

1- Towards the American century.
After brief introduction on the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence, the first part of the course will focus on the progression of events which, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, laid the foundations for American economic growth, the great wave of migration from Europe, and the progressive affirmation of the United States as a relevant actor on the international scene.

2- From Progressivism to the First World War. The growing intervention of the federal government within American society.
From isolationism to Wilsonian internationalism: political propaganda, the entry of the United States into the First World War and the new international role of the United States.

3- The interwar period. From the “roaring twenties”, which saw the emergence of the American capitalist model to the 1929 crisis and its strong impact on US society.
The thirties, the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal.
US government decision to enter the Second World War, its implication for the domestic and foreign policy, and Roosevelt’s "grand design" for a new international order led by the United States.

4- The origins of the cold war. The division pf the world into blocks and the redesign of American foreign policy. Reconstruction and containment: the Truman doctrine, the Marshall plan and the new "foreign policy making" structures. The Berlin crisis and the Korean war.

5- The fifties and the society of consent. The boom of the American way of life, the suburban family model as an anti-atomic shelter and the McCarthy drift. The evolution of the civil rights movement. Eisenhower administration’s “new look”, the consequences of the domino theory and the integration of the "public diplomacy" in the foreign policy structures of the American government. Focus on the United States Information Agency (USIA).

6- The sixties. From Kennedy's new frontier to Johnson's Great Society. International crises: Berlin, Cuba and Vietnam. From the society of consensus to the explosion of contradiction and fractures within American society at all levels: the counterculture, the students and the women movements, the radicalization of the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam anti-war movement as catalyst for dissent. How to project a struggling society abroad?

7- The seventies and eighties. Nixon, Kissinger and the realpolitik. Carter and the perception of American decline. Towards the end of the cold war. The Reagan years. The fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

8- From the post-cold war to September 11th. The Bush administration.
The Clinton administration. Bush Jr and the challenges of the end of the century.

Testi obbligatori:

Arnaldo Testi, Il secolo degli Stati Uniti, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2008.

Mario Del Pero, Libertà e impero. Gli Stati Uniti e il mondo 1776-2011, Roma-Bari,

Simona Tobia, Advertising America. The United State information service in Italy (1945-1956), LED, Milano, 2009.


La costituzione USA: File allegato in materiali didattici (in italiano) http://archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html (in inglese)


Tesi a scelta per le presentazioni in classe:

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

Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, Harvard University Press, 2003.

John Robert Green, America in the Sixties, New York, 2010.

Richard Pells, R., Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II, New York, 1997.

Frances Stonor Saunders, La Guerra Fredda culturale. La Cia e il mondo delle lettere e delle arti, Fazi, Roma, 2004.


I film:

Via col vento (Gone with the Wind), Victor Flaming (1939)

Quarto potere (Citizen Kane), Orson Welles (1941)

Dr. Stranamore di S. Kubrik (1963)

Apocalypse Now di F.F. Coppola (1979)

Twelve Years Slave, Steve McQueen (2013)