Università Roma Tre

This course intends to offer students an insight on American history and culture both in the international and transnational perspectives. 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, despite the crisis started in th 1970s, 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.
This course is taught in English

REQUIRED READINGS:
Joshua Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945-2000 (New York: Penguin, 2013).
Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2005. Available online in the University Discovery Web pages.
Daniel Rogers, "Improvising the New Deal" in Franklin D. Roosevelt : Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939, University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 131-157. Available online in the University Discovery Web pages.
William E. Luechtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Foreign Affairs, The Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/foreign-affairs
Wendy Wall, The New Deal, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2016.
The Constitution of the United States of America.

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, Available online in the University Discovery Web pages.
Erez Manela, The United States in the World, in Foner E, McGirr L. American History Now. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011, pp. 201-220. Available online in the University Discovery Web pages.
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. Available online in the University Discovery Web pages.
Richard Slotkin, "Thinking Mythologically: Black Hawk Down, the “Platoon Movie,” and the War of Choice in Iraq," in European Journal of American Studies, 12, 2 (2017). Available online at: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11873
Ian Tyrrell, “Reflections on the transnational turn in United States history: theory and practice.” Journal of Global History (2009) 4, pp. 453–474. Available online in the University Discovery Web pages.
Isabelle Vagnoux, "Introduction: North American Women in Politics and International Relations;" Chantal Maillé, "Feminist Interventions in Political Representation in the United States and Canada: Training Programs and Legal Quotas," in European Journal of American Studies, 10, 1 (2015). Available online at: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10368