Università Roma Tre

This course intends to offer students an insight into American history and culture both from 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 US still plays a major role in international relations, despite the crisis started in the 1970s, while its position and interaction with the rest of the world was already prominent in the 19th century. US 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. At the same time, it provides critical readings of the current socio-political framework of the country while tackling some of the most debated issues of the day.

Course Objectives: The course aims at providing students with a critical thinking on the United States in the last hundred years and of the contemporary world as seen from the American perspective. International studies today entail a good understanding of American culture and history: both because of the nation’s role worldwide and because the new methodologies in cultural and transnational studies developed in the United States, especially in the second half of the 20th century. Therefore, by the end of the course, students will be knowledgeable about the major aspects of U.S. history in the last 150 years both at the domestic and international level. Moreover, they will acquire an understanding of the major methodologies used by American scholars to study their country in transnational and international perspective.

Preliminary and Introductory reading : David Leonhardt, “Democracy Challenged. ‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy,” The New York Times, Published Sept. 17, 2022 – Updated June 21, 2023. Students can access the article through the University account at this link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/us/american-democracy-threats.html

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.

Salim Yaqub, Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord. The United States since 1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

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.
Wendy Wall, The New Deal, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of American History, 2016. Open access in the Web

The Constitution of the United States of America.