Università Roma Tre

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.

CONTENT:
PART I – Introduction, methodologies and major issues.
Weeks 1-2
Introduction and description of the course: methodological issues and new approaches to U.S. History. From exceptionalism to transnational history. The foundations of American democracy: the Constitution and its current value. Universal values and their domestic implementation. Understanding the United States political system: the government and its branches, parties and elections
Weeks 3-4
The Americanisation of the world and American new transnationalism.
The United States and the world: isolationism and internationalism in historical perspective.
The American century: from the Spanish-American War to 9/11. World War I, the United States’ rise to global power. Rooseveltian or Wilsonian century? The Progressive legacy: Reform and the role of the State in the age of empires and totalitarian states. American Soft Power and mass society. Booms, busts and reforms.
The New Deal.
Week 5
The 2024 elections, in-class analysis and discussion
Mid-Term in the second week of November, and two days’ recess

PART II
The United States’ rise to world power
Week 6
The coming of WWII and its immediate aftermath. Part of this week’s classes will be dedicated to the discussion of the Mid-Term elections of Congress and its repercussion on American international positioning. The first decade of the Cold War: American domestic policy and economic transformation
Week 7
Democracy, liberalism and the world. American civil rights and human rights in the world. From the struggle on civil rights to the students’ revolts and Vietnam.

Weeks 8
The crisis of the American model. The 1960s and 1970s. The end of the Cold War: what role for the United States?

PART III
A short American Century?
Weeks 9-10
Reagan, the implosion of the Soviet Union and the new relations with Europe and Asia. A Post-Cold War World: The Unilateral Moment.
The beginning of the 21st century and the new world’s balance of power. 9/11, the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the absence of an American Grand Design. The perils for democracy
New challenges, renewed wars and the new interpretations of American history and its global role.

Preliminary and Introductory reading : “Every national election presents a unique opportunity for Americans to reexamine and affirm their shared democratic values, norms, and laws. The country is currently in a period of shifting demographics and technology change that is altering the policy landscape.” (“Elections & Democracy,” Consult the Brookings Institution Site in preparation for the class discussions that we will hold in the course of the Semester: https://www.brookings.edu/projects/election-24-issues-at-stake/elections-democracy/

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.

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

One of the following two volumes:
Joshua Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945-2000, New York, Penguin, 2013.

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

The Constitution of the United States of America. Any edition. You are expected to learn the basics of the American Institutional Establishment