HIS1538S Readings in U.S. History: Post-1945
Prof. Elspeth Brown
University of Toronto • Winter, 2010 • Innes 313
office Munk 326N; email:Elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca; phone 416-946-8011
Office hours: I’ve set aside one official office hour: Wed., 11-12 pm. However, I am in the office
on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and am more than happy to meet with you on these
days also. If you wish to see me outside of the scheduled hour, though, it’s best to make an
appointment. To do that, please email the Admin Ass’t at the Centre for the Study of the United
States, Stella, at csus@utoronto.ca and she’ll book an appointment for you.
Course Description
This seminar will survey some of the important topics and readings in U.S. history after 1877. Given
the extensive scope of the historiography in the U.S. field, this particular section of HIS1538H will
focus on the post-1945 period. The goals of the course are to map current debates about the period
under question, and to provide snapshots of the historiography for each subfield. Topics include: the
Cold War; social movement history in a global frame (including civil rights, black power, women’s
movement, gay liberation, student and anti-war protest); liberalism and neoliberalism; immigration;
urbanization and suburbanization, especially in the sunbelt; the rise of modern conservativism;
immigration; mass and consumer culture; U.S. empire and colonialism, post-45. We will cover a
range of methodological approaches and subfields, including gender history, political history,
cultural history, labour history, foreign relations history, etc. The course is designed for students
preparing for comprehensive fields or others seeking a basic background in 20th century US history.
Course work will include book reviews; class presentation; historiographic essays.
Assignments and Course Responsibilities:
Response papers: each week, the majority of students will submit a short response paper to the
class discussion list (on Blackboard). The papers/emails should be about 300-350 words in
length, and are meant to be reflections or challenges to the main issues raised in the reading,
with an emphasis on the book or articles’ argument(s) and evidence. (If the reading is especially
dense, feel free to use this assignment to help you make sense of the content). These should be
posted to the discussion list no later than 11 am on Tuesday morning, so that all of us can read
them before class (please do post them earlier if you can). Also, it would be great if you can read
the comments of your peers, and respond to them as well—either in the content of your small
piece, or via a separate post. Please do eight of these response papers, with one per week; you
can choose which weeks you want to do, depending on your work schedule. You are welcome to
incorporate or respond to other postings, en route to making your own claims or observations
about the material. I won’t be marking these weekly (though I will be reading them). Instead, I will
monitor the discussion and then provide feedback twice during the term: once in mid-semester,
and once at the end. Aspects of the discussion on line will be incorporated into our seminar
discussion.
Presentation and Discussion Questions:
A) Students will sign up for two weeks in which they are responsible for generating a total
of four discussion questions and getting the conversation started. These questions must be well
crafted to prompt students to engage central themes, debates or methods in the scholarship for
that week. It is recommended the questions, as a whole, cover the range of questions we’ll want
to bring to the scholarship, including questions about analytic framework; argument; evidence;
historiography; and historical themes. Students who write questions will also take responsibility to
facilitate quality discussion that week. Your discussion will be co-directed by the two of you, and
so you will need to meet with your partner in advance of the seminar in order to decide on the
questions together, and how to get meaningful conversation going. Please print out the questions
and bring 12 copies to seminar. You are welcome to shape your questions in relationship to the
issues emerging on the Blackboard unfolding on Blackboard.
B) Students will sign up for one week in which they are responsible for making a 10
minute presentation in which they put the course reading in a historiographic, thematic, or
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theoretical context. The point is not to discuss the book in detail, as we will be doing that as a
class. Instead, the goal here is to situate the book’s contribution within the larger historiography of
the field (if it exists) or otherwise help contextualize the book within the emerging literature of the
subfield. Students are encouraged to read the assigned context article critically, and to take issue
with the subfield as it’s been mapped by the article’s author, if appropriate.
Papers: In addition to reading and discussion, the following writing assignments are required: one
750-word review of a book from the "Suggested Reading" lists below for any week (10% of grade,
due Feb 23rd) and one 2500- word historiographical or review essay that compares one of the
assigned books to a broader body of literature (20% of grade, due April 6th, 4 pm in my office or at
Munk reception). NB: if you are interested in a subfield of literature not represented in this
syllabus, this paper is a chance for you to explore this field further. I will discuss these
assignments in more detail as the class unfolds.
Participation: is required for the course. Please come to each class meeting having done all the
reading.
Grading weights: response papers, 15%; discussion questions and presentation, 20%; 750 word
book review, 10%; historiographic paper, 30%; participation, 25%.
Required Books: available at Toronto Women’s Bookstore, 73 Harbord Street
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961(University
of California Press, 2003).
Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
(Vintage, 2003).
Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
(Politics + Society in Twentieth Century America) (Princeton, 2009).
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles
(University of California Press, 2004).
Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American
Environmentalism (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
(Random House, 2009).
Lisa McGerr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001).
Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics,
Technoscience, and Women Workers (Paperback) (Duke 2007). Arrive: the 18th of January
Matthew Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard, 2008,
486 pages).
Bethany Moreton To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2009).
ONE of the following
Lloyd Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (1995)
George Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (2001)
Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon's Vietnam War (2002)
Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in
Vietnam (1999).
WK 1 (Jan 5): Introductions
WK 2 (Jan 12): Immigration and Ethnicity
Required Reading:
Matthew Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard, 2008)
Suggested Reading:
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1951)
John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (1985)
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George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los
Angeles, 1900-1945 (1995).
Rachel Buff, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and
American Indian Minneapolis.
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy
of Race (Harvard University Press 1998).
Nyan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (2001).
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship
and Labor (2002).
Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese iImmigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (2003).
Donna Gabaccia, D. From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 18201990 (Indiana University Press, 2004).
Vicki L. Ruiz, “Nuestra America: Latino History as United States History,” Journal of American
History 93, no. 3 (Dec. 2006): 655-672.
Mai Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004).
Diana Selig, Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (2008).
WK 3 (Jan 19): Markets I: Post-War Consumerism
Required Reading:
Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003)
•David Steigerwald, "All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary
Thought," Journal of American History 93 (Sept. 2006): 385-403. Pls download via library’s eresources.
Suggested Reading:
Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor
and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Thomas C. Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip
Consumerism (1997).
Robert E. Weems, Jr. Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth
Century (1998)
Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer
Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).
Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in the TwentiethCentury United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (Historical
Studies of Urban America) (Chicago, 2006).
Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Susannah Walker, Style & Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007).
Jason Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Color Line (Penn, 2008)
Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (2007)
Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization (Cornell, 2008)
Lawrence Glickman, Buying Power: a History of Consumer Activism in America (2009).
Richard Longstreth, The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960 (2010).
WK 4 (Jan 26): Cold War Cultures
Required Reading:
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961(University
of California Press, 2003)
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•Ellen Schrecker, “McCarthyism and the Red Scare,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy
Rosenzweig, eds, A Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell, 2002), 371-384.
•Raymond Williams, ‘The Analysis of Culture’ (excerpt), from The Long Revolution (1961), 41-71
[emphasis on structures of feeling material]
Suggested Reading:
Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War,
1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997).
Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East
since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at
Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union,
and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
John Lewis Gaddis, The United States & the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972).
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988).
Lary May, ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (1989).
Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War
(1989).
Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United
States in Austria after the Second World War (UNCP, 1994).
Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (1996)
Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998).
Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1996 (Eighth Edition, 1997)
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the
Cold War and Modern Feminism (2000).
Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds. Rethinking Cold War Culture, (Smithsonian 2001).
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East, 19452000 (U Cal Press 2001).
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global
Arena (Harvard 2002).
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2002).
David Johnson, The Lavender Scare: the Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the
Federal Government (2004).
Friedman, A. "Sadists and Sissies: Anti-Pronography Campaigns in Cold War America." Gender
and History 15(2) 2003: 201-227.
Penny Von Eschen Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
(Harvard, 2004).
Odd Arne Westad The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005).
Susan Jacoby, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (Yale, 2009)
WK 5 (Feb. 2): Urban and Suburban History
Required Reading:
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles
(University of California Press, 2004).
•Robert O. Self and Thomas Sugrue, “The Power of Place: Race, Political Economy, and Identity
in the Post-War Metropolis,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds, A Companion
to Post-1945 America (Blackwell, 2002), 20-44.
Suggested Reading:
Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (1985).
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-War Detroit
(Princeton UP, 1996).
Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (1999).
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Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles,
1900-1970 (UNCP, 2001)
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-class Suburbs of Los
Angeles, 1920-1965 (2002)
Delores Hayden, Building suburbia: green fields and urban growth, 1820-2000 (2003).
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the
Present (2003)
Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2003).
Andrew Weise, Places of their Own: African American Suburbanization in the 20th Century (2004).
Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: a History of the Place and the People who Made It (2004).
Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2006)
Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of
Multiethnic Los Angeles (2007).
David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (2007).
Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (2009).
WK 6 (Feb. 9): Science + Technology Studies (STS)/Feminism and Environmental Politics
Guest for Second Hour: Prof. Michelle Murphy
Required Reading:
Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics,
Technoscience, and Women Workers (Paperback) (Duke 2007).
•Context article, TBA.
Suggested Reading:
Lisa M. Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870-1930 (1990)
Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern
American Office Work, 1900-1930 (1992).
Robert Emil Botsch, Organizing the Breathless: Cotton Dust, Southern Politics & the Brown Lung
Association (1993)
Claudia Clark, Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Health Reform: 1910-1935 (1997)
Lorraine Daston, “The Coming Into Being of Scientific Objects, in Daston, ed., Biographies of
Scientific Objects (1999).
Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (2000).
Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (2002).
Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (2002).
Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders
(Duke Univ. Press, 2007).
Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice by
(MIT, 2007).
Kathleen Berry, Femininity in Flight: a History of Flight Attendants (2007).
Nancy McClean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Harvard, 2008).
[February Break]
WK 7 (Feb. 23) Social Movements I: African American Civil Rights
[Reminder: 750 word book review due this week]
Required Reading:
Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
(Random House, 2009) [warning: this book is 736 pages, so try and get a head start]
•Kevin Gaines, “The Historiography of Black Equality Since 1945,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and
Roy Rosenzweig, eds, A Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell, 2002), 211-234.
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Suggested Reading:
Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994).
Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the
Mississippi Freedom Struggle (University of California Press,1995).
Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941,
(Second edition, 1997)
Tracye Matthews, “’No One Ever Asks What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is’: Gender and the
Politics of the Black Panther Party, 1966-1971,” in Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black
Panther Party Reconsidered (1998), 267-304.
Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1999)
Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black
Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical
Democratic Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York (2003).
Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the
Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (2004).
Steve Estes, I am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (UNCP, 2005).
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (2005)
Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (2007)
Peniel Joseph, A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2007)
Risa Lauren Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Harvard, 2007).
Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the
Decline of the Democratic Party (Princeton, 2008).
WK 8 (March 2): Environmental History
Required Reading:
Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American
Environmentalism (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
•Ian Tyrrell, “Modern Environmentalism” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds, A
Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell, 2002), 328-342.
Suggested Reading:
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991)
Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: the Transformation of the American Environmental
Movement (1993).
Samuel P. Hayes, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (2000)
Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (2005).
David Ralph Diaz, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities (2005)
Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: the Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (2005)
Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics,
Technoscience, and Women Workers (2006).
Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal
(Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Neil M. Maher, Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the
Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford, 2007).
Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice
(MIT Press, 2007)
WK 9 (March 9): Social Movements II: The New American Right
Required Reading:
Lisa McGerr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001).
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•David L. Chappell, “The Triumph of Conservatives in a Liberal Age,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew
and Roy Rosenzweig, eds, A Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell, 2002), 303-327.
Suggested Reading:
Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race,
Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
Dan Carter, George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservativism, and the Transformation of
American Politics (1995).
Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy and the
Decline of Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press,1998).
Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society,
and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001).
Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's
Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Kevin M. Cruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005).
Catherine Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservativism from Suffrage to the Rise
of the New Right (UNCP, 2006)
Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative
Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: a History, 1974-2008 (2008).
Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America
Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2008).
WK 10 (March 16): Sexuality and the State
Required Reading
Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
(Politics + Society in Twentieth Century America) (Princeton, 2009) [NB: this book covers 19001983]
•Beth Bailey, “Sexuality and the Movements for Sexual Liberation,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew
and Roy Rosenzweig, eds, A Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell, 2002), 260-276.
•Marc Stein, “Theoretical Politics, Local Communities: the Making of U.S. LGBT History,” GLQ 11
(2005): 605-24.
Suggested Reading (focus here is on LGBTQ history)
John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual Minority in the
United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago, 1983)
John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (1988)
Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: the History of Gay Men and Women in WWII (1991)
Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century
America (1991)
Madeline Kennedy and Elizabeth Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a
Lesbian Community (1993)
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of
the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
Leisa D. Meyer, Creating G. I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps (1996)
Sharon Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (1997).
Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern
Society (Chicago, 1999)
Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (1999)
John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (1999).
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Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (2000)
Lisa Duggan Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (2000)
Joanne Meyerowitz How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002)
Nan Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (2003)
David Johnson,The Lavender Scare: the Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the
Federal Government (2004)
Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (2007)
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (2008)
Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (2009)
WK 11 (March 23): Vietnam
Guest: Prof. Ron Pruessen, Department of History
Required Reading A: please choose ONE of the following (available at TWB):
Lloyd Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (1995)
George Herring, America's Longest War:The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (2001)
Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon's Vietnam War (2002)
Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in
Vietnam (1999).
Required Reading B: please choose ONE of the following (pls download fr. library e-resources):
•Jessica M. Chapman, "Staging Democracy: South Vietnam's 1955 Referendum to
Depose Bao Dai," Diplomatic History, 30:4 (September 2006)
•Marc Frey, "Tools of Empire: Persuasion and the United States's
Modernizing Mission in Southeast Asia," Diplomatic History, 27:4
(September 2003)
•Matthew Masur, "Exhibiting Signs of Resistance: South Vietnam's Struggle
for Legitimacy, 1954-1960," Diplomatic History, 33:2 (April 2009)
Required Reading C: Please read the following forthcoming essay, stored on the BB site:
Ronald W. Pruessen, “John Foster Dulles and the Road Not Taken: Vietnam, April 1955”
Suggested Reading:
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972)
Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical
Experience (1986)
Maurice Isserman, If I had a Hammer. . . : The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (1987)
James Miller, A Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987)
Charles De Benedetti, An American Ordeal: The Anti-War Movement of the Vietnam Era (1990)
Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars (1990)
Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the
1960s (1993)
Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to
Wounded Knee (1995)
Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (1995)
Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, Wilfried Mausbach, eds., America, the Vietnam War, and
the World: Comparative and International Perspectives (German Historical Institute ; New
York : Cambridge University Press, 2003).
James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: the United States and State Building, 1954-1968 (2008).
WK 12 (March 30): Markets II: Religion and the Post-Industrial Service Economy
Required Reading:
Bethany Moreton To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2009).
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•James T. Fisher, “American Religion Since 1945” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy
Rosenzweig, eds, A Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell, 2002), 44-63.
Suggested Reading:
Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (1989).
Richard Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (1990).
Stephen Waring, Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945 (1991)
James Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development,
1936-1990 (1993).
Linda Kinz, Between Jesus and the Market: Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (Duke, 1997)
Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The ReAwakening of American Fundamentalism (1997)
Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate
Imagery in American Big Business (1998).
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004)
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)
Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism (2006)
Stephen Brunn, ed. Wal-Mart World: The World’s Biggest Corporation in the Global Economy (2006)
David W. Miller, God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement (2007)
Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (2008)
Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of
Business (2009).
2500 word essay due: April 6th, 4 pm, in my office or in the reception are of Munk Centre.
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