Overview

Lectures on the module will focus on the social and domestic history of the United States and will include: Affluent society – America in the 1950s; The Kennedy assassination and its aftermath; LBJ and ‘the great society’; Civil Rights and the problem of ‘black America’; Nixon and the Watergate scandal; Crime and social dislocation; Ronald Reagan and the rise of Conservative America; Bill Clinton and post-Cold war American society; 9/11 and its impact. Seminars on the module will focus on foreign policy developments and will include: the origins of the Cold War; the Korean war; the Cuban missile crisis; the ‘race to the moon’; the Vietnam war and its aftermath; the politics of détente; Reaganism and the spectre of communism; the end of the cold war; the road to 9/11.

Assessment Strategy

-threshold -Threshold students (D- to D) will demonstrate an appropriate range or depth of knowledge of at least parts of the relevant field and will make partly-successful attempts to frame an argument that engages with historiographical controversies. -good -Good students (B- to B+) will show a solid level of achievement in all the criteria of the paragraphs above. -excellent -Excellent students (A- and above) will show this depth of achievement across the criteria combined with particularly impressive depths of knowledge and / or subtlety of analysis.