Honors 300: Excavating the Recent American Past: An Introduction

1. Two very debatable propositions:

A. The post 1980s as a “new era” (Or: does continuity, rather than change characterize the past 20-25 years?)

B. The “new era” as a “postmodern” era (Or: is it merely a new stage in the long evolution of the “modern” world?)

2. A Plethora of “Posts”

Post Industrial, Post Cold War, Post Colonial, Post National, Post Fordist, Postmodern, etc., etc.

3. What do we mean by “postmodern”? (What do we mean by “modern”?)

4. A Word or Two About Postmodernism. [See “What is Postmodernism,” by English Professor Mary Klages.]

5. Confessions of an almost ex-modernist: some problems we will wrestle with throughout the semester.

The Problem of understanding the very recent past

The Problem of Linearity

Does history, especially the history of the recent past, resemble a straight line or a Buddhist Mandala?

The Problem of Postmodern America -- an intellectual dilemma

The Problem of postmodern America – can you do “national” histories in a “global” era?

The Problem of Interdisciplinarity: What’s a nice historian doing in a place (time?) like this?

The Problem of Generations (Yours and Mine)

6. The “Architecture” of the Years Following WWII (Or, “periodization” in spite of itself).

The “long” modern era

“Modern” America – from the late 19^th to the mid-twentieth centuries

Act One: from the late 1940s to the early 1960s -- the climax of modernity in America?

Act Two: the 1960s through the 1970s -- the Crises of Postwar (“Modern”?) America

The struggles for equality and identity – the African-American civil rights movement and its progeny

The Women’s Movement (and more)

Vietnam and the Crisis of Empire

The Economic Crisis of the 1970s
The Cultural Crises

Act Three: the 1980s to the present –

Backlash: efforts to restore the old, postwar (modern?) era of the 1950s

The continuing emergence of a new (postmodern?) world