American Babylon: Crisis and Reckoning in the Postwar United States, 1945-1980

This course explores the major cultural and political developments in U.S. history in the tumultuous postwar decades: liberalism, radicalism, and conservatism; race, class, gender, and sexuality in shaping national life; the Cold War and the fate of the New Deal; rise of the New Right; and the making of a second gilded age, among others. We consider postwar history in three broad periods: One, the consolidation of “Cold War liberalism” under international and domestic anticommunism through the 1960s; Two, a period we might call the “second Reconstruction,” between 1954 and 1973, when race-, gender-, and sexuality-based movements produced a social and legal revolution on behalf of equality and human rights; and Three, a period of backlash to the rights revolution that overlapped with the rise of an oligarchic phase of capitalism known as “neoliberalism,” between the 1970s and the present.