The United States in the World, 1846-1945

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This seminar explores the history of the United States in the world between 1846 and 1945. We begin with the United States’s consequential war with Mexico, a war powered by a belief in the imperial republic’s manifest destiny, and we conclude with U.S. intervention in the second world war, when publisher Henry Luce promoted a new age—the “American Century”—and a new leadership role for the United States. Along the way, we’ll consider continental imperialism and how “mainland” United States took its contemporary shape, the international dimensions and ramifications of the Civil War, how the U.S. acquired territories and undertook colonialism overseas, how Americans debated intervention, neutrality, and isolationism through two world wars and built foundations for global hegemony. We will consider various means by which Americans asserted influence—political, economic, cultural, humanitarian, military—and the interests and ideologies shaping these engagements. Not focused narrowly on foreign policy, we will also investigate how peoples outside the United States responded to these projections of power and how international and domestic developments shaped each other. Students will undertake a research paper in the second half of the course.