United States History II
Spring 2012

Course Description
American history from Reconstruction to the present is examined in detail, with particular attention to the key personalities of the era, the industrial revolution, the recent wars, and the youth culture. We will examine the political, social, economic and cultural forces that shaped contemporary American civilization.

Course Outcomes:

The successful student will develop the skills necessary to:

• Trace the rise of American power in the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• Note especially, the factors that make this growth possible, and
• identify the causes of American entry into World War I, and
• the role played by the US in ending the war.
• Explain the reasons for the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939 and America's entry in 1941.
• Trace the major events of the war, and
• explain America's contribution to the war effort at home and abroad.
• trace the development of America's Cold War with the Soviet Union (including our involvement in Vietnam), and
• assess its impact upon the social, economic, and political character of the nation.
• Compose an essay that demonstrates a strong grasp of the important questions related to the study of American history.
  
  
  
  
  

 

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

1. Exams: Two section exams and a comprehensive final will be administered during the semester on the dates listed below. The tests will consist of objective-type questions, including multiple-choice and short answer.

Make-up exams: Make-up examinations are possible only when you have presented me with a legitimate excuse BEFORE the scheduled date of the exam. Failure to do so will result in an automatic 0 for the exam. This make-up policy does not apply to the final exam. Failure to take the final exam at the stated time during the final exam week will be treated as a serious breach of policy and will probably not be excused, resulting in a failing grade for the exam.

Note: Make-up Exams: All make-up exams will be administered during the final week of classes.

2. Quizzes: There will be 10 in-class quizzes administered during the semester. The quizzes will consist of multiple-choice and short answer questions drawn exclusively from the reading materials.

Make-up Quizzes: Forget about it. No make-ups.

Pop Quizzes: The instructor does reserve the right to give pop quizzes if he deems it necessary.

3. Required Paper: There will be one short paper (3-4 pages, 750-1,000 words) required in History 2320. The paper will be based on Paul Kengor’s, God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life. Write an essay in which you answer ONE of the following: (1) What role did Christianity play in Reagan’s conception of freedom? (2) How did faith in Christ shape Reagan’s domestic and or foreign policies?

The purpose of this paper is to focus your thinking on important questions which relate to your study of American history. These are not research papers but an analytical essay in which you need to bring your thoughts together in a concise and meaningful manner. If you wish to quote from the source, and you probably should, you may simply indicate in parenthesis the pages(s) from which you have gotten a thought or a quote. Take serious the word limitation for this paper. Your grade will be based on how well you answer the question, not the length of your responses.

4. Proficiency Exam: The Department of History and Political Science administers proficiency exams for all survey courses twice per term. The second exam will be included in determining the final course grade.

 

Grade Distribution:

(Study guides may be located by clicking on the appropriate exam)

 

 

Course Outlines

PART I HUDDLED MASSES AND CROSSES OF GOLD

Jan. 12	Introducction/ Proficiency Exam
Jan. 17	End of Reconstruction	Conlin, ch. 24-26
Jan. 19	The Last Indian Wars	Conlin, ch. 30
Jan. 24	Industrialization	Conlin, ch. 27
Jan. 26	Film: Ellis Island
Jan. 31	Spanish-American War	Conlin, ch. 31-32
Feb. 2	Film: Birth of a Superpower
Feb. 7	First Exam

 

PART II THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL NATION

Feb. 9	Theodore Roosevelt	Conlin, ch. 33-34
Feb. 14	The First World War	Conlin, ch. 35-36
Feb. 16	Film: Alvin C. York	Conlin, ch. 37
Feb. 21	The Long Armistice
Feb.23	The Roaring Twenties	Conlin, ch. 38-39

 

PART III NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF

Feb. 9	FDR and the New Deal	Conlin, ch. 40-41
Mar. 1	Film: The Great Depression
Mar. 13	World War II	Conlin, ch. 42
Mar. 15	War in Europe	Conlin, ch. 43-44
Mar. 20	The Holocaust
Mar. 22	Film: Film: Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace.
Mar. 27	Second Ecam
Mar. 29	The Cold War	Conlin, ch. 45-46
Apr. 3	Film: Korea: Freedom isn’t Free

 

PART IV WE WILL PAY ANY PRICE, BEAR ANY BURDEN

 

Apr. 5	The New Frontier and the Great Society	Conlin, ch. 47-48
Apr. 10	Vietnam	Conlin, ch. 49
Apr. 12	Nixon and Watergate
Apr. 17	Film: Miracle on Ice
Apr. 19	Ronald Reagan	Conlin, ch. 50-51
Apr. 24	Discussion: Kengor
Apr. 26	Osama Ben Laden	Conlin, ch. 52
Apr. 28	Final Exam Week

 

 

Webliography

 

 

Reconstruction

 

 

 

Andrew Johnson
Images of African Americans from the 19th Century
Rutherford Hayes Diary
Rutherford Hayes Presidential Center
The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant Memoirs

 

The Development of Modern America

 

 

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show
Cartoons of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum
Doolin-Dalton Gang
General George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn
Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920
The Court Martial of George Armstrong Custer
The Iron Road
The James-Younger Gang
The Richest Man in the World: Andrew Carnegie
The Transcontinental Railroad
The Wild West
Wyatt Earp

The War with Spain

 

 

Chronology of the Spanish-American War
Crucible of Empire
New York Library Online Exhibition of the Spanish-American War
Remember the Maine
Spanish-American War Centennial Website
Spanish-American War Homepage
The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures (American Memory)
The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War
United States Naval Historical Center
United States Army Center of Military History
William McKinley and the Spanish-American War

 

The Progressive Era

 

 

 

America 1900 (The American Experience)
Americans in the Raw
Coal Mining in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Competing Visions for America (1912)
Edison Motion Picture and Sound Recording
Ellis Island Online
How the Other Half Lives (Jacob Riis)
Lincoln Steffans
New York City's Lower East Side
Port of Entry: Immigration
Restrictions of Immigration 1896
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace
Theodore Roosevlet: His Life and Times on Film
Theodore Roosevelt (The American Experience)
Theodore Roosevelt Papers (Library of Congress)
The Black Sox Scandal
The Changing Character of Immigration
The Irish in America
The Traingle Shirtwaste Fire
The Wright Stuff
Three Cites: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America
TR, The Study of Theodore Roosevelt
Upton Sinclair (Biography)
William Howard Taft

 

 

The Great War 1914-1918

 

 

Alvin C. York
American Battlefields in France
Art of the First World War
Encyclopaedia of the First World War
Eyewitness to World War I
Influenza 1918 (The American Experience)
Photos of the Great War
The Diary of Alvin C. York
The Great War
The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century
The Jazz Age in Chicago
The Nations Involved in the Great War
The War with Germany: A Statisical Summary
Western Front Association
Woodrow Wilson
World War I: Trenches on the Web
World War I, 1914-1918 (Emphasis on British war poetry)

 

The 1920s

 

 

Al Capone (The Crime Library)
Al Capone (FBI)
American Prohibition in the 1920s
Black Thursday
Calvin Coolidge
Clash of Cultures 1910s and 1920s
Greatest Films of the 1920s
Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro
Henry Ford
Immigration in the 1920s
Jazz (PBS)
Jazz Age Biographies
Lindbergh
Music of the 1920s
Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy
Red Scare
Temperance and Prohibition
The Jazz Age
The Lawless Decades
The Sacco-Vanzetti Trial
The Scopes Monkey Trial
Warren G. Harding

 

 

Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal

 

 

America in the 1930s
Breadline
Debunking the Roosevelt Myth
Documenting America Photographs from the 1939-1945
Dust Bowl 1930s
Fireside Chats of Franklin Roosevelt
FDR Cartoon Database
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
Greatest Films of the 1930s
New Deal Network
Riding the Rail (The American Experience)
Social Security Online History
The Hoover Dam (PBS)
Voices from the Thirties
WPA Life Histories from New Hampshire

 

The Second World War

 

 

 

America From the Great Depression to World War II
BBC On World War II
D-Day (PBS)
General George Patton Museum
Homefront Photographs
Iwo Jima
The American War Library
The Battle of the Bulge
The Institute on World War II
United States Marine Corps Page
World War II A Soldier's View
World War II in the Pacific
World War II Press Photographs
World War II Timeline

 

 

The Postwar Period, 1950-1960

 

Brown vs. the Board of Education
Cold War Hotlinks
Dwight David Eisenhower
Harry S. Truman
Korean War Project
Senator Joe McCarthy-A Multimedia Celebration
The American Fifities
The Cold War (CNN)
The Fifties Web
The Golden Age of Television
The Literature and Culture of the 1950s
The Music of the Fifties

 

The Sixties and Seventies

 

 

Civil Rights in Mississippi
Cuban Missile Crisis
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Free Speech Movement: Student Protest
Lyndon B. Johnson (War on Poverty)
Mississippi Burning
Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace
Television News Archive
The Kennedy Assassination
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Seventies Sites Page
Watergate (The Washington Post)
Watergate
Watergate Decade

 

 

 

The Vietnam Conflict

 

 

Battlefield Vietnam
Memory of a Paratrooper (The American Experience)
My Lai Massacre (The American Experience)
Operation Homecoming
Return With Honor
The My Lai Courts Martial 1970
The Vietnam Center (Texas Tech University)
The Vietnam War Internet Project
The Vietnam War Photo Album
Vietnam Online
Vietnam (The American Experience)
Vietnam Veterans Memorial

 

Revival of Conservatism

 

 

Desert Storm
George Herbert Walker Bush
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan (Evil Empire Speech)
Ronald Reagan (Speech on Challanger Disaster)
Ronald Reagan, American President's Life Portraits, C-Span
Ronald Reagan, The American Experience
The Gulf War
The Gulf War (Frontline)

 

 

 

Films About American History

 

 

 

 

The Emergence of Modern America:

Buffalo Soldiers
Geronimo: An American Legend
I Will Fight No More Forever
Molly Maguires
The Birth of a Nation
The Died With Their Boots On
Wyatt Earp

The War With Spain:

Rough Riders
Teddy the Rough Rider

Progressive Era:

 

The Great War and the Twenties:

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1979 )
Reds
The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case
Matewan
The Grapes of Wrath

 

The Second World War and the Holocaust:

 

 

A Bridge Too Far
Anne Frank
Bataan
Battle of Britain
Big Red One
Midway
Paradise Road
Patton
Pearl Harbor
Sands of Iwo Jima
Saving Private Ryan
Schindler's List
Tehran
The Bridge on the River Kwai
The Flying Tigers
The Gathering Storm
The Longest Day
The Outsider
Thin Red Line
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
To Hell and Back
Tora, Tora, Tora
Windtalkers

 

The Cold War Era, 1945-1989:

George Wallace
The Day the Earth Caught Fire
The Manchurian Candidate
Dr. Strangelove
Dr. Zhivago

The 1960s:

JFK
Malcolm X
Mississippi Burning
Ruby
Thirteen Days

 

Vietnam:

A Bright and Shining Lie
Apocalypse Now
Born on the Fourth of July
Casualties of War
Full Metal Jacket
Good Morning Vietnam
Platoon
The Deer Hunter
The Green Berets
The Killing Fields
We Were Soldiers

1970-2003:

All the President's Men
Behind Enemy Lines
Black Hawk Down
Nixon
Pollock
Salvador

 

 

Top/Home