After completing the course, students:
- have gained insight in the lives and historical roles of common people, their conflicts of interests and their political and ideological representations in the history of the United States, from the late 19th century until about the 1970s;
- are able to offer an analysis, both individually and in groups, of several relevant topics, including the absence of socialism in America, the nature of Prohibition, the rise of urban ghetto's and the Civil Rights movements, using literature and online source collections;
- are able to present the results of their research in written and oral presentations.
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In the second Volume of Who built America? the American history is approached once more from the perspective of groups and group struggle, such as women, workers and migrants. How to interpret the new social contradictions (wealth and poverty, work and unemployment, civl rights and continued discrimination) which these groups experienced during a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization? How important were trade unions and how and why did social security improve in the first decades of the twentieth century? How did American society respond to the Great Depression? What were the social effects of America's active role in the two World Wars and how did the society respond to the threat of Communism? After the Second World War, a civil rights movement emerged; leading to improvements in the lot of blacks, native Americans and others, but also to strong rightist 'backlashes'. In Western Europe social tensions were more or less neutralized in welfare states - how and why were the United States different? |
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