| This course focuses on a
pivotal period of American history: 1960-1980. It was a time of tremendous
change beginning with President Kennedy’s declaration that “we shall pay
any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose
any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” around
the world, and ending with the national disgrace of South Vietnam’s collapse
and the Iran hostage crisis. It began with high hopes of a nation
that seemed so endlessly prosperous that it planned a “Great Society” and
ended with a crippling gasoline shortage, rising unemployment, and skyrocketing
inflation. If the 1960s was the culmination of liberalism that had
emerged in the New Deal era, then the 1970s would pave the way for the
conservative revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. We will examine this
remarkable transformation by exploring such topics as the Civil Rights
Movement and many of the resulting movements for change (the Student Movement,
the Counterculture, the Chicano Movement, Red Power, Black Power, the Women’s
movement, Gay Power, etc.), the Vietnam War and its implications for American
society, the Watergate crisis, the rise of Christian fundamentalism and
alternative religious movements in the 1970s, the rise of musical forms
such as Disco and Punk rock and what they say about 1970s culture, and
the national “crisis of confidence” which President Carter claimed plagued
the nation by the end of the 1970s. We will not only read books of
the period, but view a healthy dose of feature films of the period as a
window into the culture of the times. |