New Era/New Deal (1920-1945)

A graduate seminar on the United States from the end of WWI through WWII, treating the quarter-century as one arc in which postwar prosperity, financial collapse, and total war reshaped the federal state and America's place in the world. You'll read deeply across the historiography (Leuchtenberg, Galbraith, Jonas and others), give oral presentations on the weekly readings, and produce an original research essay built from a proposal earlier in the term. It's a literature-driven seminar aimed at MA students in US history, so the payoff is less factual coverage than learning to argue with the existing scholarship on the New Deal order.