HIST 215 Flappers, Fundamentalists, FDR: US Experience 1919-1945
Between the end of the First World War in 1919 and the Second World War in 1945, the United States became a modern nation. Signs of the "modernism" were everywhere: in the rise of cities and urban cultures; in the mass media and its obsession with celebrity; in new norms about consumption and pleasure; in the politics of government activism and the welfare state; in new ideas about gender roles and sexual freedoms; and in new conceptions of ethnic and racial pluralism. In this course, we will examine the tensions, fears, and dreams surrounding the American transition to modernism in the 1920s and 1930s.