ICS 520 American Cultural History
The second half of the twentieth century saw the United States rise in its global stature as an economic and military superpower. Along with those categories, American culture became increasingly hegemonic. Today the ubiquity of Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and Starbucks attests to that as does the popularity of American cinema and music. This class will introduce students to important works by historians who have researched and written on American culture, broadly construed, to chart the rise from relative cultural backwater in the early twentieth century to cultural hegemon through the turn of the twenty-first century.