Led by: Prof. Barbara Perry (University of Virginia)
Course Number: AMHI 662
Semesters: Summer 2025, Fall 2023, Summer 2020, Spring 2019
Image: Letter from Senator John F. Kennedy about the minimum voting age, 1957 (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC09784)
This course examines John F. Kennedy’s biography, career, rhetoric, and policies, and uses political symbols and the media to contextualize the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the Peace Corps, civil rights, the space race, and the arts, to gain both knowledge of and perspective on the thirty-fifth president and his family’s legacy as carried on by Robert and Edward Kennedy. Followed by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the fraught era concluded with the unprecedented resignation of a US president, which continues to resonate today.
Please note that the required books listed under course readings are finalized but other aspects of the course syllabus are subject to change. We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase made through the Bookshop.org links provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Download Draft Syllabus Bookshop.org List
Barbara A. Perry, J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance, University of Virginia
Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, where she co-directs the Presidential Oral History Program. She has authored or edited seventeen books on presidents, First Ladies, the Kennedy family, the Supreme Court, and civil rights and civil liberties. Perry has conducted more than 140 interviews for the George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama Presidential Oral History Projects; directs the Edward Kennedy Oral History Project; and co-directs the Hillary Rodham Clinton Oral History Project. She served as a US Supreme Court fellow and has worked for both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate.
The views expressed in the course descriptions and lectures are those of the lead scholars.