Led by: Prof. Beverly Gage (Yale University)
Course Number: Forthcoming
Semesters: New Course
Image: A 1964 campaign button supporting Lyndon B. Johnson (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC09750)
US Political History Since 1945
US Political History Since 1945
Course Description
This course will cover United States politics, political thought, and social movements since 1945. We will discuss pivotal elections and political figures (Truman, Nixon, Reagan) as well as politics from below (civil rights, labor, women’s activism). Emphasis will be placed on political ideas such as liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism and on the intersection between domestic politics and the Cold War.
Lecture Preview
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About the Scholar
Beverly Gage, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, Yale University
Beverly Gage is a professor of twentieth-century US history. Her courses focus on American politics, government, and social movements. She is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror, which examines the history of terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. Her most recent book, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Bancroft Prize in American History, among other awards. In addition to her teaching and research, she writes for numerous journals and magazines, including the New Yorker, New York Times, and Washington Post. She currently serves on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed in the course descriptions and lectures are those of the lead scholars.