Sources and References

These notes synthesize the standard survey literature on modern U.S. history. The single most comprehensive reference is Eric Foner’s textbook Give Me Liberty! An American History, complemented by his prize-winning monograph Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. For the late nineteenth century, Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 is indispensable, as is Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom frames the Civil War stakes that opened the period, while David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory tracks how those stakes were rewritten. For the New Deal and the Second World War, David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 remains the standard. Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform and Liberalism and Its Discontents guide the story of mid-century politics; H. W. Brands’s Traitor to His Class and American Colossus illuminate the Roosevelts and the Gilded Age, respectively. Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century threads nationalism through the whole period, while Nell Irvin Painter’s Standing at Armageddon and The History of White People deepen the social history. Alan Taylor’s American Republics and Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought provide the antebellum backdrop. The narrative also draws on David Blight’s open Civil War and Reconstruction Era lectures at Yale (OCW), Pauline Maier’s U.S. History course at MIT OCW, and curricular materials from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Chapter 1: The Civil War’s Unfinished Revolution

The Stakes of 1861–1865

The period this course examines begins with a question that the Civil War had just answered in blood: what kind of country would the United States become once slavery was destroyed? By 1865, some 750,000 soldiers were dead, roughly four million enslaved people were free, and the federal government had grown into an instrument whose wartime powers – conscription, a national currency, an income tax, land-grant colleges, a transcontinental railroad charter – had no peacetime precedent. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom argues that the war was, in its essence, a “second American Revolution” whose meaning turned on emancipation. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (January 1863) redefined the Union cause, and the Thirteenth Amendment (ratified December 1865) wrote that redefinition into the Constitution, abolishing slavery “except as a punishment for crime.”

Lincoln’s Assassination and the Succession Crisis

When John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln on April 14, 1865, Andrew Johnson – a Tennessee Democrat placed on the 1864 ticket to signal wartime unity – inherited the presidency. Johnson’s racial views and his sympathy for planters turned Reconstruction from what Lincoln had hinted at into a collision between the executive and Congress. The result was a constitutional crisis whose shadows, as Foner argues in Reconstruction, would fall across the next century.

Chapter 2: Reconstruction, 1865–1877

Presidential versus Radical Reconstruction

Johnson’s “Presidential Reconstruction” allowed former Confederate states to reenter the Union on extraordinarily lenient terms. Southern legislatures responded by passing the Black Codes, which bound freedpeople to plantation labor through vagrancy statutes and apprenticeship laws. Outrage in the North produced a Republican landslide in 1866 and the period historians call Radical Reconstruction. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson’s veto and, crucially, drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed birthright citizenship, equal protection of the laws, and due process against state action. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited the denial of the vote on account of race.

The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Political Power

The Freedmen’s Bureau, created in March 1865, distributed food, negotiated labor contracts, adjudicated disputes, and founded schools that trained a generation of Black teachers and ministers. Between 1867 and 1877, some 2,000 African Americans held public office in the South, including sixteen members of Congress and two U.S. senators from Mississippi (Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce). Foner calls this experiment “America’s unfinished revolution” because it was real – Black majorities helped write new state constitutions with universal manhood suffrage and public schools – but vulnerable.

Counter-Revolution and the Compromise of 1877

Paramilitary violence by the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts “redeemed” one Southern state after another. The disputed 1876 presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden produced the informal Compromise of 1877: Hayes took the White House, federal troops left the last occupied statehouses, and Reconstruction ended. David Blight’s Race and Reunion shows how white Americans then rewrote the war as a tragedy of brave brothers on both sides, quietly writing emancipation out of the national memory.

Chapter 3: The Gilded Age and the New Industrial Order

Incorporation and the Second Industrial Revolution

Between 1870 and 1900 the United States became the world’s leading industrial economy. Railroad mileage tripled, Bessemer steel and electricity transformed production, and firms such as Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel, and the Pennsylvania Railroad reorganized markets on a continental scale. Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands argues that this Gilded Age was less a triumph than a “traumatic birth,” defined by deflation, corruption, and violence. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner gave the era its mocking name in 1873.

Labor Revolt

Industrial workers responded with the most militant labor movement in American history. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 paralyzed traffic from Baltimore to San Francisco and was broken only by federal troops. The Haymarket affair (1886), the Homestead lockout (1892), and the Pullman strike (1894) each ended in defeat for organized labor but taught a generation that the state sided with capital. The Knights of Labor rose and fell; Samuel Gompers’s craft-based American Federation of Labor survived by narrowing its ambitions.

Populism and 1896

On the farms, falling crop prices, predatory railroad rates, and tight money produced the People’s (Populist) Party. Its 1892 Omaha Platform demanded a graduated income tax, the direct election of senators, government ownership of railroads and telegraphs, and the free coinage of silver. William Jennings Bryan, fused Democratic-Populist nominee in 1896, delivered his “Cross of Gold” speech and lost to William McKinley in an election that Richard White calls the end of the agrarian republic.

Chapter 4: The West and the Closing of the Frontier

The “West” of the late nineteenth century was not empty. It was home to the Lakota, Cheyenne, Apache, Nez Perce, Diné, and many other Indigenous nations whose sovereignty was broken by army campaigns, the slaughter of the buffalo, and allotment. The Dawes Act (1887) dissolved communal landholding on reservations and transferred roughly two-thirds of remaining Indigenous lands to whites within a generation. The massacre at Wounded Knee (December 1890) ended organized Plains resistance. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) barred Chinese laborers and marked the first federal law excluding a nationality. Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” declared the frontier closed and, in doing so, gave the myth its first academic articulation.

Chapter 5: Progressivism, Empire, and the Great War

The Progressive Impulse

Between roughly 1890 and 1920, middle-class reformers – journalists Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, settlement-house workers like Jane Addams, suffragists led by Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul – sought to tame industrial capitalism through expert regulation. Progressivism was not one movement but many: anti-trust litigation under Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson’s Federal Reserve Act (1913) and Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), municipal reform against urban machines, Prohibition (Eighteenth Amendment, 1919), and women’s suffrage (Nineteenth Amendment, 1920). The Social Gospel gave Protestant reformers a theological vocabulary; muckrakers like Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906) supplied the outrage.

Becoming an Empire

The Spanish-American War (1898) ended with the United States in possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and exercising a protectorate over Cuba. The Philippine-American War (1899–1902) killed perhaps 200,000 Filipino civilians. Secretary of State John Hay’s “Open Door” notes extended the logic of informal empire to China. Gary Gerstle reads these years as the birth of a “racial nation” whose imperial ambitions were inseparable from its racial hierarchies.

World War I and Wilsonian Internationalism

Woodrow Wilson led the country into the European war in April 1917, promising to make the world “safe for democracy.” The War Industries Board, the Committee on Public Information, and the Espionage and Sedition Acts transformed the home front. Conscription built a four-million-man army. Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his crusade for the League of Nations foundered in the Senate. The war also accelerated the Great Migration of Black Southerners into Northern cities.

Chapter 6: The Long Shadow of Jim Crow

The end of Reconstruction was followed by what Rayford Logan called “the nadir” of American race relations. Mississippi’s 1890 constitution pioneered literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses to disfranchise Black voters. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) constitutionalized “separate but equal.” Lynching peaked in the 1890s; Ida B. Wells’s investigative pamphlets Southern Horrors and A Red Record exposed its logic. The New South of Henry Grady promised industrial modernity alongside white supremacy. Against this order, Booker T. Washington counseled accommodation at Tuskegee while W. E. B. Du Bois answered with The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and helped found the NAACP in 1909.

Chapter 7: The 1920s, the Crash, and the New Deal

A Decade of Contradiction

The 1920s were prosperous for some and cruel for others. Assembly lines turned cars into mass consumer goods; radio, movies, and advertising built a national commercial culture. Immigration was frozen by the Johnson-Reed Act (1924), which imposed national-origins quotas designed to privilege Northern and Western Europeans. The revived Ku Klux Klan counted millions of members, including in Indiana and Oregon. The Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925 dramatized a cultural war over evolution and biblical authority. In Harlem, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Duke Ellington built a flourishing of Black art and thought that historians now call the Harlem Renaissance.

Hoover, Roosevelt, and the New Deal

The stock-market crash of October 1929 began a collapse that by 1933 had shrunk GDP by nearly 30 percent and thrown one worker in four out of a job. Herbert Hoover’s limited response gave way to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The First New Deal (1933–34) included the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Second New Deal (1935) added the Wagner Act (protecting labor organizing), the Works Progress Administration, and the Social Security Act. Industrial unions organized under John L. Lewis’s CIO won decisive victories at GM (Flint sit-down strike, 1937) and, eventually, U.S. Steel. David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear emphasizes that the New Deal provided security more than prosperity; unemployment remained above 14 percent until the war. Roosevelt’s 1937 court-packing plan failed politically but produced the “switch in time” that accepted New Deal constitutionality.

Chapter 8: World War II and the American Century

From neutrality in 1939, the United States moved to Lend-Lease (March 1941) and then, after Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), to full belligerency. Roosevelt called America the “arsenal of democracy,” and that arsenal delivered: wartime production doubled GDP, the government ran deficits on a New Deal scale, and women entered war industries as “Rosie the Riveter.” The shameful internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066, upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944), revealed the limits of civil liberties in wartime. The “Double V” campaign, which linked victory abroad to victory over racism at home, laid groundwork for the postwar civil-rights movement. The Manhattan Project, launched in 1942 and culminating at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, made the United States the sole atomic power at war’s end. Henry Luce’s phrase “the American Century” captured the result.

Chapter 9: The Cold War at Home and Abroad

Containment and the National Security State

George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” (1946) and the Truman Doctrine (1947) framed the postwar world as a struggle against Soviet expansion. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Western Europe; NATO (1949) made the alliance permanent. NSC-68 (1950) called for a permanent military buildup and was operationalized by the Korean War (1950–53). At home, the National Security Act (1947) created the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the apparatus Eisenhower would later call the “military-industrial complex.”

McCarthyism

Fear of internal subversion produced loyalty programs, HUAC hearings, Hollywood blacklists, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reckless accusations. The Rosenberg trial (1951) and the Alger Hiss case gave the hunt its emotional fuel. McCarthy collapsed only after the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, but the security state he helped build endured.

Postwar Affluence

The GI Bill educated veterans and subsidized suburban homeownership, though its benefits were systematically denied to Black veterans. Levittowns, interstates (1956), and the baby boom reshaped the map. A managerial, consumer capitalism of the kind Alan Brinkley describes in The End of Reform had, by the mid-1950s, absorbed much of the New Deal’s ambition.

Chapter 10: Civil Rights, the Sixties, and the Crisis of Liberalism

From Brown to the Voting Rights Act

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) declared school segregation unconstitutional. The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56) made Martin Luther King Jr. a national figure. SNCC’s sit-ins (1960), the Freedom Rides (1961), the Birmingham campaign (1963), the March on Washington, and Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964) built moral pressure that President Lyndon Johnson translated into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson’s Great Society added Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and the War on Poverty. By 1966, Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power signaled a shift toward self-determination and a critique of liberal gradualism.

Vietnam, the Counterculture, and 1968

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) authorized escalation; by 1968 more than half a million American troops were in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive (January 1968), the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Chicago Democratic Convention, and the election of Richard Nixon made 1968 the annus horribilis of American liberalism. The counterculture, second-wave feminism (Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, 1963; the founding of NOW, 1966; the push for the Equal Rights Amendment), the gay liberation movement after Stonewall (1969), and the environmental movement all widened the definition of the political. Brinkley captures the paradox: the Great Society delivered more than any program since the New Deal and yet ended in disillusion.

Chapter 11: The Rightward Turn and the Post-Cold War World

Stagflation and the Reagan Revolution

The 1970s combined defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, the oil shocks, and the novel economic condition of “stagflation” – simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment. California’s Proposition 13 (1978) launched a tax revolt, and evangelicals organized politically through Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory consolidated what historians call the New Right. The Reagan Revolution cut top marginal tax rates, deregulated industries, broke the 1981 PATCO strike, and rebuilt the military. Reagan’s rhetoric recast government itself as the problem. Whatever one thinks of the results, the political center of gravity had shifted: even Bill Clinton would declare in 1996 that “the era of big government is over.”

1989, the 1990s, and Impeachment

The fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (December 1991) ended the Cold War. The 1990s brought a tech-driven boom, NAFTA (1994), welfare reform (1996), and the impeachment of President Clinton over the Lewinsky affair (1998). Globalization reorganized manufacturing and deepened inequality even as unemployment fell.

September 11 and After

The attacks of September 11, 2001 launched a “War on Terror,” the invasion of Afghanistan (2001), and the invasion of Iraq (2003). The 2008 financial crisis, triggered by the collapse of subprime mortgage markets, produced the deepest recession since the 1930s and the election of Barack Obama, the first Black president. The Affordable Care Act (2010) extended health coverage; the Tea Party and, later, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 signaled a renewed populism of the right. Movements for Black lives, climate action, and gender equality gave the 2010s and early 2020s their characteristic turbulence. The story that began with Reconstruction’s promise of a genuinely multiracial democracy remains, in Foner’s phrase, an unfinished revolution – and the task of this course is to understand how Americans have repeatedly asked, and repeatedly failed to fully answer, what it would take to finish it.