Civil Rights demonstrators in Alabama carry flags and march against voting restrictions on March 21, 1965. Two weeks earlier, police attacked marchers with horses, clubs, and tear gas at Edmund Pettus Bridge to prevent them from reaching the state capital in Montgomery. The resistance to violent intimidation was later known as Bloody Sunday. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized the march from Selma to Montgomery to bring national awareness to a federal Voting Rights Bill in Congress. Photo copyright Matt Herron.

The central political, legal, and moral issue for the United States after 1945 was equality: of class and race; gender and sexuality; and many related issues. This post-war “search for equality” poses important and challenging questions: What is equality? How is equality determined? Is legal equality sufficient, or are laws fairly toothless compared to opportunities for jobs, housing, health care, social respect, cultural authority, and individual autonomy? Do we seek an “equality of opportunity” or an “equality of outcomes”? This course will explore these and related questions as they have shaped American history over the last 85 years.

This course covers the period of U.S. history from the end of World War II until the present. Because the class examines contemporary history, it is more strongly a history of the present than other history classes. The course’s emphasis is to understand the US today by delving into the history of post-World War II America.

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