Survey American history from the Gilded Age through the early twenty-first century, examining industrialization, reform, war, economic crisis, civil rights, presidential power, and the continuing expansion of federal authority.
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Analyze competing interpretations of industrialists, monopoly, labor conflict, agrarian protest, and Progressive reform during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Explain how war, diplomacy, economic interests, and security arguments shaped American involvement from the Spanish-American War through Vietnam and the late Cold War.
Compare explanations for the prosperity of the 1920s, the Great Depression, New Deal policy, wartime economic management, and the stagflation of the 1970s.
Examine how presidents, courts, Congress, and administrative programs expanded or contested federal power during war, economic crisis, and domestic reform.
Trace the movement against Jim Crow through litigation, boycotts, mass protest, legislation, urban unrest, affirmative action, and debates over constitutional interpretation.
Assess how constitutional limits, individual liberty, political privilege, state power, and overseas commitments recur across the course’s chronological narrative.
This course traces United States history since 1877 through the interconnected growth of industrial capitalism, federal administration, presidential authority, and overseas power. It begins by reconsidering familiar narratives about industrialists, labor conflict, Populism, Progressivism, and the Spanish-American War. The course then examines American entry into World War I, the political economy and diplomacy of the 1920s, competing explanations for the Great Depression, and the interventions of Hoover and Roosevelt. Its treatment of World War II and the Cold War connects military strategy, economic controls, executive power, and changing international commitments. Later lessons follow the Great Society, the civil rights movement, constitutional disputes surrounding the Warren Court, Vietnam, the crises of the 1970s, and the Reagan administration. Throughout, contrasting interpretations invite careful evaluation of markets, reform, war, civil liberties, race, economic policy, and the durability of constitutional limits.
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Hunt Tooley is a historian of modern Europe whose teaching and writing examine war, nationalism, political culture, and the human experience of conflict.
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Jonathan Bean is a historian whose research explores business, government, civil rights, race, and liberty in the United States.
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Kevin R. C. Gutzman is a historian and constitutional scholar specializing in the American Revolution, the early republic, Jefferson, Madison, and constitutional history.
Author, Historian, and Podcast Host · The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods is an author, historian, and host of The Tom Woods Show. He founded Liberty Classroom to make serious history and economics available beyond the conventional classroom.
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