This course on recent American history is organized around careful and close readings of several critical texts that (re)frame our understanding of the nation’s last three quarters of a century. It is NOT a survey, but rather a set of conversations about big ideas like how federal policy regarding immigration and welfare led to a rigid heteronormativity in America or how a fundamentalist understanding of the world of work transformed the corporate culture of the world’s largest retail store. Or how highway infrastructure and the rise of long-haul trucking created our current urban-rural divide or how a formerly obscure understanding of economic theory helped dissolve public trust in America’s institutions or how 1980s punk rock led to the first serious and longstanding criticism of neoliberalism. TH 1:00