Contemporary North American Culture

Objectives

a) To gain interpretative instruments that contribute to an understanding of North American contemporary culture in particular of the impact in the present of social, cultural and political experiences of the 50s and 60s ;

b) To contextualize the internal debates that shaped the responses to domestic moments of crisis and to identity cultural, social and aesthetic tendencies in the period under study;

c) To read relevant texts (essays,literary and artistic texts, films and memoirs) critically, relating threm with the identified cultural dynamics;

d) To research and organize under supervision, a short essay to be presented orally, on one of the themes of the syllabus.

General characterization

Code

01101134

Credits

6.0

Responsible teacher

Teresa Raquel Nunes Pereira

Hours

Weekly - 4

Total - 168

Teaching language

Portuguese

Prerequisites

Available soon

Bibliography

Bloom, Alexander, Takin' it to the streets: A Sixties Reader (4th Edition) Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2015

Chafe, William, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (8th ed.) New York: Oxford University Press 2014.

Isserman, Maurice, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s ( 5th Edition) Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 2015

Hitchcock, William I, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s.New York; Simon and Schuster, 2018

Kirk, John A. (ed.) The Civil Rights Movement: A Documentary Reader. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020

Montrie, Chad, The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism, Oakland; The University of California Press, 2018

Theoharis, Jeanne, A More Beautiful and Terrible Histoy: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, Boston: Beacon Press, 2018

Teaching method

Teaching and evaluation methodologies: (1000 characters) Theoretical introductory exposition of the basic problematics of the syllabus, as contextualization of the primary sources under analysis, followed by student centered group discussions of those primary sources

Evaluation method

Continuous Assessment - Oral presentation of short research essay(40%), Writing of short essays in exam form(60%)

Subject matter

I The United States at the end of WWII

II- Great Expectations: The United States in the 1950s

2.1. Optimism and anxiety in the era of abundance

- Internal and external dimensions of the Cold War

-The affluent society and the baby boom

-The new sociology and the fear of conformity

- mass culture and its critics

- Images of the feminine in the 50s

2.2. Fractures and dissent in the silent decade

-The African-American awakening: from Montgomery to Little Rock

-Dissenting from affluence - beats, hipsters and suburban rebels

-The 50s theater and film

III Hope and Discord in the 1960s

3.1. A time of Consensus

- Kennedy and the New Frontier

-The Cold War revisited

-The reconfiguration of the racial problem

-The “Other America” and the Great Society project

3.2. A time of Conflict

-Vietnam

- Counter culture and new sensibility

- Pop Art, cinema

- Feminism reborn

- Stonewall, civil rights and the politics of identity

- Contemporary echoes

Programs

Programs where the course is taught: