I. Crossroads Background Survey Course for Teachers of American History

Session I: The Old Order Passes
This session begins with perhaps the single most venerable issue in American historiography -- the passing of the American frontier; it explores the development of Western societies and the growth of the frontier myth in American thought. It also assesses the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century, culminating with the tragedy of Wounded Knee. In sum, it introduces students to the meaning of a term more often bandied about than understood: modernization.

Session II: Urbanization, Industrialization, Immigration
Building on the previous session, this session traces the three major influences that transformed American society and helped to give rise to the leading preoccupations of American life in the twentieth century. It focuses on the growing urbanization of America; the rise of the modern integrated national economy, with its basis on rapid industrialization, the accumulation of capital, and the rise of the countervailing power of American labor; and the waves of immigration from Europe and Asia that helped to transform American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Session I: Populism -- The Revolt of the Masses
This session focuses on the rising tide of discontent in the Western states and among American workers in the late nineteenth century. It also focuses on the struggle to interpret the Populist revolts -- whether Populism was a truly democratic revolt against entrenched industrial, economic, and political power, a backward-looking, bigoted last stand against the forces of modernization, or combined elements of both polar interpretations.

Session II: The Problem of Progressivism
This session posits the heterogeneous movement known as Progressivism as a principal factor shaping American history in the twentieth century. It seeks to assess the range of interpretations by which historians have sought to explain Progressive reform movements, and the effects of the various Progressive reform movements on American life.

Session III: The Failed Quest for World Order
This session assesses the American nation's gradual immersion in world affairs at the turn of the twentieth century -- including the Americans' attempts to respond to -- and to imitate -- the European world powers' efforts to build colonial empires. Its principal focus, however, is on the Americans' responses to the First World War and to the victors' efforts to forge a just and lasting peace.

Session I: The Contradictory Culture
The often-misunderstood era of the 1920s is the focus of this session, which examines such phenomena as the rise of mass culture, the "noble experiment" of Prohibition, and the growing cultural divide pitting the "boosterism" of the majority of Americans against those groups excluded from the mainstream of American life.

Session II: Economic Dreams Collapse
This session focuses on the Great Depression -- the germinal economic event of the twentieth century. Tracing the causes and effects of the Great Depression, it shows how the Depression not only exacted economic hardship throughout the American population, but shattered the prevailing assumptions about the permanence of American prosperity and the nature of the economic system.

Session I: The Evolving New Deals
What was the New Deal? And how many New Deals were there? Did Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration cure the Depression? This session deals with the complex phenomenon known as the New Deal, and with the New Deal's transformation of Americans' ideas about government's place in American life.

Session II: The Renewed Quest for World Order
The most agonizing war of human history -- the Second World War -- is the focus of this session. It assesses the war and the events leading up to it in all their complexity -- as a problem for the nation's diplomacy, as a major factor in the nation's final recovery from the Great Depression, as a pivotal event that shaped American history, society, and perceptions of the world for half a century. It sketches the contours of such perennial historiographical debates as the causes of American entry into the war and the decision to use the atomic bomb as a means to end the war.

Session I: The Beginnings of the Cold War
The half-century of the Cold War still reverberates throughout American life; this session examines its origins as both a historical process and a perennial (and highly contentious) historiographical problem.

Session II: The Short-Lived "American Century"
This session examines the complexity of life in what was called "the American Century," focusing on the rise of the civil rights movement, the heyday of consumer culture, the emergence of mass media as a major cultural and political force, and the complex evolution of values and standards of conduct in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Session III: The American Century Self-Destructs
This session examines the era usually known as the "Sixties," which began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and drew to a close with the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 and the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. It seeks to provide historical perspective on the nature of the civil rights, black power, and women's rights movements of the Sixties, the cultural transformations that swept American life in that time, and the ultimate shattering of American self-confidence by Vietnam and Watergate.

Session I: Recovering from Failure: The 1970s
In the 1970s, not only were Americans deeply uncertain about their nation's place in the world, or the continuing success of American economy and society at home -- they began to question some of the basic assumptions of modern American life.

Session II: A Conservative Tide?
As the credibility of the major American institutions collapsed in the 1970s, Americans searched desperately for ways to revitalize those institutions and restore the people's faith in the American experiment. The conservative tide of the 1980s promised to do just that, but Americans were bitterly divided as to whether it had met its goals and fulfilled its promises.