Introducing FractalPast Courses

If you scoot on over to the “Course Catalog” page of this website you can see all the modules I will be offering on rotation in the coming weeks and months. If you click on the “Course Description” button you’ll see a brief synopsis of what the course covers and what you can expect to encounter over the six weeks.
 
You might wonder how I come up with the offerings. Some of the modules may look familiar to you, offering conventional periodization and subject matter. Others may appear unfamiliar or peculiar. I conceive of the modules based on three subjective factors that I believe coalesce into something substantial:

​The first is my own expertise, since I can only discuss what I know about. Second, I conceive courses based on what I believe people may be interested in or curious about. And third, I assemble modules based, it seems to me, on essential subjects that people ought to know more about, but likely don’t.
 
There are many subjects I would like to offer but lack the expertise (Japanese history!) and other areas for which I have expertise but don’t feel a particular urgency in this moment to offer. Here is a brief survey of some of the courses I will be offering in the immediate future:
 
The first course is on the New Deal. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signature program lasted only a few years, from about 1933 through 1939, or 1945, depending on how you figure it. Yet it left an indelible mark on modern America. So much that we take for granted about what government could and should do, so many of the economic and social protections we take for granted (such as social security or the FDIC), and so much of the built environment we enjoy were all built during this brief time. Small towns around the country would not have airport access without the New Deal! The University of South Carolina Gamecocks would not have a stadium in which to play without the New Deal! And yet many Americans seem to be eager to dismantle the New Deal without, one suspects, fully understanding it. This six-week module will explore the conditions under which the New Deal emerged, the problems it endeavored to address, the extent of signature New Deal programs, and the lasting legacies of those programs.
 
Americans believe, perhaps rightly, that they won the Cold War, and perhaps they did. But victory in the Cold War obscures the many ways in which American society, culture, and politics was changed by the Cold War. Our forebears would be shocked to learn what we now take for granted, as a result of the Cold War. The fears and anxieties under which Americans lived because of the threat from the Soviet Union are well-enough known. But deep changes in how Americans lived—some to the good, many not—are less well known. This course examines the emergence of superpower rivalry at the end of World War II, the growth of two opposing geopolitical power blocs, the political response of Americans to the fraught global situation, and the often-neglected cultural expressions of Cold War tensions. We will look at how superpower rivalries expressed themselves in other parts of the globe, with often bloody consequences. And we will consider what the end of the Cold War has meant for the global balance of power in the decades since.
 
While the focus of most of my own scholarship has been on the twentieth century, I grow increasingly convinced that the most vital period of US history, the period which has been the most generative for subsequent generations, and yet the period which is least well known and most misunderstood, is the period directly after the Civil War, what historians refer to as Reconstruction (1865–1877). It was in this brief period that momentous questions hung in the balance: what was the relationship of the former Confederate states to the Union, and what would this mean for the balance of federal/state power going forward? What was the relationship between the citizen and the federal government now, and what mutual obligations did each have to the other? Thousands of foreigners had fought for the Union, and millions had fought for the Confederacy: what was their status? Were they citizens, or something else? And most crucially, hanging over all else, was the supreme question of the moment: What was to become of the former enslaved, now called “Freedmen”? What was their status, and more pressing, What was their future? How, and on what terms, would 4 million Freedmen be incorporated into US political and social life? These were the great questions of Reconstruction. And while many of those questions were settled, many more were opposed. I suspect many Americans are unaware that provisions and protections rolled out by the federal government between 1865 and 1877 were rolled back and in many cases undone by recalcitrant opponents in bloody resistance. This course will survey the Reconstruction period, the hopes unleashed by new federal protections, and the promises dashed by stubborn opposition. This module will shine new light on political debates in America today that have their roots in the Reconstruction period.    
 
Most Americans think of their country as a democratic republic, and indeed it is. But the history of the US is also a history of unbridled, often frenetic, expansion. Thus many scholars, including myself, consider that the United States is also an empire, the American Empire. This module examines US history from that standpoint, considering American expansion, the imposition of racial and social hierarchies, the extraction of economic value from foreign places, and the imposition of an American-led global order as proofs of an American imperial system. One of the insights of this approach is that foreign policy and domestic culture are not separate (or, indeed, separable), and hence we will also consider select examples of American culture, from Hollywood movies to American literature, as also carrying the same imperial impulses as our expansionist foreign policy. This course will provide a new way to look at US history and a new way to think about many of the popular cultures in which we are daily enmeshed.
 
I will also be offering two courses on US Diplomatic History. If you’ve ever wanted to know, for example, what the significance of the War of 1812 is on the subsequent American rise to global power, then US Diplomatic History I is for you! I have put together a course that offers a close reading of Adam Smith’s seminal masterpiece, The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s great work is often held to be the great justifier of American-style market capitalism. But Smith is the most misread and misunderstood of the great Western philosophers. I am currently putting together a similar course on the great French observer of American life, Tocqueville. I’ll also offer a course on Muhammad Ali, whose life and career epitomized American society in the latter half the century, and also did so much to change it.
 
I also intend to offer courses on topics of great contemporary interest, notably the History of European Welfare States, the History of Socialism ( a much abused and misunderstood concept), and a deep dive into the Founding of the United States, which will cover the American Revolution through the forging of the Constitution. Readers may also be interested in upcoming modules covering World War II, the History of Hollywood, the Civil Rights Movement in Perspective, and the tragedy of The Vietnam War.
 
What’s a module that you don’t see on offer in which you would be interested? Let me know in the comments!
 
Check out the Course Catalog for a current complete list. Course descriptions updated regularly.
 
—David J. Snyder