Part 1: ‘A City on a Hill’ – Colonial America 1580-1750

• [rtoc]Europe and the transatlantic adventure
• Raleigh, the proto-American, and the Roanoke disaster
• Jamestown: the first permanent foothold
• Mayflower and the Formative Event
• ‘The Natural Inheritance of the Elect Nation’
• John Winthrop and his ‘little speech’ on liberty
• Roger Williams: the first dissentient
• The Catholics in Maryland
• The primitive structure of colonial America
• Carolina: the first slave state
• Cotton Mather and the end of the Puritan utopia
• Oglethorpe and early Georgia
• Why colonial control did not work
• The rise of Philadelphia
• Elected assemblies versus the governors
• The Great Awakening and its political impact[/rtoc]

Part 2: ‘That the Free Constitution be Sacredly Maintained’ – Revolutionary America 1750-1815

• [rtoc]George Washington and the war against France
• Poor quality of British leadership
• The role of Benjamin Franklin
• Thomas Jefferspon and the Declaration of Independence
• The galvanising effect of Tom Paine
• Washington, the war and the intervention of Europe
• Patriots and loyalists: America’s first civil war
• The Constitutional Convention
• The ratification debate
• Citizenship, suffrage and ‘the tyranny of the majority’
• The role of religion in the Constitution
• The presidency, Hamilton and public finance
• Succes of Washington and his Farewell Address
• John Adams and the European War
• Central importance of John Marshall
• Jefferson’s ambivalent rule and character
• The Louisiana Purchase
• Madison’s blunders and their punishment
• Andrew Jackson, the deux ex machina
• Jackson and the destruction of the Indians[/rtoc]

Part 3: ‘A General Happy Mediocrity Prevails’ – Democratic America, 1815-1850

• [rtoc]High birth-rates and the immigrant flood
• The market in cheap land
• Spread of the religious sects
• Emergence of the South and King Cotton
• The Missouri Compromise
• Henry Clay
• The advent of Jacksonian democracy
• The war against the Bank
• American’s agricultural revolution
• Revolution in transportation and communications
• Polk and the Mexican War
• De Tocqueville and the emerging supernation
• The ideology of the North-South battle
• Emerson and the birth of an American culture
• Longfellow, Poe and Hawthornian psychology[/rtoc]

Part 4: ‘The Almost Chosen People’ – Civil War America, 1850-1870

• [rtoc]The Constitution as substitute for national identity
• The era of Pierce and Buchanan
• Ultimate and proximate causes of the Civil War
• The rise of Lincoln
• Centrality of preserving the Union
• The election of 1860
• Jefferson Davis and why the South fought
• Why the South was virtually bound to lose
• Lincoln and the strategy of Emancipation
• The churches and the war
• The war among the generals
• Gettysburg: “Too bad! Too bad! Oh! TOO BAD!”
• The triumph and tragedy of Liuncoln
• Andrew Johnson and the two Reconstructions[/rtoc]

Part 5: Huddled Masses and Crosses of Gold – Industrial America, 1870-1912

• [rtoc]Modern America and its ageing process
• Mass-immigration and ‘thinking big’
• Indians and settlers, cowboys and desperados
• The ‘significance of the frontier’
• Centrality of railroads
• Did the Robber Barons really exist?
• Carnegie, steel and American philanthropy
• Pierpont Morgan and Wall Street
• Trusts and anti-trusts
• Monster cities: Chicago and New York
• The urban rich and poor
• American science and culture: Edison and Tiffany
• Church, Bierstadt, and the limitless landscape
• Bringing luxury to the masses
• The rise of labor and muckraking
• Standard Oil and Henry Ford
• Populism, imperialism, and the Spanish-American War
• Theodore Roosevelt and his Golden Age[/rtoc]

Part 6: ‘The First International Nation’ – Melting Pot America, 1912-1929

• [rtoc]The significance of Woodrow Wilson
• Education and the class system
• The advent of statism
• Wilson’s legislative triumph
• McAdoo and the coming of war
• The disaster of Versailles and the League of Nations
• Harding, ‘normalcy’ and witch-hunting
• Women stroll onto the scene
• Quotas and internal migration
• The Harlem phenomenon and multiracial culture
• Fundamentalism and Middle America
• Prohibition and its disastrous consequences
• San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Californian extremism
• Cheap electricity and its dramatic impact
• Hollywood
• The social and moral significance of jazz
• Race prejudice, popular entertainment and downward mobility
• Harding and historical deconstruction
• The age of Coolidge and government minimialism
• Twenties cultural and economic prosperity[/rtoc]

Part 7: ‘Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself’ – Superpower America, 1929-1960

• [rtoc]Government credit-management and the Wall Street crash
• Why the Depression was so deep and long-lasting
• The failure of the Great Engineer
• Roosevelt and the election of 1932
• The mythology of the New Deal
• FDR, big business, and the intellectuals
• Transforming the Democrats into the majority party
• US isolationism and internationalism
• Roosevelt, the Nazis, and Japan
• America in the war; the miracle in production
• FDR, Stalin, and Soviet advances
• The rise of Truman and the Cold War
• Nuclear weapons and the defeat of Japan
• The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Aid, and Nato
• America and the birth of Israel
• The Korean War and the fall of MacArthur
• Eisenhower, McCarthyism, and pop sociology
• Piety on the Potomac[/rtoc]

Part 8: ‘We Will Pay Any Price, Bear Any Burden’ – Problem-Solving, Problem-Creating America, 1960-1997

• [rtoc]The radical shift in the meida
• Joe Kennedy and his crown prince
• The 1960 election and the myth of Camelot
• The Space race
• The Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis
• Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society
• Getting into the Vietnam quagmire
• Nixon and his silent majority
• Civil rights and campus violence
• Watergate and the putsch against the Executive
• Congressional rule and American’s nadir
• Carter, the 1980 watershed, and Reaganism
• Rearmament and the collapse of Soviet power
• The Bush interlude and Clintonian corruption
• Fin-de-siècle America and its whims
• Wyeth and the significance of the realist revival
• Judicial aggression and the litigation society
• The sinister legacy of Myrdal
• Language, abortion and crime
• Family collapse and religious persecution
• The triumph of women[/rtoc]