LFU:online

The course has three main goals. It will provide you with a comprehensive, in-depth overview of key developments and concepts in the history of U.S. foreign relations. Secondly, it will introduce you to how historians have made sense of and interpreted these events through different frames of reference and from various vantage points. Finally, the course and its assignments will help you to develop the skills of critical reading, thinking, and writing and a sensitivity to the use of evidence, all essential parts of a college education and useful in most professions.

In this course we examine the United States’ interactions with other nations and cultures beyond the confines of conventional diplomatic history. We will analyze both America’s far-reaching political, military, economic and cultural impact around the globe as well as the consequences of its foreign encounters for its own society. Notwithstanding its self-perception as an exceptional nation with a universalist credo, American domestic developments have been profoundly shaped by the outside world. America’s trajectory - from a group of seditious colonies to a great power by the beginning of the twentieth century, to the superpower of the Cold War and the hyperpower (in decline?) of our days - raises a number of interesting questions for historians.  In American self-representations this rise to ascendancy sometimes has overtones of inevitability and providence, yet it was also hotly contested at every stage within the nation. Which were the factors that contributed to this development? What were the costs? What did it mean to Americans and to other peoples? The course follows a basic chronology from the 18^th century onward with an emphasis on the twentieth century and includes several thematic sessions.

Readings, discussions, analyses, and presentations.

Active participation, presentation, term-paper of ca. 3,500 words

Basic readings, from books and articles, the latter posted on OLAT.

for the Bachelor Program (612): positive completion of compulsory module 14
for Bachelor Program Lehramt (457): positive completion of compulsory module 16
for the Teacher Training Program (Lehramtsstudium: 344): VO2: Introduction to American Literary Studies

For the Teacher Training Program (Lehramtsstudium: 344): PS2: American Culture.

Due to substantial differences in the allocation of ECTS-Credits in various curricula (teacher training program - BA/MA English and American Studies), the requirements for this course vary. Information will be provided by the instructor at the beginning of the course.