Twentieth Century United States History

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Twentieth Century United States History

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Twentieth Century United States History Historical writing about the United States in the twentieth century has mushroomed over the years, reflecting great interest among American readers and students in books concerned with the recent past.

University courses concerned with twentiethcentury American life are frequently very large and rely on a wealth of sources—not only books and articles but also published and unpublished archival materials, films, documentaries, recordings, statistical information, and oral accounts—that have enabled scholars to explore a wide range of issues and historical controversies.

Although it is difficult to generalize about so vast a domain of inquiry, a few tentative observations may be useful at the start.

The first is that most historians teaching and researching in this field are comfortable with a scheme of periodization that accepts the years around 1900 as pivotal in various ways: teaching courses on twentieth-century American history makes sense to them (though books and articles dealing with the period since 1975 or so are short in archival sources and lack historical perspective).

At the turn of the century, a swelling of immigration, much of it from eastern and southern Europe, dramatically changed the nature of the American population. At the same time, the severe depression of the mid-1890s came to an end, as did populism, a major protest movement. A wave of mergers accelerated the process of corporate concentration. The Republican Party, electorally powerful in the urban-industrial Northeast and Midwest, came to dominate national politics until the 1930s.

New patterns of electioneering arose, featuring the weakening over time of political parties, a decline in voter participation, and the proliferation of well-organized interest groups. A larger administrative state started to assert itself, and the United States began to emerge as a major power on the international scene. Many of the characteristics of modern, mass consumer society—automobiles, motion pictures, radio, advertising and public relations, amusement parks, commercialized sports—also became increasingly central to the culture early in the twentieth century and have sparked great research interest among scholars and students in recent years.

Most historians have accepted the view that the years around World War II were also pivotal in the United States.

Many two-semester courses in modern United States history accordingly use 1945 or thereabouts as a dividing point. At that time, trends that had become important in the 1930s— the rise of industrial labor unions and of agribusiness, the triumph of a new, Democratic electoral coalition, major expansion in the size of the federal government and of the international power of the nation—became firmly established.

Post-World War II developments, notably the expansion of a powerful civil rights movement and of feminism, and the resurgence once again of immigration and of ethnic consciousness, also became central to American politics and social life, especially after 1960. Reflecting concerns such as these, studies of race, ethnic, and gender relations have
become thriving areas of scholarly specialization for historians concerned with the twentieth century. Indeed, a focus on “race-class-gender” matters has become a central organizing principle for school and university history courses in the United States. ...

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(Currents in American Scholarship Series, Vol. 4)
By James T. Patterson, Robert Fleegler and Andrew Huebner/Brown University
October 2004

Introduction:

The Currents in American Scholarship series offers Americanists abroad updates on the status of theory and practice in disciplines relevant to the study of the society, culture and institutions of the United States of America. Prominent scholars from across the U.S. graciously accepted the invitation of the Study of the U.S. Branch to author annotated bibliographies.

We hope the series proves to be valuable in introducing or refreshing courses on the United States, or expanding library collections.

About the Author:

James T. Patterson is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Emeritus at Brown University where he has taught since 1972. A graduate of Harvard University, Professor Patterson has also taught at Indiana University and received overseas fellowships from the University of Oxford, Cambridge University and the University of Amsterdam.

Dr. Patterson’s most recent book is Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Oxford, 2001) which, along with his 1996 Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford) was chosen as a History Book Club selection. Grand Expectations also won the Bancroft Prize in History in 1997. His America in the Twentieth Century: A History (Harcourt Brace, 5th rev. ed. 2000) is a widely used textbook, currently in its fifth edition. Another classic work written by Patterson is America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century (Harvard, 2000).

Professor Patterson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and the Society of American Historians in 1974. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities have all awarded fellowships to Dr. Patterson.

Brown University doctoral students in history Andrew Huebner and Robert Fleegler assisted Dr. Patterson in preparing this essay and bibliography. Mr. Huebner’s dissertation examines the changing images of soldiers and veterans in American culture between 1941 and 1980 and Mr. Fleegler is writing his thesis on the changing nature of cultural pluralism between 1924 and 1965.

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