The main content of the course is an introduction to a number of basic issues in the history of the United States and Latin American countries from circa 1930 to the present. Among the issues covered in relation to the USA are “The New Deal” and the establishment of the American welfare state, World War II, the establishment of the USA as a global superpower, the Cold War and its domestic consequences, the struggle for black Americans’ civil rights, the development of immigration patterns, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the American crisis of trust, the Reagan revolution, the end of the Cold War, and the changes in domestic and foreign policy after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Among the subjects and themes in Latin American history dealt with in the teaching are economic inequality and its political consequences, popular movements such as Peronism in Argentina, neoliberalism and the role of the military in a number of Latin American countries, democratic movements, the struggle against narcotics production, the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs affair and the Cuban crisis, the relationship between the USA and Latin America during the Cold War, civil wars and conflicts in Central America, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the military regimes in South America during the same period, the process of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s, the debt crises and other economic problems in the same period, as well as the relationship to the USA after 2001.

Course literature will be listed in the semester plan