American History and Politics

The course aims to provide students with tools for understanding American political language in relation to the differences between democratic language and non-democratic languages, analyzing the issue in an historical context.
Within this general framework, the course aims to provide students with the acquisition of knowledge and concepts related to:
- what kind of institutions were created in the United States - Congress, President, Supreme Court - how they think and how they speak;
- power and legitimacy of American political actors and of the two political parties - Democratic and Republican - considered in historical terms from their foundation up today;
- what is public history, between identity and ethnicity, between race and class;
- nature, tradition, society and community in American political language.
The objectives of the course are to provide students with an appropriate vocabulary for understanding and expressing themselves to define the different period of American history, as well as offering a key to interpreting topical political dynamics in contemporary American politics, developing on them critical thinking skills and independent judgment.

Corcerning knowledge and understanding the course aims to apply original ideas in a research context, and to solve new problems in the field, making judgements on new issues, as well as the ability to communicate these skills to a broad publlic. Finally with the exercise of the comprension of historical cases we will try to obtain learning skills to study in an autonomus way.