A Semester’s Journey through 20th-Century American Culture

In her Modern American Cultural History course, Gayle Wald draws on her talents as an interdisciplinary scholar to present George Washington University students with an extraordinary amount of material, beginning with Black women blues singers of the early 20th century and ending with the current culture wars over history and identity. Along the way, there are lessons on topics such as early movies and sound recordings, the modern Civil Rights Movement, AIDS activism in the 1980s and the digital revolution, to name just a few. There are lectures centered on the War on Terror, the Vietnam War and other defining episodes of modern U.S. history.