main themes from WWI to the present

in no particular order:

• SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
• resistance to capitalism
• repressive Cold War culture and its impact on gender, race, class, activism and life in general
• representation (documentaries, photographs) of oppressed people as sites of social construction and subversion
• Old Left vs New Left
• fighting globalization
• activism, especially activism that involves people laboring under multiple forms of oppression
• relationships between race and class; deconstructing social categories
• sexuality becomes an issue when everything else is in flux
• figuring out how empire intersects with internal divisions of race and class (this is a major AMS project in the 1990s and 2000s)
• the 1930s
• the 1960s, both from the perspective of the people who were there and the people who weren't.
• structures of power determine the forms of resistance; infrapolitics, turbulence, mass protests
• SMOs and whether they're good or bad
• nuclear technology, WWII, the Cold War, propaganda, the Culture Industry, and American exceptionalism
• people need physical spaces in which to exercise our democratic rights
• are we fighting for democracy or for something beyond capitalism?  or maybe these are the same thing?
• consolidation of industry, agrarian manhood?

main themes from the Civil War to WWI

in no particular order:

• "the way[s] in which an industrializing society's search for order shaped its approach to diverse peoples" (Ahern, reviewing Hoxie's A Final Promise)
• anti-vice campaigns 
• reform movements are often more about policing the borders of the elite than they are about helping anyone
• the long, slow march to modernity, and the general cultural upheaval it caused
• bureacratization, professionalization, institutionalization as logistical responses to new mass cultures
• fixing discrete identity categories and policing norms as anxious responses to what probably felt like chaos and flux in new urban industrial centers
• women starting to break out of separate spheres in the new commercial culture; the New Woman, women missionaries, female circus performers as a foil to Victorian womanhood
• rationalization of work, commodification of leisure
• locating agency and recovering voices of oppressed groups: freed blacks, new urban working classes, prostitutes, women, Native Americans
• whiteness and masculinity as responses to industrialization (which emasculates men)
• culture of reform movements
• if the antebellum era was mostly about the creation of industrial capitalism in terms of production, perhaps this era is about the penetration of capitalism into consumption, with the development of the new mass market?

a few themes regarding the antebellum era...

...in no particular order:

• tensions over the transition from a mercantile/ precapitalist/ agrarian economy to an industrial economy
• class (and by extension capitalism) is a key component in American democracy
• using the new social history to reconstruct the communities and recover the agency of enslaved people
• the development of whiteness
• racism as a projection of white nostalgia for a pre-industrial past + frustration with the new capitalist economy onto black people
• growing the nation and expanding westward via transportation, expansion of slavery, or cultural imaginary
• tensions between America as Edenic garden/ America as industrial giant; landscape, art, technology
• reform movements and religious plurality
• impacts of deskilling and proletarianization on the nation and on individuals

a few themes regarding colonial and revolutionary America

in no particular order:

• the search for origins is often linked to the search for what makes America America.  This holds whether you believe in American exceptionalism or whether you're intentionally setting out to break it down.
• religion and the development of American culture
• ideology, the American revolution, and the development of a unitary (or not) American culture
• conflict with Native Americans and slavery are both central to the formation of American culture, though these vary with time and place
• where, geographically, American culture can be said to have started, and what it means to locate the origin point there: New England, Virginia, the Great Lakes
• animals and property as a key difference and source of conflict between Native Americans and English settlers