Extremism in America, from the Ku Klux Klan to January 6

(62E is 3 units; 262E is 5 units.)This course is a historical analysis of extremism in the United States from Reconstruction through the present day, looking at such figures and movements and the KKK, the First Red Scare, Father Coughlin and the Christian Front, McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, the Aryan Nations, and the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers of the present. Students will explore the following questions: what do we mean by extremism? What are the material, cultural, political, and intellectual conditions that lay the groundwork for extremism? What is the relationship between political and religious extremism? Is there a connecting thread spanning extremist movements across the nation's history--a paranoid style or authoritarian personality, perhaps? With these guiding questions, students will be introduced to primary sources along with scholarly literature--classic texts and new, groundbreaking research--to equip them with a foundational knowledge of the long history of extremism in the United States.