This course focuses on America during a period of intense economic and political strain, as a global depression challenged fundamental aspects of an American commitment to individualism. With unemployment soaring, productivity plummeting, and businesses as well as banks failing in unprecedented numbers, large numbers of Americans questioned the efficacy of both capitalism and democracy. Dissatisfied with Republican President Herbert Hoover’s handling of the crisis, voters turned in 1932 to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), a New York-born aristocrat and politician who had spent much of the 1920s recovering from a bout with polio that left him unable to walk. Together with his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, Congress and the American people, FDR helped fashion a New Deal that reordered the relationship of democracy to capitalism, rewriting a social contract that placed community and the public welfare above excessive individualism and private power. In this course, we will look at New Deal America as a political, social and cultural construct, noting how grassroots movements, national politics, and cultural currents interacted with one another to create new values, institutions and identities in ways that shaped America through the remaining decades of the 20th century.