From: The Modem World Global History since 1760 Course Team <I To: Subject: Starting Week 12 Date: Sun, 07 Apr 2013 04:18:06 +0000 jeffrey epstein, The latest information from The Modem World: Global History since 1760 on Coursera. Dear jeffrey epstein, Even as we enter Week 12, there are still new students joining the class. Welcome aboard. This weekend I am participating in a conference of Coursera partner universities, and it is interesting to hear about what everyone is learning and thinking about this educational adventure we are in. But most gratifying for me personally is to keep running into new virtual acquaintances, people who are taking this course and finding that it is enriching their lives, if only a little. I feel that a lot of higher education institutions like mine are slowly realizing that they are reaching — perhaps for the first time — a vast community of able, hard-working, passionate learners who do not fit their standard model for a "college student." These institutions, blinking and scratching their collective heads, are only beginning to rethink who they serve, and how. The course this week concentrates on a period — 1950 to 1968 — dominated by what we generally call the "Cold War." It is a period in which the global influence of the United States — economic and cultural, not just political — probably was at its peak. So the week opens with some reflections on the changes inside America that enabled the country to play this kind of role. I call attention, for instance, to some important economic shifts like the incorporation of the American South fully into the national economy, a shift that began during the 1930s but was greatly accelerated by the war and postwar period, as was also true for the transformation of California and the American West. The struggle of African-Americans for civil rights was also very much related to America's sense of what it stood for in the world. The United States would eventually bec