Professor Beverly Gage concludes her portion of Yale's America at 250: A History course with this lecture surveying the period from the 1980s through 2007, tracing how the nation moved from an era of relative political consensus toward more divisive trends. The class situates the late twentieth and early twenty first century United States within the longer historical narrative developed across the semester. Recorded in Yale's Battell Chapel as part of the DeVane Lecture series, the lecture is part of a one time course tracing United States history from 1776 to the present across lectures by three Yale historians, closing out Gage's sequence before the course's final class.