I STRONGLY DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS CLASS!!!

Back at NSO, many many new student advisors plugged clusters and hyped them up so much-- especially The America in the 60s Cluster. I implore you to ignore their propaganda and to avoid this class at all costs. The class grading can be quite subjective and harsh at times and is heavily dependent on the whims of your TA. Class lectures often feel random in their content and more often than not many students walk out absolutely dumbfounded. It isn't even that the content of the lectures is hard to understand, but it feels like we are learning about completely disparate events that are VAGUELY in the 1950s-1970s. One day you'll go from learning about Bob Dylan and Folk Music and then completely flip the script to the Chicano Movement. Which makes trying to study for the midterms/final incredibly difficult because you have to weave together all of these random events or figures, PLUS there are no materials online you can use to study as the curriculum has no real basis / textbook it follows.

AND THE WORKLOAD IS EGREGIOUS --- you are assigned at least an hours worth of reading or videos to complete before each lecture, and more often than not this reading isn't even discussed in your discussions and a complete waste of time. The lectures are insufferably boring and are not recorded either. Lectures are not mandatory, however discussion sections are- you get 1 free skip per quarter but following that every absence is a 10% penalty to your grade.

Please heed my warning when I say there isn't a single person I know that enjoys this cluster. DO NOT TAKE IT. THIS IS NOT AN EASY A.

Literally so lit, all we did was analyze politics, culture, music, film, art, intersectionality, of American history in the 50s-70s. SOOOOO easy if you took APUSH bc you can easily pull stuff from apush for essays! but honestly not too much boring history yk. super engaging! all the professors are lit

The variety of professors means that you inherently will like professors more or less than others, but I think that this class does a good job of keeping equal material, test questions, and essays based on each professors line of work. The amount of expected reading for each week is a bit insane and I would recommend doing it at the start of the year, and then seeing you feel like the lectures just give you the same info (in my opinion the readings are simply just the first 15 minutes of the lectures, so it's not really necessary to read unless you don't pay attention during lectures well). The midterms and essays are fair. The biggest part of a class like this where the TAs grade everything is that some TAs will give every student a 97+ on every assignment as long as you're competent, while other TAs have a sub 90% average on every assignment (I was fighting for my life for this A ngl). The other thing is that the TAs are super important for every assignment because they get to choose how they want each essay or assignment to be done by the students. Overall, the class is good and interested, but the deeper understanding and grade aspect is totally TA dependent.

Professor Decker was in the kindest words, the most boring. While I do believe Decker has great value in his lectures and is very knowledgeable in his topics, he is very bad keeping the students engaged. His lectures can get boring fast is not the most engaging either. His lectures are important and useful when the literature paper comes up later in the quarter. He's a well meaning professor.
Onto the class in general, I recommend this cluster for those who are interested in history, politics, and culture but also can deal with some more dense long readings. While the readings are helpful to understand lectures better, the reading isn't too important until the midterm when they expect you to cite some readings in the timed essay. When it came to the workload I would say it was pretty light, the first two weeks you are assigned reading forms to encourage doing the weekly readings and can be finished in 15 minutes. After this you have only two assignment, a political science paper explaining the choices you made in making a 15 second campaign ad from any president between 1955-1975. The final assignment is a literature paper on a one of two books due in December. The class is not recorded but lecture slides are posted on BruinLearn.
The only serious downside to this cluster would be grading, grading is completely up to your TA. Some TA's may grader stricter than others. In general your TA will make this class pleasant or difficult depending on their grading. I will highly recommend this cluster but do recommend you take into consideration the long readings and TA grading.