One of the best history lecturers I've taken. All the information is so succinct & there's no fluff. She also does a great job of creating a clear narrative, which makes it all easy to follow.

I'm not sure how she did her other 140C classes, but in this Winter 2014 quarter version she barely touched at all on anything after 1970. The VAST majority of the material was focused on the 1960's & social movements in them. I didn't necessarily have a problem with that because she did a great job of presenting it, but I would've preferred for the class to be titled US in the 1960's or US Social Movements instead, since she almost seemed obligated to give the last 2 lectures as extremely bare bones surveys of the 70's & 80's (basically what you'd find in a lower div course).

The Midterm & Final were alright. I'm much more into writing in class exams as opposed to doing take home exams because TA's tend to focus on grading the writing as opposed to the analysis more when it's a take home. The midterm consisted of 3 separate essays totaling 8-11 pages, and the final consisted of 2 separate essays totaling 6-8 pages. You only have to use the primary sources from class and lecture notes (no need to buy the textbook).

Section was great because the sources we had to read were on the short side, and were very easy to discuss.

Brilliant professor. Of course, it helps if you're a liberal, as many of the other reviews will note. Yes, she's biased. But bias is history, it's in every text we read.

What's great about Corey is what you see is what you get. She's teaching about the history she lived and partook in, and it's incredible. She's so honest, so brutal, so clever. Her personal stories really make class come alive. I don't find her to be disorganized, and do find her to be tremendously engaging.

I mean, the woman through rotten tomatoes at LBJ's head herself. What more do you want from a professor in terms of living the history they teach. Fair grader, great lecturer, takes an active interest in her students.

Couldn't love her more if I tried, I wish she would adopt me.

On the first day of lecture, Professor Corey said, "Partiality has no place in historical analysis." And then commenced the most entertaining, hilarious, and wildly subjective course I have ever taken. Corey is rude and unprofessional (answers emails in incomplete sentences and disrespectful phrases like “Use common sense”), disorganized (don’t even bother printing out the syllabus; she doesn’t stick to it... except for the time she yelled at us for not reading her syllabus instructions about Turnitin.com, and then scolded us for complaining that she changed the final due date, printed on the syllabus, during tenth week), and a raging liberal (for the record, I am not conservative). Flowing gray hair, tattoos, bangles, and baggy clothes indicate that she is still stuck in the 60s, and given that she spent 7 weeks lecturing on that decade, only discussing Reagan for a measly day, her course is also stuck in the 60s. And yet, the woman has style. Even if she didn’t present history well, she performed like an actress on a stage, and I was never bored. Here is a sampling of Corey’s unique and often laugh-out-loud funny version of post-1945 U.S history:

ON POP CULTURE:
"The Help is like 'Animal House' meets 'Roots.' It's really stupid." [Corey managed to incorporate criticisms of "The Help" into every lecture.]

"Elvis was as over-the-top sexually as Clay Aiken ... Maybe, he was a little sexy before he became the bloated blimp in the white pant suit." [comparing Elvis Presley's sex appeal to Clay Aiken is just insulting to his memory]

“When I was younger, health food stores were owned by crazy old guys with long Jesus beards, who thought ‘the end is near, but i’ll never die because I’m eating enzymes from a pig and doodoo from a goat’ ... now, there’s Whole Foods.”

ON CIVIL RIGHTS/RACISM/MINORITY MOVEMENTS:

"Homie don't play that." [usually said this when discussing the discontent of minorities]

"American racism is in the bone marrow— hard to leech out."

“The Nation of Islam is a bastardization of the Muslim faith.” [on Malcolm X’s religion]

“Some historians argue that ‘bra-burning’ feminism is a myth, but I’m sure there were a few bras in there.” [on radical feminist protest at the Miss American Pageant in 1968]

“[Maribel Morgan’s ‘The Total Woman’] suggested that women should greet their husbands at the door in an apron and in fishnet pantyhose with a martini in their hands. I don’t know where the kids are at this point, chained to the parking meter maybe.”

“If you don’t get along with your mother, it’s not because you’re two bitchy women. You just don’t get along with each other.” [on gender stereotypes]

“When I was growing up, I had heard of menopause, but I didn’t know a lot... I know a lot about it now.”

“White people are bad.”

ON COMMUNISM/COLD WAR FOREIGN POLICY/VIETNAM:
"Drunk, I assume. Him, not me." [after joyfully stating that Senator Joseph McCarthy died on her birthday]

“The average schmo of this country looks at foreign policy like it’s too befuddling” [sincerely, elitist intellectual]

“There was a whack plan if there ever was one.” [on Nixon’s Vietnamization]

“So the smarter you were, the dumber you were.” [after referencing a study that showed Americans with lower education wanted immediate withdrawal from Vietnam by 1971]

ON THE PRESIDENTS (AND OTHER POLITICAL FIGURES):
"One of my TAs thinks the book is too kind to [John] Kennedy. And I told him, 'Don't worry. I'll take care of it." [so far left that she dislikes the sweetheart of the Democrats, JFK]; on JFK: "He was a major player...and I don’t mean the kind on the Senate floor. He was a player player."

George W. Bush Anecdote: Corey’s friend (half Cherokee scholarship student) roomed with George Bush, a “rich bully,” at Yale, and "G.W. used to pass out in the hall and his floor mates would use him as a doorstop." ... “I mean that sucks— the person you hated the most is the president of your country.”

"I liked Clinton. He did some bad things, but he did some bad things that probably you all have done. Not during the presidency, though.”

“He’s very hairy. His problem is that he shaves, and five minutes later, he has a five o’clock shadow.” [on the 1960 presidential debate between Nixon and John F. Kennedy]

“Nixon is like the honey badger ... a nasty creature, but tough.” [if this reference goes over your head, you need to watch more youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg]

“Mamie Eisenhower looked like an ottoman.”

“How does [Newt Gingrich] get anyone to have sex with him? I’m blind to Newt’s charms. ... This is an interesting country we live in.”

Lyndon Johnson anecdotes: “He clung rebelliously to [the] most galootish behavior ... He invited female journalists from the Washington establishment to his ranch in Texas” and took them to his “bull mating with a calf.” He showed a scar from a gall bladder surgery to the media during a White House conference. During White House dinner parties, he wiped his greasy hands on the back of people’s jackets. He burped during cocktail parties and talked to journalists on the toilet. “He flaunted his crudeness.”

“Nixon’s version of the War on Poverty consisted of killing and incarcerating people ... [His] War on Drugs was taken to the ghetto junkies but not to the Wall Street elites, snorting coke off glass coffee tables.”

“Nixon refused to release the tapes. That’s when the fecal matter hit the fan.” [on the Watergate scandal]

“[Gerald] Ford was a pleasant, good-natured doofus ... not necessarily an idiot, but he suffered concussions from football.”

“[Jimmy] Carter wasn’t an efficient president, but he wasn’t swine or a pig. He had a moral code.”

“This country is largely ungovernable.”

“Where’s the rest of me?” [joke about Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s]

“In the movies, [Ronald Reagan] played tepid nice guys who didn’t get the girl in the end.”

“Reagan believed the rich would invest, production would increase, employment would increase, and prosperity would result, but most rich people went on holiday or bought French perfume, and they didn’t make valuable investments for societal improvement ... George Bush called this voodoo— put on a mask, dance around on one foot, and it’ll all be fine.” [on Reaganomics, trickle-down theory]

MISC.
"What time is it? [looks at watch] 1:10 ... When does this class end? 1:45? Oh god." [first day of class]

"I don't know if you're checking your favorite website to say if Adam Levine looks good naked ... I've done that, and it was pretty good actually." [addressing students who were not paying attention; also recounted a time when two students had sex in her classroom]

“When I was living in a commune in the mountains of Colorado, I was an auto-mechanic.

And that’s Mary Corey in a nutshell. Your grade depends on your TA. If you want facts, read “Present Tense.” Take Corey if you have a sense of humor and are not a radical Republican.

She's not the demonic apparition that some of these comments are portraying her as, but she's definitely not one of the better lecturers I've ever had. Her style of presentation in class is very disorganized, she goes off on far too many irrelevant tangents (gee, let's preach to the choir and remind the class that being LGBT is not a choice!), and she generally doesn't convey material very effectively. Praise for take-home exams.

Corey is by far the most subjective history professor I've ever heard at UCLA. Lecture is nothing more than a pummeling of American society and its presidents. Many of her comments are personal opinion and rude. If you are right wing, don't take the class unless you can handle writing from a left wing perspective, because that's the only perspective she'll grade highly. The class was entertaining because of her snide comments and tangents. I learned very little from her and the readings. I had a really great T.A., Sierakowski, who gave an ACCURATE view of history from 1945.

I don't know what people are complaining about. She was a wonderful lecturer. Not only is she brilliant, she also happens to be very engaging and entertaining. Lectures are never boring and you're bound to learn something invaluable each time. The subject matter (US History post WWII) was interesting. The textbook was informative without being dry, and the two novels are must-reads. Getting an A/A- is pretty straightforward. Entire grade was based on a take home final (given 10 prompts/questions, choose 2 to write 4 pages for each).

Corey, Corey, Corey... the wicked witch of north campus. The only thing more leathery than her skin is her personality. I can't believe this old corpse is still flying around on her broom. To her credit, she is a little charming in a crypt-keeper sort of way, but her lectures do fall on deaf ears, no pun intended (though she is hard of hearing). It's true kids, Corey is as likable as a yeast infection, but I'd like to see you act jolly after 90 years of dropping acid. She can best be described as a cactus: prickly and rough on the outside, but full of mushy green slime on the inside. Regardless, there are some interesting facts about Corey that most people don't know. For example, the veins in her neck and wattle actually draw out a secret treasure map, but she can be difficult to work with. This grumpy old coot practices favoritism like a its a religion.She is available at office hours, but thats if you don't mind staring at the asbestos in her hallway for 30 minutes while she discusses the clearance rack at Neiman Marcus with the kiss-ass Orange County athletes loitering in her office. I guess she has a thing for smelly blue sweatpants, because if you don't dribble a basketball or row a canoe, your screwed. Her disgruntled TA's are also somewhat testy, but scrubbing the rust off of Corey's iron-lung every night is a difficult job. I'll tell you, its a good thing she inherited all that money from her daddy because the world could definitely use 1 less cat-lady. As for the grading, its a crap shoot so good luck. Make sure you always attend class with a ring of garlic around your neck and some rosary beads. If you decide to visit her in that crypt she calls an office, be sure take a wooden stake and a mallet in case things get ugly and she tries to suck the blood out of your skull.