Global Arc

An overview of European colonization in North America, covering New France, New Spain, New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake area, South Carolina, and the sugar islands. Special emphasis upon social structures, labor systems, race, gender, religion, political cultures, and the problem of imperial control from Jamestown through the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Particular attention will be paid to the various and changing encounters of Africans, Native American, and Europeans, and to the importance of slavery in the colonization process. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Why was there an American Revolution? How revolutionary was it, and for whom? Why did it end with the creation of a fractious independent republic, an "empire of liberty" rooted in slavery? This class explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Revolution, from the Seven Years War through the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Lectures, readings, and precepts will trace the ideas and experiences of the many peoples whose lives intersected with the United States' struggle for independence: female and male, Black and white and Native American, free and enslaved, American and British, Loyalist and Patriot.

How did the United States emerge as a revolutionary republic built on the principle of human equality at the same time that it produced the wealthiest and mightiest slave society on earth? This course approaches that question in an interpretive history emphasizing the contradictory expansion of racial slavery and political democracy. Topics include the place of slavery in the Federal Constitution and the founding the nation, the spread of the cotton kingdom, Jacksonian democracy and the growth of political parties, the rise of antislavery and proslavery politics, and the growing social and political divisions between North and South.

The history of the place we now know as the U. S. West, from European contact to the mid-twentieth century. Primary focus on the struggles over access to land, resources, and power in old and new Wests, with particular attention given to the role of visual and popular culture in shaping the national imagination of the region. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course examines the history of the United States through its intellectuals and major ideas. Starting with the Puritans and progressing through to the contemporary intellectual scene, it hopes to introduce students to major debates, themes, and intellectual movements in the history of American ideas. We will complement the thought of these great thinkers with attention to the institutions and social contexts in which those ideas developed. Students will leave this class understanding the inner logistics and social contexts of the major intellectual systems that have marked American life.

Why did the flourishing United States, by some measures the richest and most democratic nation of its era, fight the bloodiest civil war in the 19th century Western world? How did that war escalate into a revolutionary political struggle that transformed the nation--and then, almost as rapidly, give way to a reactionary backlash? This course will explore the causes, course, and consequences of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, keeping in mind the ways that America's greatest conflict also represented a major event in the history of the global 19th century, and a landmark moment in the making of the modern world.

This course explains a turbulent and transformative era in United States history, from the dismantling of Reconstruction to the aftermath of World War One (c. 1877-1920). Lectures and readings examine the nature of Reconstruction and its destruction; economic inequality in the Gilded Age and the political movements that challenged it; the relationship of financial and industrial capitalism; the making of the American middle class and the contradictions of Progressivism; the politics of white supremacy and the construction of Jim Crow regimes; mobilization for World War 1 and wartime contests over civil liberties; postwar social upheaval.

This class views legal history broadly as the relationship between formal law, popular legal culture, state governance, and social change in the U.S., from the colonial period to the present. We will examine changing conceptions of rights, equality, justice, the public interest. We also will consider questions about the operation of law in U.S. history: How is law made? What do people expect from law? Who controls law? How did that change over time? These questions open up a rich, layered past in which the law was a source of authority that mediated social and political conflicts, even as those conflicts ultimately changed the law.

This course covers the history of US foreign relations from the American revolution to the present day. Lectures take up questions of diplomacy, foreign policy, ideology and culture, empire and anti-imperialism, and revolution and counterrevolution. Precepts emphasize primary sources, from the writings of Tom Paine, George Washington, William Jennings Bryan, Ho Chi Minh, Phyllis Schlafly, Elaine Scarry, and more.

The history of modern America, with particular focus on domestic political and social changes. Topics include the Roaring 20s; the Great Depression and the New Deal; the homefront of World War II and the Cold War; the civil rights movement and the Great Society; the Vietnam War; the sexual revolutions; the Silent Majority, the Nixon administration, and Watergate. Two lectures, one preceptorial.