Syllabus
Topics:
Who Owns History?
Contact, Conflict, and Environment
Colonial Slavery and the Atlantic World
Religion in Early America
Gender relations in Early America
The American Revolution
Early Republic
The Frontier / Borderlands and Native Americans
Antebellum Slavery
The Civil War
Reconstruction
Annotation
The aim of this course is to introduce students to American historiography by examining a number of major works whose subjects range from the colonial era to 1877. The goal is not to achieve a deep understanding of a particular tropic, but rather to understand the different questions historians ask and methodologies they use.
The assigned readings comprise a mix of both older and new scholarship. Together they illustrate a variety of important topics and approaches to American history over the past few decades.