Teaching American History Program II: Seminar Descriptions
America and the Atlantic World (1450 - 1787)
Democracy in America (1787-1876)
Remaking America (1877-1941)
Immigration and the American Identity (1880-1950)
A Century of Civil Rights in America (1865- current)
American Century: US Foreign Policy (1898 - current)
Seminar I: America and the Atlantic World (1450 - 1787)
America and the Atlantic World will focus on three centuries of American history, from the interactions of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans in the Atlantic World through the formation of American republican government. We will provide participants with knowledge of the development of slavery, the religious and political foundations of British colonial society, the influences of Enlightenment thought in North America, and detail the unraveling of Britain's North American empire after the Seven Years' War. We will consider America's great republican experiment as embodied in the Constitution. From the chartering of the Virginia Company in 1606 through the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in 1791, this seminar will provide participants with fundamental knowledge of the nation's founding documents, including the Mayflower Compact, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Massachusetts Constitution. We will introduce participants to additional historical sources extracted from court records, autobiographies, diaries, ledgers, sermons, and archaeology. Participants will be taught to contextualize these sources within current historical scholarship. In so doing, they will develop a deeper understanding of how America's origins continue to resonate in contemporary society.
Seminar II: Democracy in America (1787-1876)
Democracy in America will explore America's democratic traditions from the founding of the United States through the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. We will examine ideals of classical republicanism and the articulation of Jeffersonian democracy, consider how political, industrial, and market revolutions prompted redefinition of democracy, and explore the role that the First and Second Party Systems played in this process. Participants will learn about America's unique and dynamic political culture during the nineteenth century, including how debates over race and sectional identity shaped American politics. We will examine how Americans continually redefined the meaning of democracy through the emergence of the Republican Party, the violence of the Civil War, and the early years of Reconstruction. With an emphasis on the relationships among local, state, and federal governments and public participation in American political life, we will provide participants with knowledge of the seminal writings of Jefferson, Clay, Jackson, Calhoun, Sumner, Lincoln, and Douglass, while also introducing them to lesser-known Americans who shaped American democracy, including Charles Langston, and Anna Dickinson. Through current historical scholarship and close readings of historical evidence, participants will develop a deeper understanding of democratic ideals of America's historical reality.
Seminar III: Remaking America (1877 - 1941)
Remaking America
examines the main contours of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American history with an emphasis on efforts to reform the nation in light of the challenges posed by industrialization. We will consider the full spectrum of reform efforts--conservative, liberal, and radical--focusing in particular on the distinct role played by women, immigrants, farmers, and workers in shaping regional and national responses to the problems of industrial capitalism. We will conclude with a detailed examination of the moment of greatest crisis during this period, the Great Depression, and its impact on the lives, thinking, and values of the American people.
Seminar IV: Immigration and the American Identity (1880 - 1950)
Immigration and the American Identity explores the arrival and impact of large numbers of immigrants from Europe, Russia, Asia, and the Mediterranean to American shores; and their experiences in the process of becoming American after the mass migrations of 1880-1920. Issues of identity formation and the drive for assimilation, citizenship and political power at the local and national level across the twentieth century will be examined. We will consider the strategies used by immigrants to survive and adjust to their new world, including: issues of acculturation, assimilation and language loss; the acquisition of English; ethnicity, and; identity change over generations. The challenges of adjusting to the American workplace, racial and ethnic stereotyping, nativism and political conflict, institution of the quota system, and WWII Japanese and Italian internment are also considered. We conclude with an examination of the cultural loss and changing experiences of the second and third generations.
Seminar V: A Century of Civil Rights in America (1865-current)
A Century of Civil Rights in America is a thematic treatment of the issue of race in American history which takes the long view and spans American history from the Civil War, Reconstruction, suffrage, organized labor, to the Civil Rights Movement. We will examine the key events, figures, and ideas of the American Civil Rights Movement from its roots in Abolitionism and Reconstruction through the period of legalized racial discrimination and the dismantling of legal segregation to the ongoing persistence of white privilege. We highlight the distinctive African-American history narrative and its relationship to the general narrative of American history and consider the achievements and failings as well as shifting agendas of the movement over time. Our focus will range from looking at the role and significance of large organizations like the black church, the NAACP, and the U.S. court system, to localized civil rights movement organization and mobilization, to the quotidian reality of the movement in the lives of individuals. Course content is both chronological and thematic and will consider such questions as What is citizenship? What are civil rights? What constitutes a social movement? What are the unique qualities of social movements in a democratic nation?
Seminar VI: American Century: US Foreign Policy (1898 - current)
American Century: US Foreign Policy will examine America's foreign relations, the history of U.S. diplomatic, economic, political and military interactions beyond its borders which have shaped our relationships with the larger world. Three key phases covering the past century will be emphasized. The first phase will include Alfred Thayer Mahan's ambitious vision of an American empire built on trade and backed by naval power; the expansion of American commerce around the globe and President Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to construct the Panama Canal; and Taft's expansion of U.S. commercial power in Asia and Latin America through Dollar Diplomacy. The second phase will emphasize the era of global conflict and the two world wars--the assertion of American diplomatic influences at Versailles in Wilsonian idealism, the isolationism of the thirties, Henry Luce's vision of the forties as the dawn of the American Century and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Big Three diplomacy during the Second World War. The third phase will cover the dawn of the nuclear age, the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, rise of the national security state, evolution of the Cold War containment strategy, America's changing relationship with the non-aligned nations and conflict in Korea and Vietnam. We will conclude by examining the complex issues of Nixon's China policy, the Iran hostage crisis, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union and finally examine efforts to stem nuclear proliferation and conflict in the Middle East.
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