This is the first part of a two-semester course that studies American cultural history through a selection of key texts and key concepts. In this first part of the course, we will engage with these texts and concepts as cultural historians who understand the connection between text and history as interdependent, following the New Historical paradigm of “the historicity of the text and the textuality of history.” We will move from Early Settlement and New England Puritanism and the Revolutionary Era to the Early Republic, the Antebellum Era and the Civil War, and finally Reconstruction. Writers discussed in this course include Cpt. John Smith, John Cotton, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Frederick Douglass, George Fitzhugh, William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham Lincoln, James Monroe, Judith Sargent Murray, John L. O’Sullivan, Edward Pollard, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott.
- Dozent/in: Daniel Stein