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