Colonial History
1. How did trade and religion reshape Native American societies?
2. How did race, class, and gender intersect in the origins of slavery and democracy in the Chesepeake?
3. Was the American Revolution revolutionary?
4. Why was the Constitution created and ratified, and how has it structured U.S. government? What tensions and conflicts are embedded in the document, how did they play out in Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian philosophies, and which approach to governance is personally preferable?
Selected Texts:
Primary texts by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, John Hutchinson and others
Freehling, William F.. “The Founding Fathers and Slavery.” American Historical Review (February 1972), 81-93.
Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery-American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.
Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Wood, Gordon. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Zinn, Howard. The People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003.