Hist-80010-Fall-2017 1
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Preliminary Syllabus subject to change. For the final syllabus please check Blackboard Hist. 80010 Literature of American History l Fall 2017 GC 3308 Thurs. 1145-145pm Prof. David Waldstreicher [email protected] Office hrs (5111.09) Th. 2-3pm 817-8450 This course introduces Ph.D. students to the historiography of the U.S. through the Civil War and is intended to prepare students for the First Written Examination or an outside field in US history. One of our primary concerns will be periodization. To what extent should the colonial period be considered a prologue to U.S. history? And on the other side of the nationhood divide, are there analyses that suggest a coherence or continuity to U.S. history beyond the particularities of the early republic or Civil War periods? What is the status of the Revolution and the Civil War, and the political history that drives or used to drive the narrative of U.S. history, amid transformations otherwise seen as social, cultural, economic? Are there explanations that that cut across centuries, or stories that hold up in our time? Another important theme of the course is space, within and beyond the places that became the United States during this period and afterwards. Is U.S. history the story of provinces or regions becoming a nation-state? What weight should be given to the local in a moment when historians are reassessing the international or even global nature of early modern as well as modern history? Should “Atlantic” and “Continental” approaches change the narrative? Can empire or empires provide a more compelling and honest as well as capacious history while allowing for the different experiences of different groups in different places? The books and articles we shall discuss include prizewinning narratives, classics that are still in print after decades, recent monographs born as dissertations, syntheses, and historiographical essays. An important part of what we will be doing is attempting to read these in light of each other. Be forewarned: the reading is extensive, in recognition of the five credits this course carries and its status as a prerequisite for the first qualifying examination. Our goal is to prepare for the exam, of course, but also to prepare to teach this period at the college level and to lay a substantial foundation for future research and teaching in any period of U.S. history. Instead of a seminar paper or historiographical essay, your written work for the course will consist of weekly (2-3 page) responses to the readings. I will provide prompting questions that will help us work toward the kinds of writing and analysis the faculty will expect for the examination. These informal short essays will be due Thursdays by 930am via email and may serve as jumping off points for our Thursday seminar discussions. Schedule of readings/discussions Books with a + are available electronically via the GC library; articles will be posted on Blackboard. 8/31 Introduction 9/7 US Historiography: Consensus and Conflict, Truth and Myth, Capitalism, Slavery, and Freedom Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It (1948), intro & ch. 1-6 (pp. v-163 in original and older paperback editions) R. Hofstadter, “Consensus and Conflict in American History,” The Progressive Historians (1968), 437-66. Nathan Irvin Huggins, “The Deforming Mirror of Truth” (1990) in his Revelations: American History, American Myths (1995), 252-83. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (1998), Introduction and Chapters 1-5 (pp. xiii-113). Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Prologue and Introduction, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (2000). 3-39. Andrew Cayton and Fred Anderson, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000(2006), Introduction, ix-xvi. Nancy Isenberg, “Introduction: Fables We Forget By,” White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016), 1-14 Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910(2016), Introduction, pp. 1-8 9/14 How Historians Revise: Slavery, Race, and Origins in Virginia Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975) Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May-June, 1990), 95-118 or in Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, Racecraft (2012), 111-48. Alden T. Vaughan, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Roots of American Racism (1995), 136-75. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996), Introduction and ch. 6-7, pp. 1-4, 107-86. Rebecca Anne Goetz, “Rethinking the ‘Unthinking Decision’: Old Questions and New Problems in the History of Slavery and Race in the Colonial South,” Journal of Southern History (Aug. 2009), 599- 612. April Lee Hatfield. “Chesapeake Slavery in Atlantic Context,” ch. 3 of Atlantic Virginia (2004). James D. Rice, “Bacon’s Rebellion in Indian Country,” Journal of American History 101 (Dec. 2014), 726-50 *Tuesday 9/19 Rethinking Beginnings and Perspectives: Continental and Atlantic Worlds John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World (2012), Intro, ch. 1, 2, & 6 (pp. 1-99, 159-211). Andres Resendez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016) Eliga H. Gould, "Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery," AHR 112 (June 2007), 764-86, and response by Canizares-Esguerra, "Entangled Histories: Borderlands Historiographies in New Clothes?," Ibid., 787-99 & replies by Gould and Canizares-Esguerra in American Historical Review, Dec. 2007, pp. Pekka Hamalainen, “The Shapes of Power: Indians, Europeans, and North American Worlds from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century” in Julianna Barr and Edward Countryman eds., Contested Spaces of Early America (2014), 31-68. 9/28 Things Material: New England Freedom, Environment, and Political Economy Revised +Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from its Founding to the Revolution (2009) +Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004) Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun, ch. 1-5, pp. 42-207 Allan Greer, “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America,” American Historical Review 112 (Apr. 2012), 365-86. 10/5 Mid-Atlantic History (and New York) as Imperial History +Serena Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (2009) +Gail D. MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistance on the Frontiers of Empire(2011) Cayton and Anderson, Dominion of War, ch. 1-2 Wayne Bodle, “The Fabricated Region: On the Insufficiency of ‘Colonies’ for Understanding American Colonial History,” Early American Studies 1 (Spring 2003), 1-27. 10/12 Empire, Understandings, and Misunderstandings in a Long Revolutionary Era Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms we Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (2009) Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2013) Cayton and Fred Anderson, ““Washington’s Apprenticeship”, “Washington’s Mission,” ch. 4-5 of The Dominion of War, pp. 104-206. Bernard Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution” in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson eds., Essays on the American Revolution (1973), 3-31. Michael McDonnell and David Waldstreicher, “Revolution in the Quarterly? An Historiographical Analysis, 1944-2016,” William and Mary Quarterly (Oct. 2017). 10/19 The Early Republic as Public: Political Cultures and Cultural Politics Jeffrey L. Pasley, The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy +Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (2012) Andrew W. Robertson, “’Look on this Picture, and on This!’: Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787-1820,” American Historical Review 106 (Oct. 2001), 1263-80. Van Gosse, “As a Nation, the English are Our Friends’: The Emergence of African American Politics in the British Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 113 (Oct. 2008), 1003-28. 10/26 The Early Republic at Home: Women and Men +Laura F. Edwards, The People and their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009) Ulrich, Age of Homespun, ch. 6-11 Jeanne Boydston, “The Woman Who was Not There: Women’s Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (Summer 1996), 183-202. 11/2 1815-48 -- The Age of Jackson, or is it Adams? Political History and Dueling Synthesis Edward Pessen, “We are all Jacksonians, We are all Jeffersonians; or, a Pox on Stultifying Periodizations,” Journal of the Early Republic 1 (1981), 1-26. READ Sean Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, ch 6-20, pp. 181-632 OR +Daniel Walker Howe, What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007), chapters on politics; EXAMINE the other for differing arguments 11/9 “Antebellum” American Cultures in Motion David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (1995), xi-403. +Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship Before the Civil War (2016) Recommended: D. Howe, What God Hath Wrought, chapters on communications, transportation, culture 11/16 Slavery Revisited, Capitalism Revisited, Mobility Revisited Edward E. Baptist, The