This is a preliminary syllabus and is subject to change. Please see Blackboard for final version. Hist. 80010 Literature of American History l Fall 2016 GC XXXX Thurs. 2:00-4:00 p.m. Prof. David Waldstreicher [email protected] 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.
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? What are the most important achievements of recent US historians, and what are the trends in the field now?
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 communities?
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 required preparation for a 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 Thursday by 10am 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
Aug. 25 Introduction : Who, When , and Where, and What is American History… and Why?
9/1 American History in 1948, 1968, 1998, and beyond: Origins, Celebration, Criticism, and the Big Story Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It (1948), intro & ch. 1-6 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). Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, “Introduction,” Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1999), xi-xxiv. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Prologue” and “Introduction,” The Age of Homepun (2001), 3-40. Fred Anderson and Andrew R. L. Cayton, “Introduction: A View in Winter,” The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (2005), ix-xxix. +Daniel K. Richter, “Introduction: Layrered Pasts,” Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (2011), 3-8.
9/8 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” in New Left Review 181 (May-June, 1990), 95-118 or in B. 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), chapters TBA. 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 75 (Aug. 2009), 599-612. James D. Rice, “Bacon’s Rebellion in Indian Country,” Journal of American History 101 (Dec. 2014), 726-50
3) *FRIDAY 9/16* Beginnings and Comparisons; or, Empires, Environments, and Peoples in New Worlds Daniel K. Richter, “Progenitors,” “Conquistadors,” “Traders,” Before the Revolution, 11-168 Cayton and Anderson, “Champlain’s Dream,” The Dominion of War, 1-53 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004) Eliga H. Gould, "Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery," AHR 112 (June 2007), 764-86, and responses by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, "Entangled Histories: Borderlands Historiographies in New Clothes?," Ibid., 787-99 & replies in AHR, Dec. 2007,pp. Allan Greer, “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America,” American Historical Review (Apr. 2012), 365-86. John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History (2014), pages TBA 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
4) 9/22 How Early Americans Revised: New England and the Notion of Region (and Freedom) Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun, ch. 1-5, pp. 42-207 +Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from its Founding to the Revolution (2009) Richter, “Planters,” Before the Revolution, 171-238. 5) 9/29 Zooming In on Colonial Development: Imperial and Atlantic NY and PA Burrows and Wallace, Gotham , ch. 1-12 (3-190) +Serena Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (2009) Daniel K. Richter, “Imperialists,” “Atlanteans,” ch 10-14 of Before the Revolution, 241-367. Cayton and Anderson, “Penn’s Bargain,” Dominion of War, 54-103 Barry Levy, “Levelers and Fugitives: Runaway Advertisements and the Contrasting Political Economies of Mid-Eighteenth Century Pennsylvania and Massachusetts,” Pennsylvania History (2011), 1-32. Daniel K. Richter, “Mid Atlantic Colonies R.I.P.,” Pennsylvania History 82 (Sept. 2015), 260-81.
10/13 Whose American Revolution? Bernard Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution” in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson eds., Essays on the American Revolution (1973), 3-31. Andrew Cayton and Fred Anderson, ““Washington’s Apprenticeship”,”Washington’s Mission,” ch. 4-5 of The Dominion of War, pp. 104-206. Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms we Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (2009) Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward An Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (Oct.2011), 597-630, D. Richter, Before the Revolution, ch. 15-16 and epilogue, pp. 369-422. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch. 13-19 (pp. 191-298)
6) *FRIDAY 10/21* T Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (2016)
7) 10/27 The Early Republic at Home and Abroad, I Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch 20-26, pp. 299-408 +Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (2012) Cayton and Anderson, “Jackson’s Vision,” Dominion of War, ch. 5 “Interchange: The War of 1812,” Journal of American History 99 (Sept. 2012), 520-55. 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 (Oct. 2008), 1003-28.
8) 11/3 The Early Republic at Home & Abroad, II: Women’s Lives, other Revolutions, American Myths Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (2008) Laurel T. Ulrich, Age of Homespun, ch. 6-14, pp. 208-418.
9) 11/10 Slavery Revisited, Capitalism Revisited Edward E. Baptist, The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) Amy Dru Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love: An Antebellum Argument over Slavery, Capitalism, and Personhood” in Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith eds., Capitalism Takes Command (2012), 119-44 Seth Rockman, “What is Newsworthy about the History of Capitalism?” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (Fall 2014), 239-66.
11) 1/17 Class, Culture, & Progress, East and West Ryan Dearinger, The Filth of Progress: Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West (2014) Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch, 27-47, pp. 429-851
11/24 no class – Thanksgiving
12) 12/1 “Antebellum”: Political History and the Problem of Causation David M. Potter , The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976), chapters TBA William W. Freehling,”The Divided South, Democracy’s Limitations, and the Causes of the Peculiarly North American Civil War,” The Reintegration of American History (1994), 176-219. Gary Kornblith, “Rethimking the Coming of the Civil War A Counterfactual Exercise,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003), 76-105 Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 Invasion of Mexico (2012) James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (2014) Scott Hancock, “Crossing Freedom’s Fault Line: The Underground Railroad and Recentering African Americans in Civil War Causality,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (June 2013), 159-92’ Frank Towers, “Partisans, New Histories, and Modernization: A Historiography of the Civil War’s Causes,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (2011), 237-64. Michael E. Woods, “What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature,” Journal of American History (Sept. 2012), 415-39.
13) 12/8 Where in the World was the Civil War? William W. Freehling, The South vs the South (2002) Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (2016), chapters TBA “Interchange: Nationalism and Internationalism in the Era of the Civil War,” Journal of American History 99 (Sept. 2011), 455-89. John Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empires: North American Borderlands and the American Civil War, 1660–1860,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (June 2014), 264-298 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch. 49-50 (pp. 864-905) Yael A. Sternhell “Revisionism Reinvented?: The Antiwar Turn in Civil War Scholarship,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (June 2013), 239-256.
[12/15: makeup class if needed, or review meeting]
12/21 FIRST WRITTEN EXAMINATION