This is a course about an early America bathed not in the hazy soft light of folklore and imagined memory, but confronted head-on in its ambitious, boisterous, complex, contentious, messy, noisy, violent, fully human and full-bodied act of becoming. It is a course about arguments and uprisings, rebellions and revolutions, stunning successes and heartbreaking failures. 

This semester we will explore the collisions and chaos of colonial settlement, multiple struggles for independence, and the improbable rise of a new nation founded on the proposition, radical for its time, that “all men are created equal.” Together we will try to understand the American past through examinations of art, class, culture, gender, geography, politics, race, and technology. We will also investigate how the grand ideals but unequal outcomes of the first American Revolution set the stage for a second in the Civil War and Reconstruction.