HIST 212: United States History to 1877
Fall 2023 Alert: This course will be taught as a "flipped" classroom. Lectures will be prerecorded and available online a week before the scheduled meetings. The "lecture period" will instead focus on discussing lectures and readings in greater depth.
Fall 2023: HIST 212 surveys British America and United States history from Jamestown (1607) to Reconstruction (1877). Lectures and readings trace key social, cultural, and environmental developments. The goal is to develop contextual reasoning, which means knowing not only what happened and why, but how broader forces shaped events. Life was more contingent than destined or inevitable. The challenge for students is thus to master both the personal and specific and the general and conceptual in order to understand the past on its terms. Students will engage source materials ranging for lectures to primary documents and secondary texts. In-class discussions and exams will focus on big themes. The two papers, each five pages, require the contextual analysis of a set of pre-selected documents available online through Canvas.
Topics: Colonialism, environmental contingencies, industrialism, nationalism, political culture, racialism and racism, religion
Course Prerequisites
45 credit hours including 9 hours of lower division history credit and one of HIST 101, 212, or permission of the department
Required Texts
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried
Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Allen Guelzo, Lincoln: A Brief History
Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, The American Yawp
Tutorial readings available through Canvas Course Site
Course Evaluation
Weekly Quizzes: 10%
Midterm: 30%
Papers: 15% each
Final: 30%
Fall 2023: HIST 212 surveys British America and United States history from Jamestown (1607) to Reconstruction (1877). Lectures and readings trace key social, cultural, and environmental developments. The goal is to develop contextual reasoning, which means knowing not only what happened and why, but how broader forces shaped events. Life was more contingent than destined or inevitable. The challenge for students is thus to master both the personal and specific and the general and conceptual in order to understand the past on its terms. Students will engage source materials ranging for lectures to primary documents and secondary texts. In-class discussions and exams will focus on big themes. The two papers, each five pages, require the contextual analysis of a set of pre-selected documents available online through Canvas.
Topics: Colonialism, environmental contingencies, industrialism, nationalism, political culture, racialism and racism, religion
Course Prerequisites
45 credit hours including 9 hours of lower division history credit and one of HIST 101, 212, or permission of the department
Required Texts
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried
Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Allen Guelzo, Lincoln: A Brief History
Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, The American Yawp
Tutorial readings available through Canvas Course Site
Course Evaluation
Weekly Quizzes: 10%
Midterm: 30%
Papers: 15% each
Final: 30%
