History 502: American History
Core I
Fall 2005
Mon. 4:00-6:40, Park 532
Prof. Erik Seeman
Park 534, 645-2181 x534
seeman@buffalo.edu
Office hours: Mon. 1-3
Goals: This course seeks
to introduce Master’s and Ph.D. students to the history and
historiography of America to 1865. That is, this course will help
students master a basic narrative of American history through the Civil
War. At the same time, it will introduce them to the main
historiographical trends of the past fifty years or so.
Assignments: Students are
expected to complete the weekly readings carefully, attend class
faithfully, and participate in discussion. In addition, there are
several writing assignments:
•Summary papers (3). These may be no more than two double-spaced
pages. The first is based on Richter’s Facing East from Indian
Country and is due in class Sept. 12. The second and third are
based on any assigned article or book, due in class the day we discuss
that reading. In these papers you should note the author’s
subject, argument, historiographical context (if it is clear in the
text), and research methods. You should also evaluate the
author’s effectiveness at meeting his or her goals.
•Historiographical paper (1). This is a three-page double-spaced
paper in which you compare and contrast two readings from a single week
from a historiographical perspective. The weeks you may choose
from are Oct. 10 (Colonial New England), Oct. 24 (American Revolution),
and Dec. 5 (Antebellum Slavery). The paper is due in class the
day we discuss those readings.
•Final paper. This is a 10-12-page double-spaced paper due
December 12. You will have two options, about which more details
will be provided later: 1) read a series of 18th or early-19th
century newspapers and respond to their contents in the context of the
class readings; or 2) take a topic that we have covered in class and
think about how you might incorporate what you have learned into
classroom teaching. The final product could be a college lecture
or a high school or middle school annotated lesson plan.
Grading: Class
participation counts for a majority of the final grade, with the
written assignments making up the balance.
Readings: The following
six books may be purchased at the University Bookstore. Articles
and chapters may be accessed through the online syllabus.
Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from
Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
(Harvard, 2001).
John Ruston Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s
Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia (Oxford, 2002).
T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Myne
Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore,
1640-1676 (Oxford, 1980). There is also a new edition,
2004, but either edition will do.
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the
American Republic, 1776-1787 (North Carolina, 1969). Any
edition is fine.
Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of
Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale, 2001).
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern
Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (North Carolina,
1997).
Course Schedule
August 29: Introduction
September 5: Class cancelled –
Labor Day
September 12: American Indians
Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native
History of Early America (Harvard, 2001)
September 19: Atlantic World
Wim
Klooster, “The Rise and Transformation of the Atlantic World,” in
Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic World: Essays
on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Prentice-Hall, 2005), 1-42
Ian
K. Steele, “Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian,
Atlantic, and Global Perspectives,” Reviews in American History 26
(March 1998): 70-95
Joyce
E. Chaplin, "Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American
History," Journal of American History 89 (March 2003): 1431-55
September 26: Colonial Chesapeake
John Ruston Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard: Sex and Law in Early
Virginia (Oxford, 2002)
April
Lee Hatfield, “Virginia, North America, and English Atlantic
Empire,” in Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the
Seventeenth Century (Pennsylvania, 2004), 191-228
October 3: Class cancelled –
Rosh Hashanah
October 10: Colonial New England
Perry
Miller, “Errand Into the Wilderness,” William and Mary Quarterly
10 (Jan. 1953): 3-19
Philip
J. Greven, Jr., “Family Structure in Seventeenth-Century
Andover, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 23 (Apr. 1966):
234-56
Erik
R. Seeman, “The Spiritual Labor of John Barnard: A Boston
Housewright Constructs His Piety,” in Pious Persuasions: Laity
and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Johns Hopkins, 1999),
15-43
Mark
A. Peterson, “Life on the Margins: Boston’s Anxieties of
Influence in the Atlantic World,” in Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula,
eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and
Imagination (Prentice-Hall, 2005), 45-59
October 17: Colonial Slavery
T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom
on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (Oxford, 1980)
Ira
Berlin, “Societies with Slaves: The Chesapeake,” in Many
Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North
America (Harvard, 1998), 17-46
October 24: American Revolution
Bernard
Bailyn, “Transformation,” in The Ideological Origins of the
American Revolution (Harvard, 1967), 160-229
Gary
B. Nash, “Social Change and the Growth of Prerevolutionary Urban
Radicalism,” in The American Revolution: Explorations in the
History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (Northern Illinois,
1976), 3-36
Woody
Holton, “Land Speculators Versus Indians and the Privy Council,”
in Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of
the American Revolution in Virginia (North Carolina, 1999), 3-38
Andrew
Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Black Majorities,” in An Empire
Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean
(Pennsylvania, 2000), 34-57
October 31: White Women
Cornelia
Hughes Dayton, “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender
Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village,” William and
Mary Quarterly 48 (Jan. 1991): 19-49
Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich, “Hannah Barnard’s Cupboard,” in The Age of
Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth
(Knopf, 2001), 108-41
Jeanne
Boydston, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Women’s Market
Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States,” in Wages
of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic
(Madison House, 1997), 23-47
November 7: Constitution
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (North
Carolina, 1969), 127-255, 306-564
November 14: Political Culture
Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New
Republic (Yale, 2001)
David
Waldstreicher, “Rites of Rebellion, Rites of Assent:
Celebrations, Print Culture, and the Origins of American Nationalism,”
Journal of American History 82 (June 1995): 37-61
November 21: Southern Religion
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the
Bible Belt (North Carolina, 1997)
November 28: The Market
Revolution
Allan
Kulikoff, "The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America," William
and Mary Quarterly 46 (Jan. 1989): 120-44
Paul A. Gilje, “The Rise of Capitalism in the Early Republic,” in Wages
of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic
(Madison House, 1997), 1-22
Sean
Wilentz, “Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution,
1815-1848,” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Temple, 1990),
51-68
Richard
E. Ellis, “The Market Revolution and the Transformation of
American Politics, 1801-1837,” in The Market Revolution in
America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880
(Virginia, 1996), 149-76
December 5: Antebellum Slavery
Ulrich
Bonnell Phillips, “Life in Thraldom” in Life and Labor in the
Old South (1927; Little Brown, 1939), 188-217
Stanley
M. Elkins, “Slavery and Personality,” in Slavery: A
Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959; Chicago,
1976), 81-139
Eugene
Genovese, “Paternalism and Class Relations in the Old South,” in
Sean Wilentz, ed., Major Problems in the Early Republic (1974; D.C.
Heath, 1992), 264-73
Walter
Johnson, “Introduction” and “Acts of Sale,” in Soul By
Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard, 1999),
1-18, 162-88