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