3.0

Average Course Rating

“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear…” – Walt Whitman, poet, 1860. In this course, we’ll listen to those varied carols, whether songs of praise, of protest, or of mourning. This course offers a chronological study of histories of the United States, starting with colonization and continuing through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Throughout, students will practice `thinking historically` by using historical methods to explore major questions in American history. Students will work with primary, secondary, and tertiary sources in order to better understand the major issues of American history. We will pay particular attention to the ways that American history has been contested and debated, created and memorialized. Students will demonstrate their understandings in a midterm essay and a final essay, and they will create a creative performance project exploring an era, issue, or persona relating to the course.