300-400 level courses are on special topics and are more advanced. They often presuppose some basic knowledge in the field and should be more difficult courses than courses at the 1-199 levels. The department is trying to insure that some 400 level courses, although substantially more difficult, are also small in size; they thus may be suitable for graduate students.
HIST 442 American Revolution
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
PRE-1800
As a number of historians have observed, the American Revolution now may seem to have been the inevitable culmination of political, economic, and cultural changes underway in the eighteenth century. But for many whose lives were altered by its disruptive contours, it was more improbable than inevitable. How, then, are we to make sense of the Revolution? What were its causes? Its progress? Its extended "settlement," or period of resolution and integration into a new kind of democratic government? As we address these and others questions during the course of the semester, we will need to keep our eyes open for changes afoot in many social fields: the ascendancy of democratic and egalitarian thought; the widespread development of consumerism and market capitalism; the linked forms processes of rebellion and nation-building; and the economic and strategic progress of the conflict itself.
