All courses numbered 500 and above are graduate courses.
Undergraduates need to submit a course permit to enroll.
HIST 610 American Political History and Political Culture, 1750 - 1865
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
This course will provide a comprehensive chronological and historiographical survey of the most important historical writing dealing with America's political history and political culture from the mid-eighteenth century up to the outbreak of the Civil War. It is emphatically a course about politics, but it will trace the way in which historians' definitions of that word have been broadened to cover a wide range of behaviors associated with "public life." Among the topics covered will be: the transformation of Anglo-American political institutions in the eighteenth century; the emergence of the so-called "republican paradigm;" the American Revolution; the creation of the United States Constitution; the transformation of republican theory and practice in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the creation of the first and second American party systems; public culture and political culture in the streets and taverns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and finally, the disintegration of America's national polity in 1861.
