History 80000—Literature of American History I

Fall 2007
5 credits

Professor Jonathan Sassi
Tuesday, 2:00-4:00 p.m., in room C196.05
E-mail: sassi@mail.csi.cuny.edu

This course is designed to introduce first-year students to some of the major debates and recent literature about United States history from the colonial era through the Civil War. It also serves to prepare students for the First (Written) Examination.

Students should come prepared each week to discuss the common readings listed below. Over the course of the semester, each student will also read two of the recommended books, write a 1000-word review of each, and make a ten-minute presentation about each book to the seminar. Each student will also write an historiographical essay of about twenty pages on a topic chosen in consultation with the professor. A proposed bibliography for the essay is due in class week 6, and the essay itself is due on December 18, 2007. NB: Syllabus subject to change before wk. 1.

Week 1 (8/28): Getting Organized

Week 2 (9/4): Old and New Worlds Joined
Common Reading:
Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Recommended:
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 1972).
Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., ed., America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples before the Arrival of Columbus (New York: Knopf, 1991).

Week 3 (9/11): New England in the Seventeenth Century
Common Reading:
Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Recommended:
Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Knopf, 2002).
Daniel Vickers, Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

Week 4 (9/18) – no class; classes follow the Friday schedule

Week 5 (9/25): The Chesapeake
Common Reading:
Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Recommended:
James P. P. Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).

Week 6 (10/2): The Atlantic World
Common Reading:
Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Recommended:
J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).
Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Week 7 (10/9): Eighteenth-Century British Colonial America
Common Reading:
Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Recommended:
Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Week 8 (10/16): The Coming of the American Revolution
Common Reading:
Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992): 11-38.
Recommended:
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enl. ed. (1967; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1992).
T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Week 9 (10/23): The U. S. Constitution
Common Reading:
Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
Recommended:
Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1996).
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).

Week 10 (10/30): Political Culture in the Early American Republic
Common Reading:
Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Recommended:
Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).
Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Knopf, 1995).

Week 11 (11/6): The Market Revolution
Common Reading:
Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
Joyce Oldham Appleby, “The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 1 (2001): 1-18.
Recommended:
John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Charles G. Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Week 12 (11/13): Religion and Reform
Common Reading:
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997).
Jonathan D. Sassi, “The First Party Competition and Southern New England’s Public Christianity,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 2 (2001): 261-99.
Recommended:
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002).
Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Week 13 (11/20) – no class; classes follow the Thursday schedule

Week 14 (11/27): Slavery, Race, and Abolition
Common Reading:
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Recommended:
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

Week 15 (12/4): Antebellum Culture
Common Reading:
Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Knopf, 1998).
Recommended:
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Week 16 (12/11): The Civil War
Common Reading:
Gary J. Kornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise,” Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (2003): 76-105.
James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: Norton, 2007).
Recommended:
William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).