American History I

This course traces how a handful of contested colonial settlements became a continental republic torn apart by slavery, covering roughly 1492 to 1865 with emphasis on the colonial period, Revolution, early republic, and Civil War. Most of your work happens through primary sources — colonial charters, political pamphlets, slave narratives, visual material — which you read closely and discuss, with homework assignments and exams testing how well you can connect a specific document to the broader social and political currents around it. As a sophomore-level AMER requirement, it builds the historical foundation you'll lean on in later literature and culture courses, where understanding why a 19th-century text sounds the way it does depends on knowing the world that produced it.