American Intellectual History I

This course will deal with the intellectual history of the United States from the colonial era to the Civil War. It will explore such topics as the Puritan tradition, republican ideology in America, Tocqueville and democracy, the Transcendentalists, the debate over slavery, views on the role of women in the new republic, and antebellum social science. Primary texts by John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Sarah Grimke, Catharine Beecher, Margaret Fuller, Horace Bushnell, Henry C. Carey, and George Fitzhugh will be read and discussed in the course.