This course is designed to engage students in conversations about particular perspectives on the history of a selected nation, region, people, culture, institution, or historical phenomenon as specified by the respective instructor. By taking this course, students will come to understand, and develop an appreciation for, some combination of: the origins and evolution of the people, cultures, and/or political, economic, and/or social institutions of a particular region(s) of the world. They may also explore how human encounters shaped individual and collective identities and the complex political, economic, and social orders of the region/nation/communities under study. Instructors and subject will vary.

Two-hundred-fifty years ago this April, a small skirmish in eastern Massachusetts ignited a profound, violent, and transformative revolution—one which birthed America’s independent republic. When it first emerged on the transatlantic stage, the United States and its Declaration of Independence simultaneously lauded and grappled with complex political ideologies related to equity, freedom, safety, unity, and self-government. From historians and politicians to filmmakers and poets, from physicians and lawyers to trade laborers and artisans, Americans still fiercely debate whether the United States has fulfilled its founding promise to safeguard “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To answer this timely question, Americans first must answer an equally poignant historical question: what, if anything, made America’s rebellion against, and independence from, the British empire so revolutionary? This course will provide an in-depth exploration of eastern North America, its western borderlands, and the greater Caribbean world throughout America’s long-revolutionary era (1740-1815). We will pay particular attention to the influence, authority, and power that British, French, and Spanish colonists, Indigenous polities, and members of the African diaspora exercised within these regions. From these continental and transatlantic perspectives, we will investigate the causes, consequences, and geopolitical ramifications of the upstart rebellion that thirteen British American colonies staged in the 1770s. In addition to this political narrative, we will investigate how North America underwent a multitude of cultural revolutions during this period, including revolutions in reading, eating, feeling, and identity. Lastly, we will interrogate four central legacies of America’s long-revolutionary era: the ways in which the founding generation deployed notions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and disability to other individuals and create marginalized communities within the United States; the political, ideological, and legal implications of the U.S. Constitution; the profound influence of the early republic upon the Atlantic world’s Age of Revolutions, and the cultural significance of America’s revolutionary ideology in modern-day society.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills