The course, History 216:

From the Founding of Jamestown through the American Revolution

OR

From the American Revolution through the American Civil War

History 216, a College of William and Mary introductory-level seminar, forms the centerpiece of the Pre-Collegiate Summer Program. In this undergraduate course, participants earn four academic credits by engaging in college-level studies of America's past.

This immersive course will include a high degree of interaction with people actively engaged in researching and presenting the American past. There will be special talks and performances by interpreters, behind-the-scenes tours with curators and archaeologists, and conversations with historians and other scholars who are working in the field of American history in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Above all, there will be discussion, both formal and impromptu, about every aspect of the course. Participants in the Pre-Collegiate Program will be divided into seminars of no more than a dozen students, each seminar with its own instructor selected from advanced doctoral candidates and recent Ph.D.s in History and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. These seminars will meet daily for in-depth discussions of readings and site visits. Professor James Whittenburg, chairman of the Lyon G. Tyler Department of History, College of William and Mary, heads the instructional staff and will be with the Pre-Collegiate students every day.

Guest scholars, special performances of music and dance, and evening movies will supplement the site visits, readings, and class time. Students will also produce electronic journals of their site visits, reflecting upon what they saw, heard, said, touched, and read--and especially how this has reinforced, contradicted, or extended their understanding of the American past.

To see recent examples of student journals, go to: http://www.wm.edu/niahd/journals.

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