American Independence
Session 1 Summer 2024
To commemorate the 250th anniversary of revolutionary struggles of the 1770s and beyond, NIAHD will offer History 219: American Independence.
The class will explore the “contagion of liberty” that culminated in new democratic governments on this continent; new rights of conscience and worship for members of minority religious groups; women’s struggles for rights to run their households, their workplaces, and to support the coming war; new political action strategies for laborers and small businesspeople; and newly available, albeit in some cases temporary, routes to emancipation from slavery.
Daily case studies will allow students first to investigate, and then to participate in negotiating and redefining, the possibilities for human liberation in this era. The 2024 class will have a particular emphasis on the 250th anniversaries of the momentous events of 1774, though the wider era will be considered. Those events included the trade boycotts formalized in the 1774 Continental Association, the dissemination of Jefferson’s Summary View of the Rights of British North America, the formation of the first Continental Congress, and the Day of Fasting, Humiliation, & Prayer whereby leaders and everyday people here in Virginia were called upon to show solidarity with the struggling of the people of Massachusetts under the Coercive “Intolerable” Acts. From our home base in Williamsburg, which was Virginia's capital, students will get an immediate sense of this vital and often misunderstood history.
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Use historical thinking to analyze, evaluate, and interpret primary and secondary sources.
- Use evidence-based reasoning and diverse historical sources (written and material) to interpret the past coherently, develop an argument, and present an argument both in discussions and in written assignments.
- Constructively describe, and in some cases practice, methods of museological communication like first- and third-person interpretation, exhibition label-writing, object curation and preservation, and consideration of diverse publics who approach the revolutionary past.
- Practice crucial skills of leadership and civic engagement through negotiation and collaboration in field-based classroom sites that will allow you to embody and engage with the limits and possibilities of real people in the past.
- Critically consider the ways in which the events of the 1770s are understood, and in your view how they ought to be understood, in scholarly and public settings today.
