1
American Empires from George III to Andrew Jackson
Summer 2014
MW, 2:00 -5:00 PM
Daniel Kanhofer – dhk286@nyu.edu
Office Hours: KJCC 526, by appointment
Present-day discussions of the United States as an “empire” often lead to politically fraught
debates. Yet creating a new empire was a stated goal for many people in the United States
beginning in the late eighteenth century. What did these Americans mean when they talked
about the United States as an empire? What implications of empire did these Americans seek to
embrace or obscure? This course will examine the history of empire in British America and the
United States. It pays particular attention to the evolution of colonial societies that were not
completely overturned by the political revolution that created the new nation. The material
covered by the course is divided into two parts. It will first examine the features that
distinguished the antecedents of the United States as colonies, including the development of
racialized chattel slavery, the commercial and political relationship with Great Britain, and land
contests and diplomacy between Native Americans and Euro-Americans. In turning to the early
history of the United States, the course will study how these characteristics of colonial America
persisted and even became more pronounced in the independent US as the former colony
pursued its own imperial expansion.
Required Texts
Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (Harvard University Press, 2001)
Kariann Yokota Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial
Nation (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Class Requirements
Especially with a compressed summer schedule, section attendance is mandatory. Students may
have one unexcused absence. A doctor’s note or approval from the course instructor one week
prior to an absence is required for an excused absence. Class discussion is a large part of the
course and final grade. Please come prepared to discuss the assigned readings each class and be
courteous to your classmates during discussions. In addition to a participation grade, final grades
will be determined by two short response papers, an in-class presentation, and a final paper.
Grading
Participation – 25%
Presentation – 10%
Response Papers – 30%
Final Paper – 35%
Writing
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Papers should be double-spaced and typed in 12-point font with one inch margins. Students will
write two response papers in the weeks of your choosing that compare and contrast two class
readings. These papers should be 3 to 4 pages long. Two final paper prompts will be distributed
to choose from that will ask you to make an argument about a major theme of the class, drawing
on lectures and at least three course readings. These papers should be 6 to 8 pages long. More
instruction and tips about writing will be provided in class.
Week 1
July 7 - Empires in the Atlantic World
Readings:
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of
Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010), 1-22; Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World:
Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c.1500-c.1800 (Yale University Press, 1995),
TBD.
July 9 - Imperial Subjects?
Readings:
Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (Harvard University Press, 2001), 1-10, 69109; Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “Subjects... Unto the Same King": New England Indians and the Use
of Royal Political Power,” Massachusetts Historical Review, vol. 5 (2003): 29-57; Nancy
Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to be Red,” The American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 3
(Jun., 1997): 625-644.
Week 2
July 14 - Colonial Slave Society
Readings:
Kathleen M. Brown, “Nathaniel Bacon and the Dilemma of Colonial Masculinity” in Gender
and the Southern Body Politic, Nancy Bercaw, ed. (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 2962; Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” The Journal of
American History, vol. 59, no. 1 (Jun., 1972): 5-29
July 16 - The British Imperial Constitution
Daniel Hulsebosch, “Imperia in Imperio: The Multiple Constitutions of Empire in New York,
1750-1777,” Law and History Review, vol. 16, no. 3 (1998): 319-79; Richter, Facing East from
Indian Country, 151-188.
Week 3
July 21 - The Empire of Goods
Assigned Reading
T. H. Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth
Century,” Past & Present, No. 119 (May, 1988): 73-104; Richter, Facing East from Indian
Country, 41-68; Timothy J. Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick,
William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1996):
13-42.
July 23 - Revolution for Empire?
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Readings:
Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 189-253; Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher,
“Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American
Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 4 (October 2011): 597-630.
Week 4
July 28 - The US Imperial Constitution
Readings:
Daniel Hulsebosch, “The Imperial Federalist: Ratification and the Creation of Constitutional
Law” in Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the
Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 203-58.
July 30 - Declarations of American Dependence
Readings:
Kariann Yokota Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial
Nation (Oxford University Press, 2011), 1-114; Michael Warner, “What's Colonial About
Colonial America?” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, Robert Blair St.
George, ed. (Cornell University Press, 2000), 49-70.
Week 5
August 4 - Demarcating Race and Extending Slavery
Final paper prompt distributed
Readings:
Yokota, Unbecoming British, 192-242; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion
and the Origins of the Deep South (Harvard University Press, 2005), [TBD].
August 6 - Empire without Subjects
Readings:
Nicole Eustace, “Demographic Strategies and the Defeat of Tecumseh” in 1812: War and the
Passions of Patriotism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 118-67; D.W Meinig, “Empire:
The Geopolitical Management of Captive Peoples” in The Shaping of America: Continental
America (Yale University Press, 1993), 170-96.
Week 6
August 11 - Towards Manifest Destiny
Readings:
Thomas R. Hietala, “American Exceptionalism, American Empire” in Manifest Design: Anxious
Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Cornell University Press, 1985), 173-214; Peter S.
Onuf, “American Exceptionalism and National Identity,” American Political Thought, vol. 1, no.
1 (Spring 2012): 77-100.
August 13 - [Last Class]
TBD
Final papers due