History 80000
Autumn 2013
Martin J. Burke
MBurke1@gc.cuny.edu
The Literature of American History I: to 1865
Topics and Readings:
I. Colonial Encounters, Exchanges and Empires
Required:
J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (2006)
Recommended:
Robert Applebaum and John W. Sweet, eds. Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making
of the North Atlantic World (2005)
David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 2nd ed. (2009)
Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds. Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the
Americas, 1500-1820 (2002)
Jack P. Greene, Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity
(2013)
April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (2004)
Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds. The Creation of the British Atlantic World (2005)
James S. Pritchard, In Search of Empire: the French in the Americas, 1670-1730 (2004)
Jean B. Russo and J. Elliott Russo, Planting an Empire: the Early Chesapeake in British North
America (2012)
Alan Taylor, Colonial America: a Very Short Introduction (2013)
II. Natives and Newcomers in North America
Required:
Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: a Native History of Early America (2001)
Recommended:
Kathleen Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775 (2009)
Karen Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (2000)
Gail MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire
(2013)
Daniel Richter, Trade, Land and Power: the Struggle for Eastern North America (2013)
_____, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (2011)
Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (2009)
Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: the Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (2010)
Cynthia Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations: the Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America,
1580-1660 (2008)
Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early America (2011)
III. Colonial Societies and Cultures: European Settlers on the East Coast
Required:
Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (2006)
Recommended:
Francis Bremer, John Davenport: a Puritan in Three Worlds (2012)
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_____, First Founders: American Puritanism and Puritans in an Atlantic World (2012)
Joseph Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (2006)
Bruce Daniels. New England Nation: the Country the Puritans Built (2012)
David Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England
(2012)
Eric Hindenraker and Peter Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: the Backcountry in British North America
(2003)
Ned C. Landsman, Crossroads of Empire: the Middle Colonies in British North America (2010)
Donna Merwick, Stuyvesant Bound: an Essay on Loss Across Time (2013)
Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims and a City Upon a Hill (2012)
IV. Africans and the Americas: Slavery in the Atlantic World
Required:
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: a Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007)
Recommended:
Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (2012)
David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000)
David Eltis, Frank Lewis, Kenneth Sokoloff, eds. Slavery in the Development of the Americas (2004)
Alan Gally, ed. Indian Slavery in Colonial America (2010)
Linda Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the
Americas, 1585-1660 (2007)
Russell Menard, Migrants, Servants and Slaves: Unfree Labor in Colonial British America (2001)
Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: a Short History (2001)
Anthony Parent, Foul Means: the Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (2003)
Peter Wood, Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (2003)
V. Colonials, Commerce and Culture: The Creation of Eighteenth-Century British North America
Required:
Jon Butler, Becoming America: the Revolution before 1776 (2001)
Recommended:
Virginia De John Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America
(2004)
T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence
(2004)
James Drake, The Nation's Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of
America (2011)
Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (2011)
Peter Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (2003)
Mary Beth Norton, Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World
(2011)
Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, eds. Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America (2006)
Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (2011)
Serena Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (2009)
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VI. Resistance, Rebellion and Revolution: the Unmaking of British North America
Required:
Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: the Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776
(2006)
Recommended:
Benjamin Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: the Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (2010)
Douglas Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (2009)
Benjamin Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: the Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors
(2011)
Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (2009)
Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution (2006)
Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties that Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (2009)
Eran Shalev, Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American
Republic (2009)
Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (2004)
Kariann Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America became a Postcolonial Nation (2010)
VII. Novus Ordo Seclorum?
Required:
Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: a History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (2011)
Recommended:
Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 17741804 (2009)
Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine's America: the Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic
(2011)
Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (2001)
Paul Johnson, The Early American Republic, 1789-1829 (2007)
Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship
(2008)
Darren Staloff, Hamilton, Adams Jefferson: the Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding
(2005)
Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies
(2011)
Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (2010)
Rosemary Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (2007)
VIII. Democratic Vistas
Required:
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) [chaps. 1-16]
Recommended:
Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (2006)
David Ericson, Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791-1861
(2011)
Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s
(2008)
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Stephen Harnett, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (2002)
Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: the Early American Republic in a British World (2010)
Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery and the Louisiana Purchase
(2003)
Mark Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (2005)
Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: the Language of American Nationhood (2000)
Samuel J. Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors: the Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier,
1821-1846 (2013)
IX. Property and Power in Antebellum America
Required:
Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy [chaps. 17-25, Epilogue]
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007)
[chaps. 1-11]
Recommended:
David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: the Material Culture of Early America (2011)
Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: a Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking
Collapse (2008)
John L. Larson, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition and the Eclipse of the Common
Good (2010)
_____, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the
Early United States (2000)
Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: the Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (2012)
Bruce Mann, A Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (2002)
Steven Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States
(2007)
Sharon Murphy, Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (2010)
Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith, eds. Capitalism Takes Command: the Social Transformation of
Nineteenth-Century America (2012)
X. Notions of the (Antebellum) Americans
Required:
Howe, What Hath God Wrought [chaps. 12-20, Finale]
Recommended:
Timothy Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America
(2008)
James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: the American Path to a Modern Self and Society (2002)
Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public After the Revolution (2009)
Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education and Public Life in America’s Republic
(2008)
Timothy Mason, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (2009)
Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (2003)
Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death and Memory in Barnum’s America (2001)
Carl J. Richard, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United
States (2009)
Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion and Antebellum America (2008)
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IX. The Anomalies of American Slavery
Required:
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006)
Recommended:
Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (2011)
Steven Doyle, Carry Me Back: the Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2005)
Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: the Slavery Question in the Old South (2009)
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013)
_____, ed. The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (2004)
Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005)
Calvin Schemerhorn, Money Over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper
South (2011)
John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2001)
Steven Woodworth, Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War
(2010)
XII. American Armageddon: the End of the First Republic
Required:
Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)
Recommended:
Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (2011)
John Ashworth, The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861 (2012)
Edward Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (2005)
David Blight, Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory (2001)
Andre Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: the American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (2012)
Gary Gallagher, Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty (2013)
Michael Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil
War (2004)
Mark Neely, The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (2007)
Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War
(2006)
Assignments:
August 28: Organizational Meeting
September 4: No class meeting. CUNY closed.
September 11: Elliott
September 18: Richter
September 25: Merwick
October 2: Smallwood
October 9: Butler
October 16: McConville
October 23: Wood
October 30: Wilentz [chaps. 1-16]
November 6: Wilentz [chaps. 17-25, Epilogue]; Howe [chaps. 1-11]
November 13: Howe [chaps. 12-20, Finale]
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November 20: Davis
November 27: No class meeting. Classes follow a Friday schedule.
December 4: Faust
December 11: Conspectus and Conclusion.
In addition to the assigned readings, course requirements include weekly short papers and a final
examination. Expectations and guidelines for the essays and the examination will be provided in separate
handouts. The questions for the final will be distributed at the last meeting of class; the completed
examinations will be due by the end of the examination period.
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