Course Objectives

Understand the character of the men and women who settled America and created a new nation; Appreciate the causes, effects and meaning of the American Revolution;

Examine and understand the United States Constitution;

Study the forces that both unified and divided the young Republic;

Comprehend the causes, conduct and legacy of the American Civil War.

Although we will examine the experiences of all segments of American society from colonial times through 1865, we will emphasize the major political events and figures. We will spend extra time on the American Revolutionary War and Civil War periods and will study the United States Constitution in considerable detail. At the end of the course students should have a deeper understanding of America and its people, a fuller appreciation of how this nation has been shaped by its past, and realistic expectations for America 's future.

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INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.”

—Patrick Henry, 1775

“If you don't know history, you don't know anything; you're a leaf that doesn't know it's part of a tree.”

—Michael Crichton in Timeline

“A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia. —David McCullough

“History is our collective memory. If we are deprived of our memory we are in danger of becoming a large, dangerous idiot, thrashing blindly about, with only the dimmest understanding of the ideals and principles that formed us as a people, and that we have constantly to reinterpret and affirm if we are to preserve a sense of our own identity.”

—Page Smith, from A People's History of the United States

Why Study History?

Henry Ford once said, "History is more or less bunk." To an industrialist who revolutionized the automobile industry by discarding old methods and creating new ones, the past may have seemed irrelevant. But it is clear that Henry Ford understood thoroughly what had occurred in industrial America before his time when he developed the assembly line and produced an automobile that most working Americans could afford. Whether he was aware of it or not, Henry Ford used his understanding of the past to create a better future. (In fact, what Henry Ford really meant was that history as being taught in the early 1900s was bunk.)

Ford's opinion aside, history is about understanding. It would be easy to say that "in these critical times" we need to know more about our history as a nation. But even a cursory study of America's past reveals that relatively few periods in our history have not found us in the midst of one crisis or another—economic, constitutional, political, or military. We have often used the calm times to prepare for the inevitable storms, and in those calm times we ought to try to predict when the next storm will arise, or at least consider how we might cope with it.

Because the best predictor of the future is the record of the past, we can learn much of value even when the need for such learning is not immediately apparent. Once the inevitable crisis is upon us, it may be difficult to reflect soberly on what we can learn from the past. As philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said, "Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help." A modern version of that dictum, often used in a military context, goes something like this: "It's hard to remember that your mission is to drain the swamp when you're up to your butt in alligators." In any case, without looking backward, we may find the road ahead quite murky.

No matter how much American history keeps presenting us with trying new situations, we discover from looking backward even to colonial times that we have met comparable challenges before. Conditions change, technology provides new resources, populations grow and shift, and new demographics alter the face of America. Yet no matter how much we change as a nation, we are still influenced by our past. The Puritans, the early settlers, founding fathers, pioneer men and women, Blacks, Native Americans, Chinese laborers, Hispanics, Portuguese, eastern Europeans, Jews, Muslims, Vietnamese—all kinds of Americans from our recent and distant past—still speak to us in clear voices about their contributions to the character of this great nation and the ways in which we have tried to resolve differences among ourselves and with the rest of the world.

Everything we are and hope to be as Americans is rooted in our past. Our religious, political, social and economic development proceeded according to a pattern—whether random or cyclical—and those patterns are intelligible to us when we study our heritage. The men who wrote our timeless Constitution, the most profound political document ever produced by man, were acutely aware of what had gone before as they fashioned a document that would serve millions of Americans yet unborn. The power of our form of government comes from the fact that our fathers took the best of the past and built upon it.

Our success as a nation depends on how well we know ourselves, and that knowledge can only come from knowing our history. Without hindsight we are blind to the future; without comprehending our past—the positive and negative aspects—we can never truly know where we want to go. History is an essential element of the chain of events that defines our road ahead. As the quotations at the top of this section suggest, we are all part of the American tree, and its roots go very deep.