This is a survey course which will give you a good understanding of how the United States as a country was shaped and constructed. For that purpose the course will take you back to 40,000 years ago, (http://www.beringia.com/), when the northern portion of the North American continent was mostly covered by ice sheets, several miles thick. It is a fascinating story of prehistoric peoples hunting big game animals. We will learn of how some Native Americans settled down in villages and built large mounds which exist to this day and of other Native Americans who were desert agriculturists. The story then moves on to the brave and desperate European migrants who fought the Native Americans for land and won, and how they enslaved Native Americans and imported more slaves from Africa. We will study the successful struggle of the colonists for independence from England leading to the creation of the United States of America and how the young nation created a model constitution that is still an inspiration for democratizing countries around the world. We will then move on to understand how the United States fulfilled its "manifest destiny" of expanding westward to extend from "sea to shining sea" with the consequent annihilation of the intervening native cultures. The course will conclude with the emergence of the United States as the dominant nation in the western hemisphere but about to tear itself apart in a bloody civil war over slavery. (http://historymatters.gmu.edu)
 

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We will try to answer significant questions such as...

• How did a few Europeans conquer the Native Americans who were living in the continent for thousands of years? Is it in the words of Pulitzer-prize-winning author, Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel? (http://www.elbo.net/read/guns.htm)

• Why did the white man regard Indians and Africans as inferior human beings from the very beginning? How did he justify his superiority to them?

• How did pre-contact Indians create a "remarkable spectrum of human cultures, societies, and historical experiences" (Paul Boyer, The Enduring Vision) without metals, wheels, domesticated animals like cattle or horse, and writing?

• Was the American Revolution radical? What do we mean by radical? Why is the US Constitution regarded as a model document when it excluded more than half the people? (Read about and the federalist papers especially Paper #10: www.shadeslanding.com/firearms/federalist.html)

• What is the legacy of the Puritans in the America of today?

• Why did the white settlers enslave the natives and Africans? How did they institutionalize slavery? How did they justify it on intellectual, biological, and religious grounds?

• Why did Americans think that it was their god-given right (manifest destiny) to conquer the entire North American continent south of the Great Lakes?

• Do we see the seeds of a Civil War between the North and South from the beginning of European settlement?

• How do Hollywood films deal with US history? Examples: Native Americans, Jefferson, Amistad.

• Women had a secondary status to men in politics, society and religion. How was their history different from men's history? What were the experiences of women who were Native Americans, puritans, slaves, free blacks, pioneers, Hispanics, southerners and slave owners?

Ten quizzes

Worth ten points each,

Three exams

Worth 100 points each, and

One "critical thinking paper"

Worth 100 points.