This course offers undergraduate students a broad survey of the history of North America and later the United States from c.1600 - 1865.

Our story begins with the colonization of North America by the Spanish, English, and French in the early seventeenth century and ends with a cataclysmic civil war in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. We will trace the evolution of these European colonial outposts in North America, and in particular the British settlements, as colonists created settler societies that unexpectedly produced a new nation called the United States. We will then follow this new people who called themselves "Americans" as they attempted to create a new republican society in the nineteenth century, only to see it nearly collapse in the 1860s.

This story encompasses a number of people. We will meet European colonists who settled the continent, Native American peoples who grappled with white settler expansion, African slaves who powered part of the colonial and later national American economy, and individuals such as Powhatan, George Washington, Frederick Douglas, Mary Rowlandson, Solomon Northup, Tenskwatawa, Judith Sargent Murray, Andrew Jackson, Peggy Eaton, Ulysses S. Grant, and Elizabeth Van Lew. All of them contributed to the formation of cultural, social, and political worlds that shaped this history.

Our challenge for the term is to forget we know how this story begins and how it ends. We will spend as much time asking why events happened as they did, as we will in learning what happened. Students will read and view a number of primary sources including letters, maps, paintings, material objects, and works of literature to achieve both goals.