American Studies
Voices, Conscience, and Conflict: From Contact to Reconstruction
Course Description
This course traces American literature and historical experience from Indigenous and colonial origins through the Civil War and Reconstruction, organized around a recurring set of tensions: covenant versus conquest, individual conscience versus the state, self-reliance versus social order, and competing claims to the meaning of liberty.
The class is run as a Harkness seminar: students, not the instructor, drive discussion around a shared table. The goals of this method are to deepen engagement with primary texts, build the habit of collaborative (rather than purely individual) insight, draw connections across sources and time periods, practice multiple analytical lenses (historical, rhetorical, theological, literary), and develop independent critical thinking and the confidence to test ideas aloud.
This course is also designed to build the foundational skills — close reading, document analysis, argumentation, historical contextualization — needed to excel in AP U.S. History, AP European History, AP World History, AP English Language & Composition, AP English Literature, and AP Comparative Government and Politics.
Methods & Student Responsibilities
- Annotation: All assigned readings must be annotated in advance of class; annotations are subject to spot-check.
- Written work: Regular short written responses, due before or after each class.
- Presentations & debate: Each class includes a presentation or formal debate exercise tied to that day’s material; students should expect to prepare and deliver arguments, not just discuss informally.
- Participation: Harkness discussion depends on preparation. Students are expected to arrive ready to lead, not just respond.
Assessment & Academic Integrity
In keeping with current trends in higher education, this course limits — and where possible eliminates — reliance on AI tools for graded work. Mastery is assessed primarily through:
- In-class blue book quizzes (closed-book, handwritten)
- Oral examinations
These formats ensure that the thinking and the writing are the student’s own.
Classroom Policy
Smartphones are not permitted during class, except in the case of a genuine emergency.
Class-by-Class Schedule
Each class is organized by theme, required readings, discussion questions, and a debate or presentation activity.
July 7
Creation, Contact, and CovenantPre-contact through early colonial settlement
- The Iroquois Creation Story (p. 32)
- Christopher Columbus, Letter of Discovery (p. 45)
- John Smith, from The General History of Virginia, Book III, Ch. 2, “What Happened till the First Supply” (p. 56)
- John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (p. 93)
- The Iroquois Creation Story and Winthrop’s sermon both describe a people called into being for a higher purpose. How does each text define “chosenness,” and what obligations does it impose on the community?
- Columbus and Smith write to persuade audiences back in Europe. What rhetorical strategies do they use to frame the “New World” and its inhabitants, and how do those strategies shape who appears to have a rightful claim to the land?
July 9
Hellfire and Reason — The Great Awakening Meets the Self-Made Man1740s, Great Awakening and Enlightenment
- Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (p. 192)
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Part 1 (p. 221)
- Edwards depicts human beings as utterly dependent on God’s mercy, suspended over the pit. Franklin depicts a self that improves itself through discipline and habit. What competing visions of human agency and free will do these texts offer?
- Both writers are trying to reform their audience’s behavior. How do their methods differ — terror versus anecdote and persuasion — and which strikes you as more distinctly “American”?
July 14
The Architecture of VirtueFranklin’s project of self-invention
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Part 2 (p. 268)
- Franklin organizes his self-improvement plan around a discrete, list-able set of virtues. What are the benefits and the limitations of trying to systematize moral character this way?
- Franklin admits to falling short of his own virtue project even as he promotes it as a model for others. Does that admission strengthen or undermine his authority as a moral guide?
July 16
Whose Common Sense? Revolution and Resistance in Two Voices1770s, eve of and during the Revolution
- Thomas Paine, Common Sense (p. 339)
- Pontiac, “Speech at Detroit” (p. 479)
- Both Paine and Pontiac call their audiences to resist an empire. How do their arguments for resistance differ in their use of reason, religion, and appeals to natural rights?
- Paine imagines America as the world’s best hope for liberty; Pontiac speaks for a people facing displacement by that same expanding settler society. How does reading these speeches together complicate the traditional story of the Revolution as a story of “liberty”?
July 21
Self-Reliance and Its ShadowsAmerican Renaissance, 1830s–50s
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (p. 596)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (p. 668)
- Emerson urges readers to trust their own intuition over tradition and convention. How does Hawthorne’s story test or complicate Emerson’s faith in the individual conscience?
- Both writers are deeply concerned with the legacy of Puritanism studied earlier in the course (Winthrop, Edwards). Where does each affirm, and where does each depart from, that inheritance?
July 23
Voices from BondageAbolition and women’s rights, 1840s–60s
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Slave Singing at Midnight” (p. 709)
- Sojourner Truth, Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, OH (p. 832)
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (p. 879–894)
- Longfellow, Sojourner Truth, and Jacobs each represent the experience of slavery from a different vantage point and in a different form — poem, oral speech, written memoir. How does form shape what each can say and how persuasively?
- Sojourner Truth links the oppression of enslaved people to the oppression of women. Where else in these three texts do you see overlapping or intersecting claims to dignity and rights?
July 28
Conscience Against the StateAntebellum reform and resistance
- Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (p. 1066)
- Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government” (p. 903)
- Both writers argue that individual conscience holds higher authority than the law of the state. How does each ground that authority, and how persuasive do you find each justification?
- Douglass directly indicts the nation’s founding celebration as hypocrisy; Thoreau argues for quiet, principled non-cooperation. Which strategy of resistance do you think is more effective, and why?
July 30
A Nation Forged in FireCivil War and its meaning
- Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Chapters XVII, XXIV, XXV, XXX (Project Gutenberg)
- Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address” (p. 801)
- Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!” (Poetry Foundation)
- Grant’s memoir, Lincoln’s address, and Whitman’s elegy each try to make sense of mass death for a national audience. How does each text’s form — memoir, oration, allegorical poem — shape the meaning it makes?
- Lincoln speaks of a “new birth of freedom,” while Whitman mourns a fallen captain even as the ship reaches port safely. What tension between national triumph and personal or collective loss runs through all three texts?
August 4
Bartleby and the MachineIndustrial and bureaucratic modernity
- Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (p. 1157)
- Bartleby’s refrain “I would prefer not to” is neither compliance nor open rebellion. What kind of resistance is this, and how does it differ from the civil disobedience of Thoreau or the moral outrage of Douglass studied earlier in the course?
- The narrator-lawyer sympathizes with Bartleby but is ultimately unable, or unwilling, to truly help him. What does the story suggest about the limits of sympathy within a system built around efficiency and productivity?
August 6
Interior Lives — Dickinson’s Private Rebellion and Alcott’s Domestic IdealPostbellum poetry and domestic fiction
- Emily Dickinson, “Success is counted sweetest” (p. 1250), “I tasted a liquor never brewed” (p. 1252), “The Bible is an antique Volume” (p. 1270)
- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Part II, Chapter IV (p. 1306)
- Dickinson’s poems quietly subvert religious certainty and conventional notions of “success,” often from within a private, domestic world. Where in Alcott’s chapter do you see a similar tension between an inner self and the social roles available to women?
- Both writers work largely within the domestic sphere assigned to 19th-century women. Does that setting limit, or actually enable, the insight and critique each writer offers?
