Grade 8
This course provides the opportunity to engage with critical historical questions about the position and role of women in the new American republic and about the struggle to redefine relations of power between the genders. In ways that are not well understood, these matters of women and gender were central, not marginal, to the ongoing transformation of American life in the nineteenth century: to the emerging and highly contested sphere of democratic politics in the aftermath of the Revolution; to the imperial ambitions of the United States on the continent and abroad; to the struggle over slavery, emancipation, Civil War, and race that launched the second republic (as we might think of it); and to the new political economy and culture of industrializing America.