Led by: Prof. Alan Taylor (University of Virginia)
Course Number: AMHI 630
Semesters: Summer 2024
Image: Joseph Laing, Inauguration of Gen. George Washington, published by William Blackman, New York, NY, ca. 1870s (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC04723)
This course explores the American struggle to establish a republic on a national scale. We will examine the politics, economy, social structure, and culture of the union created by the American Revolution and the bitter but creative debates over the meaning of the Revolution and the proper form of republican government. We will explore the lives of men and women: rich and poor, enslaved and free, Indian and settler. Because contemporary America owes much to the conflicts and compromises, accomplishments and failures of the early republic, understanding that period will deepen your perspective on our place in time.
Lecture 1: “The Federal Constitution”
Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History, University of Virginia
A specialist in the early history of the United States, Alan Taylor has written extensively about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution, and the early American Republic. He has received two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize and is the winner of the 2022 New-York Historical Society Book Prize in American History for American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 (2021).
The views expressed in the course descriptions and lectures are those of the lead scholars.