Syllabus: HSTY2034

Week 5: Severing the Bonds of Empire

Lecture 1: Revivalism
Lecture 2: From Resistance to Revolution

Tutorial: The Boston Massacre

Essential Readings:

Anonymous Account of the Boston Massacre (Course Reader)
Article from Boston Gazette and Country Journal , March 12, 1770. (Course Reader).
Account of the Boston Massacre by Capt. Thomas Preston, 13 March 1770. (Course Reader).
Oration concerning the Boston Massacre delivered in Boston on April 1771 by James Lovell (Course Reader)
Oration concerning the Boston Massacre delivered in Boston on March 1774 by John Hancock (Course Reader) 

Questions:       

What can the first two sources tell us about attitudes toward Britain at this time? Which account do you find the most convincing and why?   Now look at the two orations. Do they share anything in common (concerns, metaphors, etc.)   According to Hancock, what are the different ways in which the British attempted to enslave the colonists?   Noting down all of the adjectives Hancock uses to describe his countrymen, explain what he sees as a representative American.    How does Lovell define slavery and freedom?   Think about these two orations in light of the Edmund Morgan article we read last week.   Do they reinforce or challenge Morgan's arguments?  

Further Reading: The American Revolution

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

T.H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

T.H. Breen, "Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution," William & Mary Quarterly , 3d ser., 50 (1993): 471-501.

Edward Countryman, The American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985).

Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Jack P. Greene, Understanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995).

Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972).

Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992). If you want to read excellent critical reviews of this controversial book, see William & Mary Quarterly 3d ser., vol. 51 (October 1994).

Further Reading: Gender in the Revolutionary Era

Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).

Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language and Patriarchal Politics (New York, 1988).

Optional Assignments:

Watch the 1985 film Revolution directed by Hugh Hudson; starring Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, and Nastassja Kinski.   Or take a look at The Patriot, released in 2000.   Directed by Roland Emmerich, starring Mel Gibson.  

For those unwilling to sit through a Mel Gibson film, why not do your reading for class while listening to some folk music of the American Revolution: http://members.aol.com/bobbyj164/mrev.htm

Alternatively, read an excerpt from Jefferson's autobiography describing the days leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence - one of the most important documents ever written. http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/account/index.htm