Syllabus: HSTY2034

Week 7: Whose Revolution?   Politics in the Early Republic

Lecture 1: Politics in the Early Republic
Lecture 2: Jeffersonian America

Tutorial: The Whiskey Rebellion

Essential Readings:

Terry Bouton, "A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania,"Journal of American History 87 (December 2000): 855-87 (Course Reader).
George Washington's Sixth Annual Message to Congress. (Course Reader).
The Diaries of George Washington, 30 September-19 October 1794. http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/whiskey/index.html

Questions:

The Whiskey Rebellion was the first major test of the federal government's power. Do you think Washington was motivated more by politics or principle?   How well do you think he handled the situation?   How did he account for the rebellion?   What were the rural insurgents' major sources of grievance?   What can this episode tell us about politics in the early republic?

Further Reading: Politics in the Early Republic:

Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era , exp. ed., Rita and Robert Kimber, trans. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001)

Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

Marshall Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

Jeffrey L. Pasley. "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

Joel H. Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Elizabeth Varon, "We Mean to Be Counted": White Women and Party Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).