WEEK TWO: Encountering the New World	READINGS: Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590) NOTE: Read the 1590 text, and look at the illustrations	QUESTIONS What did Harriot find in the New World? What was Harriot looking for? How did Harriot see, and represent, what he found?
	WEEK THREE: Cultural Contact	READINGS: Giovanni da Verrazzano to Francis I (July 8, 1524) Jacques Cartier's First Account of the New Land, Called New France, Discovered in the Year 1534 The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Seas (1579)	QUESTIONS How did Native Americans perceive Europeans? How did the Europeans perceive, and represent, Native Americans? What do Native American requests that Europeans heal the sick suggest about how they saw the explorers? What does the response of Europeans suggest about how they perceived Native Americans? What do the goods that Native Americans traded for suggest about how they saw Europeans? What does the response of Europeans suggest about how they perceived Native Americans? What does the help that Native Americans offered Europeans suggest about how the two groups saw each other?
	WEEK FOUR: Racism	READINGS: Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), 107-137 Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 316-337 Selected Virginia Statutes relating to Slavery	QUESTIONS In what way did white Virginians perceive African slaves, according to Morgan, before the development of racism? Why did they change their view to emphasize race? How did early Virginians use law to express racial difference legally, incorporate it into the social order, and endow it with legal, economic and social meaning? Why, according to Brown, did those laws first focus on African women?
	WEEK FIVE: Revivals	READINGS: Benjamin Franklin Listens to His Friend George Whitefield, 1739 A George Whitefield Sermon: Marriage of Cana (1742) A Newspaper Account of the Expulsion of James Davenport (1742) The Reverend Charles Woodmason views the Backcountry in the 1760s Frank Lambert, "'Pedlar in Divinity': George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, 1737-1745," Journal of American History 77 (1990): 812-837	QUESTIONS Why did some Americans respond to religious revivals? How important were the commercial revolution and the spread of the market to the success of Whitefield's evangelical mission? Why did religious revivals appear dangerous to some Americans? What impact did religious revival have on the lives of ordinary Americans?
	WEEK SIX: Getting Ready for Revolution: Benjamin Franklin	READINGS: Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography NOTE: Read at least the first 7 chapters   Another version of the Autobiography -- maybe easier to read on-line	QUESTIONS What was the key to Franklin's success in "emerg[ing] from the Poverty and Obscurity in which [he] was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World?" What does Franklin's account of his life and success suggest about why his generation of American colonists became revolutionaries? Is there any relationship between his experience of business and commerce and his political ideas?
	WEEK SEVEN: Ordinary Americans Revolt: George Hewes	READINGS: Alfred Young, "George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742-1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 38 (1981): 561-623	QUESTIONS What transformed the shoemaker George Hewes into a political man, an angry, assertive participant in the beginnings of the American Revolution? Can Hewes' experience explain the transformation of other ordinary Americans into participants in the Revolution? What did the Revolution mean to Hewes?
	WEEK EIGHT: Was the Constitution a counter-revolution?	READINGS: How Close a Union?: Debating Federal vs. Consolidated Government Patrick Henry Brutus No. 15 Sam Adams VS James Wilson James Madison, Federalist No. 39 Representation: Debating who should represent the people John Adams 1776 John Adams 1787 VS Federal Farmer No. 7 Melancton Smith The Bill of Rights: Debating how great the restraints on the power of government should be Federal Farmer No. 16 Robert Whitehill James Madison Alexander Hamilton Saul Cornell, "Aristocracy Assailed: The Ideology of Backcountry Anti-Federalism," Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1148-1172.	QUESTIONS: Did the Constitution give sufficient power to state and local governments? Did the people get representatives able to represent them? Did the Constitution place sufficient restraints on the government's power? How, according to Cornell, did the answers elite and common Anti-Federalists offered to these questions differ?
	WEEK NINE: Minstrel Shows	READINGS: Eric Lott, "'The Seeming Counterfeit': Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy," American Quarterly 43, 2 (1991): 223-254 Blackface Minstrelsy 1830-1852: Images, Songs, Texts, Reviews, Advertisements	QUESTIONS: How were African-Americans portrayed in Minstrel shows? What is Lott's alternative to a view of minstrel shows as either authentic representations of African-American culture or simply racist, inauthentic white counterfeits of African-American culture? Why were minstrel shows so popular in the early nineteenth century? What ambivalence does Lott find in the response of white working-class men to minstrel shows? What does that ambivalence suggest about broader working-class responses to racial politics and abolition?
	WEEK TEN: Slave Narratives and Gender	READINGS: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself or Another on-line text, with annotations or A basic text NOTE: Concentrate on the 1st six chapters of Jacobs If you find it hard to read these texts on-line, copies are also in Special Reserve	QUESTIONS: What does Frederick Douglass' account of his life tell us about the experience of slavery? What are the crucial moments in his rejection of his status as a slave? What does the style and presentation of Douglass' autobiography tells about Northern white understandings of slavery and race, and black experiences of freedom? Compare Harriet Jacobs' experience of slavery, and the style and presentation of her autobiography, to that of Douglass: What difference does gender make?
	WEEK ELEVEN: Female Moral Reformers	READINGS: "What was the Appeal of Moral Reform to Antebellum Northern Women?"	QUESTIONS: How did moral reform appeal to Northern women's sense of their gender role? How did the movement attract younger women not involved in earlier female reform activity? What about the activities pursued by moral reformers might have appealed to women? How radical was the moral reform movement? Do you think the documents support the argument that it was a precursor to the first wave of feminism later in the nineteenth century?
	WEEK TWELVE: Abolitionist and Anti-abolitionist Images	READINGS: Abolitionist and Anti-Abolitionist Images	QUESTIONS: How did Abolitionists represent slavery? How did Anti-abolitionists represent slavery, and the consequences of its abolition? How are African-Americans represented in these images? What do the images tell us about the attitudes of the Americans to which the abolitionists and their opponents were appealing?
	WEEK THIRTEEN: Photographing War	READINGS: Alan Trachtenberg, "Albums of War," in Reading American Photographs: Image as History from Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York, 1989), 71-118. Examples of Civil War Photographs	QUESTIONS: What image of the Civil War did Brady's photographs convey to mid-nineteenth century Americans? How did photographers use albums to try to shape the meaning of their photographs? What image of the Civil War do they convey now?