POL S 318 A: American Political Thought from the Colonial Era to the Civil War

American Political Thought from the Colonial Era to the Civil War

This course surveys American political thought from the colonial era to the Civil War. Topics include the meaning and consequences of the first encounters between American Indians and Europeans; Puritan and Quaker conceptions of conscience, community, and liberty; work, political economy, and the idea of the “self-made” man in the eighteenth century; the ideology of the American revolution; debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution; the relationship between power and property; Jeffersonian republicanism and Jacksonian democracy; the market revolution, class conflict, and racial identities; democratic culture; the conflict over slavery; the gendered dimensions of citizenship; and the relationship between freedom, the rule of law, and popular sovereignty. Readings from John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, William Apess, Maria Stewart, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abraham Lincoln, and others.

APT 1 Syllabus - Spring 2023.pdf