Joseph Brant by Gilbert Stuart, London, 1786
Welcome! I hope you all had an enjoyable winter break. I wanted to let you know about a few items before we meet on Tuesday, January 31, at 8:00 am in Whitehead 517.
1) Please download a PDF of the course syllabus here and review it before the first class. We will go over it together, but it would be good to look it over beforehand.
2) There are three books required for this class, which will be available at the Brooklyn College bookstore shortly (you can also click on each title to be taken to the Amazon page for each):
- Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, Volume I: To 1877, Sixth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.
- Douglass, Frederick and David W. Blight, ed. Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, with Related Documents, Second Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
- Wallace, Anthony F.C. The Long, Bitter Trail. New York: Hill & Wang, 1993.
3) Lastly, you also have a very brief assignment for the first class. (No worries–it doesn’t require any reading!) Using the “Leave a Comment” function above, name one issue, theme, or event in American history (up through the Civil War) that you hope to learn more about in this course. Explain why you find this issue/theme/event important, troublesome, or hard to understand. Everyone in the course is required to provide an answer of at least a paragraph. Ideally, you should follow the guidelines for posting on the course website which you find here, or on pages three and four of the syllabus.
AMERICA TO 1877 