This one-time-only course examines U.S. history from 1776 to the present, in advance of the nation’s semiquincentennial (or 250th birthday) in 2026. Taught jointly by Professors Joanne Freeman, David Blight, and Beverly Gage, the course emphasizes the history of the nation-state and the contested nature of American national identity. All three scholars will deliver the course’s first and final lectures together, as an introduction and a wrap-up. In between, they will each deliver eight lectures individually based on their areas of expertise.
Joanne Freeman, the Alan Boles, Class of 1929 Professor of History and American Studies, and an expert in the revolutionary and early national periods of American history, will cover the period from the Revolution up through the 1830s, touching on such topics as the birth of party politics, the nature of “Jacksonian democracy,” and the rise of the reform and protest movements.
David Blight, Sterling Professor of History and African American Studies and one of the country’s foremost authorities on the history of slavery and the Civil War, will cover the Civil War era up through Reconstruction and the emergence of the Jim Crow laws.
Beverly Gage, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, who is currently writing a book on the nation’s past to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, will pick up in the 1890s and continue through the end of the 20th century, addressing debates around immigration, wealth inequality, and the creation of the social welfare state.
The course explores U.S. political history broadly conceived–not just as a realm of presidents and elections and wars (though there will be plenty of those) but as a conversation across time between citizens about what the United States is, was, and was meant to be. It proceeds from the premise that the American Revolution was the first but not the last radical act of national reimagining in U.S. history.