JOHN SAILLANT, HISTORY 197K
BROWN UNIVERSITY, SEMESTER I, 1993-1994
FRIDAY, 3:00-5:30
September 10, 1993: Definitions: Race, Religion, Ideology, and Early America
September 17, 1993: Expansion, Civilization, and Savagism
September 24, 1993: "The Spiritual Exercises" of the European Encounter with American Indians.
Reading: Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit against the Wilderness (New York: Viking Press, 1981).
October 1, 1993: Indians in the "Divine Providence" of Christian History.
Reading: Mitchell Robert Breitwieser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724, Ed. Alden T. Vaughn and Edward W. Clark (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 31-75.
October 8, 1993: Race and Captivity in a Liminal Zone.
Reading: June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
October 15, 1993: Cultures and Conversions in French, British, and Indian North America.
Reading: James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
October 22, 1993: Race and Enlightenment, I: Noble Savage or the Other? Reading: Robert Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978), 33-80; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984; in French 1982), 127-254.
October 29, 1993: Slavery in History:
Reading: David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
November 5, 1993: The Origins of American Slavery
Reading: Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).
November 12, 1993: Race and Enlightenment, II: Science, Sentiment, and Color.
Reading: Gordon S. Wood, "Revolution," "Enlightenment," "Benevolence," in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 169-225. Tzvetan Todorov, "Races," in On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 90-170. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, chs. VIII, XIII, XIV, XVII, XVIII.
November 19, 1993: Republicanism Black and White, I: Race and Revolution
Reading: Gary Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison: Madison House, 1990). David Brion Davis, "The Emancipation of America," in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 255-342.
First draft of essays due in class.
December 3, 1993: Republicanism Black and White, II: Race and Liberty
Reading: Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). John Saillant, "Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins of Black Theology, 1776-1801," Religion and American Culture 2 (1992): 79-102.
December 6, 1993:
Reading period begins.
December 10, 1993:
Final essays due in class.
Each student will also be responsible for an oral presentation that begins with the weekly reading and extends it into other material, usually an original text (or selections from one) or a set of images. This material can be chosen in consultation with the instructor.
[This class produced some very fine student papers on topics ranging from the violence of women in captivity narratives (which won its author a prize at Brown), to the economics of slavery in Virginia and in Haiti, to Quaker antislavery thought, to the role of race in William Simms's The Yemassee. All undergraduates, most of the students were junior or senior concentrators in History. This course also tolerated my first experiment in creating an on-line component for a course, an electronic "seminar" I formed by pooling the e-mail addresses of all concerned in the class into a mailing list. It provided a forum for asking questions, offering information, and warming up the class for presentations.]
Information provider:
Unit: H-Net program at UIC History Department
Email: H-Net@uicvm.uic.edu
Posted: 8 Sep 1994
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