How and why did thirteen small colonies break away from one of the world’s most powerful empires, and what kind of nation did they build in the process? This course introduces students to the history of the American Revolution, from the Seven Years’ War through the ratification of the Constitution. We will explore how imperial conflict, political ideas, economic change, warfare, and social upheaval combined to transform thirteen British colonies into an independent United States. We will pay particular attention to the diverse experiences of revolution: not only those of famous leaders, but also of ordinary men and women, Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and Loyalists. Students will consider the Revolution as both a struggle for independence and a civil war; as a story of democratic promise and profound exclusion; and as part of a wider age of revolutions that reshaped the Atlantic world. As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, the course also invites students to reflect on how Americans and others have remembered, commemorated, and contested the Revolution across four centuries.
Penn Courses Relating to America 250 Themes
Penn students have a wide range of Revolutionary-themed courses to choose from, on science, storytelling, slavery, women, economics, race, and culture. Below are courses available for the 2026 spring semester.
Students, please note that individual classes may require applications or may have already reached capacity. Check each description in the course catalog for the most up-to-date information.
Accordion List
This course will analyse the forms, contexts, and politics surrounding protest print forms produced by anticolonial movements. This critical-creative seminar will focus on genres like the newspaper, the cultural journal and the political pamphlet as sites for the forging of revolutionary culture, alternative aesthetics, and global south political theory. While research on decolonisation is largely focused on canonical figures like Nehru or Nkrumah, and key historical events like the Bandung Conference, periodicals offer a broader view into revolutionary struggles that can spotlight the communities, institutions, and public intellectuals who made these historical transformations possible. The syllabus will take a comparative and transnational approach, drawing examples from publications active in 20th century movements across a range of contexts including colonial India, Apartheid-era South Africa and the civil rights years in America to discuss the ways in which magazines translated and re-imagined concepts like socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, freedom, or democracy within regional contexts, and catalysed experiments in art, political education, and print. Texts covered will include Eric Bulson’s Little Magazine, World Form to theorise the place of the periodical in Global South contexts, and Olivia Harrison’s monograph on the Arabic and French political magazine published in 1960s Morocco, Souffles-Anfas. Students will also study primary material, specifically the periodicals themselves, like the journal Umkhonto We Sizwe/ Dawn, the organ of the militant wing of the African National Congress in Apartheid-era South Africa, and Lotus, the Afro-Asian magazine published in Cairo. Assignments will push students to closely engage with the form of the revolutionary periodical and include weekly posts analysing or engaging a particular aesthetic or textual element, e.g., a political cartoon, or letters to the editor, or a table of contents. A couple of sessions will be dedicated to guest lectures by practitioners, editors and political organisers involved with contemporary radical magazines like Public-action, a magazine associated with the Fees Must Fall movement in South Africa. The final project will be a critical-creative project that can take the shape of a zine, an annotated archival reproduction, a digital teaching tool, a walking tour, or any other medium that can be developed in consultation with the instructor.
As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches in 2026, the question of how we commemorate it seems a whole lot more complex than it did in 1976, when the nation celebrated its 200th birthday. Partly, this complexity lies in the very different views of the American Revolution held by academic historians and the wider public. While most scholars have spent the last forty years researching the Revolution through the eyes of ordinary people, the public’s appetite is often for stories about America’s great heroes and Founding Fathers. This research seminar will introduce you to these competing viewpoints, giving you the opportunity to conduct original research into Revolutionary-era Philadelphians, whose lives are documented in the rich collections of manuscripts held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. At the end of semester you will have written an original research paper, grounded in primary sources you have unearthed at the Historical Society. In doing so you will confront some of the most important questions preoccupying Revolutionary historians today: What can these individual stories tell us about the American Revolution? How can we reconcile their very different narratives? And how can we interpret them for those Americans who haven’t had the opportunity to read them first-hand?
This course explores the social and political currents in Philadelphia during the revolution by focusing on the writer Thomas Paine.
Did ideas in print make the American Revolution? Is it possible that Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense converted colonists in the spring of 1776 to independence? Is there something particular about the pamphlet or the city of Philadelphia that made the idea of the United States possible? In this class, students will start to ask if a text can really make a change, while they create texts themselves. Class will involve field trips to archival sites throughout Philadelphia as well as printing and papermaking. We will read and study Common Sense and other pro-and anti-Revolutionary texts to begin thinking about what makes a text work to change minds.
Thinking about the forthcoming anniversary of the 1776 American Revolution, this seminar will pay particular attention to the relationship between the successive eighteenth-century revolutions (in colonial America, in old regime France, in Haiti) and books or other texts that (supposedly) contributed to the expectation for a radical rupture with the old political and social order.
In this course we will consider the writing, publication, and reading of texts created on both sides of the Atlantic in early modern times, from the era of Gutenberg to that of Franklin, and in many languages. The seminar will be held in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in Van Pelt Library and make substantial use of its exceptional, multilingual collections, including early manuscripts, illustrated books, plays marked for performance, and censored books. Any written or printed object can be said to have a double nature: both textual and material. We will introduce this approach and related methodologies: the history of the book; the history of reading; connected history; bibliography; and textual criticism. We will focus on particular case studies and also think broadly about the global history of written culture, and about relations between scribal and print culture, between writing and reading, between national traditions, and between what is and what is not “literature.” We encourage students with diverse linguistic backgrounds to enroll. As part of the seminar, students will engage in a research project which can be based in the primary source collections of the Kislak Center. History Majors or Minors may use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, or Latin America geographic requirement if that region is the focus of their research paper.
This course is designed to explore major themes and events in early American legal history. Because of the richness of the subject matter and the wealth of sources available, we will be selective in our focus. The course will emphasize several core areas of legal development that run throughout colonial and early national history: 1) the state: including topics such as war and other military or police action, insurrection, revolution, regulation, courts, economic policy, and public health; 2) labor: including race and racially-based slavery, varied forms of servitude and labor coercion, household labor, industrialization, unionization, and market development; 3) property: including property in persons, land, and business, and the role of lawyers in promoting the creation of wealth; 4) private spaces: including family, individual rights, sexuality, gender, and private relations of authority; 5) constitutionalism: various methods of setting norms (rules, principles, values) that create, structure, and define the limits of government power and authority in colonial/imperial, state, and national contexts; 6) democracy and belonging: including questions of citizenship, voting rights, and participation in public life. By placing primary sources within historical context, the course will expose students to the ways that legal change has affected the course of American history and contemporary life. The course will be conducted primarily in lecture format, but I invite student questions and participation. In the end, the central aim of this course is to acquaint students with a keen sense of the ways that law has operated to liberate, constrain, and organize Americans. Ideally, students will come away with sharper critical thinking and reading skills, as well. *This course is a core requirement for the Legal Studies and History Minor (LSHS).*
In this course, we will work both chronologically and thematically to examine laws, constitutional provisions, and local and federal court decisions that established, regulated, and perpetuated slavery in the American colonies and states. We will concern ourselves both with change over time in the construction and application of the law, and the persistence of the desire to control and sublimate enslaved people. Our work will include engagement with secondary sources as well as immersion in the actual legal documents. Students will spend some time working with Mississippi murder cases from the 19th century. They will decipher and transcribe handwritten trial transcripts, and will historicize and analyze the cases with attention to procedural due process as well as what the testimony can tell us about the social history of the counties in which the murders occurred. The course will end with an examination of Black Codes that southern states enacted when slavery ended.
This seminar provides students with an understanding of how legal doctrines shape everyday life on the ground with special attention to the legal condition of women. It offers an overview of the different ways gender (and secondarily, identifiers like race, class and disability) intersected with the law and legal culture in colonial North America and the early Republic. Students will gain a basic understanding of the mechanics of Anglo-American common law but then also, an understanding of how law helps organize society beyond “black letter” (formal) rules. Students will also be asked to think about how gender, as a legal category, has been understood and how that understanding—and its impact on individual lives—has varied depending on context. Finally, the course will encourage students to reflect on how this early history of gender and the law reverberates today in debates over reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, pay equity, and other social and economic rights in modern American society. This Communication within the Curriculum seminar is open to all regardless of ability.
This capstone course examines the various methods historians use to understand the economic, medical, environmental, and human costs associated with the Atlantic slave system from roughly the 1600s to the 1850s. Students will learn how slavery, settlement, and disease contributed to the development of Atlantic World societies in North America and the West Indies and reinforced the enduring concept of embodied racial differences. This latter concept in particular fueled Enlightenment Era knowledge production and the development of the medical profession in the Americas. In this course we focus on the close and often coerced contact between disparate groups of people—Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. We will examine how interactions between these groups contributed to the development racialized disease, the social construction of disease, and the ways in which race became (erroneously) theorized as an aspect of biology). We will consider how perceptions of health and sickness in the disease environment of the Americas gave rise to enduring racial and gendered identities.
This course will study the political economy of Early America, from the British Settlement to c. 1820. In particular, we will explore the forces behind the economic growth of the British colonies, the economic forces behind the Revolution, the economic consequences of the Revolution, the political economy of the constitutional convention and ratification, the role of SCOTUS in creating a national market, and the opposing Hamilton-Jefferson views of an American economy. Early America is a fascinating and rich historical period, and we will need to skip many issues of interest. Nevertheless, we hope to provide you with a good overview of how a group of small peripheral colonies created an institutional arrangement that allowed them, in less than two centuries, to become the biggest economy in the world.
Many Americans widely accept the notion that the United States is a nation of immigrants despite the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation’s past. This course explores the United States’ development of immigration and border enforcement during the twentieth century through an intersectional lens. It roots the structures of modern immigration and border enforcement in Native dispossession and histories of slavery, and interrogates how Asian, Black, and Latinx immigration has shaped and expanded immigration controls on, within, and beyond US territorial borders. In addition to historicizing the rise and expansion of major institutions of immigration control such as the US Border Patrol and Bureau of Naturalization, we explore how immigration controls were enforced on the ground and impacted the lives of everyday people.
This course examines the historical foundations of immigration and border control to illuminate the policies, debates, and practices that shape the contemporary United States. Through a “history of the present” approach, we analyze how past systems of governance and politics continue to influence modern immigration policies and societal challenges. From the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol to the introduction of immigration quotas, we trace the historical origins of today’s enforcement apparatus and connect them to pressing issues in the present. Along the way, we explore how historical narratives have been deployed to justify current policies and examine their enduring impacts on individuals, communities, and the nation in the 21st century. Students from all areas and disciplines are welcome and encouraged to enroll. No prior knowledge of course content is required.
This course is a Penn Global Seminar, which includes a travel component. An application is required. Find more information and apply.
This course proposes an examination of race with a three-pronged approach: one that broadly links the study of race in the United States with a multi-disciplinary approach; situates specific conversations within the immediate location of Philadelphia; and examines the international human rights context of race with Greece as a case study. The broad historical examination advances key concepts of race and racialization, explores key theoretical methodologies, and highlights major scholarly works. Students will engage with the study of race through Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Urban Studies, South Asia Studies, Latin American & Latinx Studies, and through international human rights law. Readings and methodologies will introduce students to critical issues in education, in literature, in sociology, and with methods in oral history, archival work, and ethnography. Most importantly, this extensive approach highlights the impact of race across multiple communities including Black Americans, immigrant populations, Asian Americans, and international communities that are marginalized to emphasize connections, relationships, and shared solidarity. Students are intellectually pushed to see the linkages and the impacts of racism across and among all Americans and from a thematic and legal perspective. As each theme is introduced a direct example from Philadelphia will be discussed. The combination of the national discourse on race, with an intimate perspective from the City of Philadelphia and travel to Greece, engages students both intellectually and civically. The course will be led by Fariha Khan and Fernando Chang-Muy along with local activists with varied disciplinary backgrounds from local community organizations. Each guest lecturer not only brings specific disciplinary expertise, but also varied community engagement experience. This course is a Penn Global Seminar, which includes a travel component.
The course is also supported by the SNF Paideia Program, the Asian American Studies Program and Africana, Latin American & Latinx Studies, Sociology, South Asia Studies, and Urban Studies.
The Civil War and Reconstruction fundamentally transformed the nature of American democracy, including who could participate in it, what its processes were, and what legislation was possible. This course will explore the legacy of that change in American history and culture. Through primary and scholarly secondary sources we will trace the meaning and practice of democracy from the establishment of the United States of America through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and their continued echoes to the present day. We will examine how historical actors defined terms we often take for granted, like citizen, franchise, and representation, but we will also delve into the nitty gritty history of voter intimidation methods, coercion, fraud, and demagoguery that marked democracy at many points in this era.
This course examines the political, religious, and military conflicts and social and cultural transformations that wracked England, Ireland, and Scotland between the late 1630s and 1660. While much of the focus will be on events from the breakdown of royal authority and the coming of rebellion and Civil War through the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, we will also consider the longer-term roots of conflict in religious Reformation, state-formation, social change, and colonial conquest, as well as its legacies in subsequent imperial expansion, political thinking, and historical memory. Readings will include a mixture of classic works and contemporary scholarship, and students will develop a research project based in extensive engagement with primary sources.