This course will introduce students to a more hemispheric understanding of the American experience, through the writings of many authors from the New World, including the United States, on what it means to be an American. Students will read texts from many genres including but not limited to poetry, film, prose, political speeches and autobiography, to come to terms with histories of native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, and whites in the United States, as well as peoples of South America and the Caribbean. In the process students will become familiar with scholarship across the social sciences and humanities that consider issues of race, culture, nation, freedom and inequality in the Americas, and how racial slavery and the Afro-American hemispheric experience has informed multiple American visions.
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.
Fall 2026 Courses
This course introduces students to major themes in U.S. legal history from 1877 to the present. Topics include (but are not limited to) citizenship and immigration, federalism, public regulation of economic activity, lawyers and the legal profession, criminalization, social welfare provision, and rights-claiming. Prominent through-lines include the relationship between law and politics; the struggles of marginalized groups for recognition and inclusion; and shifting, competing understandings of liberty, equality, and justice. Judicial decisions figure prominently in this course, but so, too, do other sources of law, including statutes, administrative decisions, and provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Students will leave this course with a better grasp of how the U.S. legal system operates and how it has channeled power, resources, and opportunity over time.
This course will trace the history of the American South from the end of the Civil War to the present. Charting its course out of the smoldering aftermath of the post-Civil War South, it will track a narrative of politics, economics, and culture across more than 150 years of life in the modern American South. The course will include deep examinations of race, gender, and culture, including a broad set of Southern stories and voices in an interdisciplinary journey across what is perhaps America’s most storied region.
This class introduces students to the United States Constitution, specifically Articles I, II, III, the Tenth Amendment, Equal Protection Clause, and the First Amendment. The format for each class will consist of a 45-minute lecture followed by small group discussions on assigned issues and questions.
This course explores theories, debates, and frameworks in African American popular culture. Drawing on Africana, Gender and Sexuality, Communications and Performance Studies, it examines histories of Black representation across a number of performance forms. Television, film, dance, theater, music and more will be explored to interrogate the ways blackness has been defined, framed, and disseminated. What are the micro-politics through which racial difference is produced? How have Black people redefined and wrestled with questions of authenticity and "the real"? What are the capacities and the limits of popular culture to both render and shape Black life? In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the creative labor that Black people produce, and the processes of racialization produced through Black bodies.
This First-Year Seminar will explore contemporary Native American, Alaska Native and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) identities and experiences through interdisciplinary and multi-media resources. Readings, guest speakers and course lectures will focus on contemporary Native communities as they maintain their cultural traditions and ceremonies, while navigating the ever-changing political landscape that challenges their existence. Native leaders, authors, activists, educators, musicians and comedians such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Tommy Orange, Robert Warrior, Haunani-Kay Trask, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, David Treuer, Joanne Shenandoah, Jim Ruel and the 1491s, among others, will help us learn about Native resistance and advocacy, while also exploring resilience, joy and ways of knowing. Grades will be based on weekly reading, class discussion leadership and participation, in-class assignments, reading summaries and a final paper.
This seminar examines the history of art, artists, and artistic movements that emerged in the Americas between the 16th and 20th centuries. It may also engage with histories of visual culture, criticism, and the theory of art. Specific topics and periods vary from semester to semester.
Section Details
The Declaration of Independence was signed in the Pennsylvania State House, a brick building constructed between 1732 and 1753 in the Georgian style of the Hanoverian monarchy. During the Era of Revolutions that followed the signing, which engulfed both the colonizing and colonial worlds and swept across the Caribbean and the Americas, Neoclassicism in art and architecture, with its references tothe republican and democratic legacies of ancient Greece and Rome, came to represent the political power of new, independent nations coming into being. Similarly, the English style of portraiture made popular by Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Pennsylvania-born Benjamin West was supplanted by the Romantic influence of French Napoleonic painters. Through the exploration of primary sources in the holdings of the Penn Libraries and object-based study in regional collections, this course will examine the theories and methods used by art historians to understand the uses of the visual rhetorics adopted by fine artists, architects, and other makers in the newly independent United States. We will also consider other nineteenth-century revolutionary contexts throughout the Americas, from Haiti to Argentina, and identify distinct scholarly approaches to specific local conditions and contradictions.
This course investigates book histories and the worlds of readers, printers, publishers, and libraries in the Americas, from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Section Details
How did Benjamin Franklin strike it rich in the printing business? Did Common Sense really start the American Revolution? What does it mean to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin on a deck of playing cards? This course will investigate book histories, and the worlds of readers, writers, printers, publishers, and libraries in the Americas. It focuses on the colonial period through the nineteenth century, with a concluding look at the modern era. Each week we will look at books, newspapers, pamphlets, pictures, broadsides, or manuscripts—big and small, famous and forgotten. We will think about how books work, not just as texts but as cultural artifacts, and we learn to decode their languages, from title pages to typography to bindings. Our area of study is sometimes referred to as “book history,” and we will try to define this field together. We will examine sources now considered to be “literature” and those that tend to be more studied in “history,” and we won’t be particularly finicky about the differences. Our strategy is to introduce, each week, a range of topics and questions, including: * Colonization, missionization, and printing * Writing and revolution, printing and politics * Black and Indigenous print cultures * Gender, reading, and book history * Technology and change * Bookselling and marketing. The seminar will be held at the Kislak Center in Van Pelt Library and feature its rare book and manuscript collections. A number of seminar meetings will also be held at the Library Company of Philadelphia (1314 Locust Street), an extraordinary research library founded by Franklin in 1731. Assignments include weekly seminar discussion and posts; brief primary source exercises; and a final research project based upon special collections.
This first-year seminar explores questions about revolutionary change and historical commemoration in Philadelphia, with a focus on the neighborhood of Germantown. What constitutes a revolution? What do we mean when we call something “revolutionary”? In cooperation with the twenty historic sites that constitute Historic Germantown, this seminar exploring various facets of the American Revolution as they played out in Philadelphia, including the Battle of Germantown (1777) as well as Quaker and Peace Church peace testimonies, and how they have been remembered–by historians, by museums, and in popular culture. We will also consider older proposals for change which might be called “revolutionary”–including the abolition of chattel slavery, proposed in Germantown in 1688–and the “unfinished promises” of freedom for all, enduring into the nineteenth century and even today. With visits to local exhibits commemorating revolution in Germantown and in Philadelphia, we will examine how the city’s museums are asking and answering questions about how to document, commemorate, and remember. And, we will create our own installation for a public exhibit in the welcome center of Historic Germantown illuminating the work of neighborhood’s memory keepers today.
The United States was not inevitable. With that assumption as its starting point, this course surveys North American history from about 1500 to about 1850, with the continent's many peoples and cultures in view. The unpredictable emergence of the U.S. as a nation is a focus, but always in the context of wider developments: global struggles among European empires; conflicts between indigenous peoples and settler-colonists; exploitation of enslaved African labor; evolution of distinctive colonial societies; and, finally, independence movements inspired by a transatlantic revolutionary age.
The 2020 protests about monuments in Philadelphia and across the nation exposed this truth: Arguments over history are political arguments about the future. The subsequent countermovement to restore monuments, memorials, statues, and place-names, as well as “classical” and “traditional” architecture, has further politicized the landscape of memory. In this place-based, Philadelphia-centric course (including campus walking tours and local field trips), we will examine how the built environment communicates ideas about—and creates connections to—the past. These ideas and these landscapes can be inclusive or exclusive, or both. The goal of this course is to inspire greater dialogue about national history and public space, two kinds of shared projects in a democracy. Students will learn about the making of the US memorial landscape in the long nineteenth century, its remaking in the twentieth century, and its possible futures now in the (re)making. The course will also put Philadelphia and the US in global context, for the politics of historical memory exist everywhere there are monuments.
This course introduces students to major themes in U.S. legal history from 1877 to the present. Topics include (but are not limited to) citizenship and immigration, federalism, public regulation of economic activity, lawyers and the legal profession, criminalization, social welfare provision, and rights-claiming. Prominent through-lines include the relationship between law and politics; the struggles of marginalized groups for recognition and inclusion; and shifting, competing understandings of liberty, equality, and justice. Judicial decisions figure prominently in this course, but so, too, do other sources of law, including statutes, administrative decisions, and provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Students will leave this course with a better grasp of how the U.S. legal system operates and how it has channeled power, resources, and opportunity over time.
What is capitalism? What is democracy? And what is the relationship between the two? Socialist critics, including revolutionaries like the German communist Rosa Luxemburg and reformists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, have long argued that capitalism is a despotic regime. But by the 1940s, new defenders of capitalism—known as “neoliberals”—began to tie political freedoms to free markets. Then in the crucible of the Cold War, modernization theorists began to argue that the democratization of Europe and the U.S. had been caused by rising levels of wealth. The U.S. then mobilized this historical logic to defend free markets abroad, in its fight to make the world safe for democracy against the Communist East. Ever since the 2008 crisis, however, the continued co-existence of democracy and capitalism no longer seems to be a given in a world fractured by growing inequalities and the rise of far-right populist politics. Rather than approaching the question of democracy and capitalism’s potential (in)compatibility from a theoretical angle, we will look at the question historically: when have democracy and capitalism been at odds? What historical conditions have underpinned their mutual destruction? We will pay special attention to the case of the first global depression of the 1870s-1890s and the rise of the new right in Western Europe, as well as the rise of fascism during the 1930s. On the other hand, when and how have democracy and capitalism mutually co-existed—and even flourished? We will take a good hard look at the institutions and ideas undergirding the post-World War II golden age of “democratic capitalism” and the expansion of welfare states. This course will introduce students to major thinkers, texts, and debates in the history of political economy and the social sciences during the long 20th century, including Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, W. E. B. Dubois, Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.
This course investigates book histories and the worlds of readers, printers, publishers, and libraries in the Americas, from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Section Details
How did Benjamin Franklin strike it rich in the printing business? Did Common Sense really start the American Revolution? What does it mean to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin on a deck of playing cards? This course will investigate book histories, and the worlds of readers, writers, printers, publishers, and libraries in the Americas. It focuses on the colonial period through the nineteenth century, with a concluding look at the modern era. Each week we will look at books, newspapers, pamphlets, pictures, broadsides, or manuscripts—big and small, famous and forgotten. We will think about how books work, not just as texts but as cultural artifacts, and we learn to decode their languages, from title pages to typography to bindings. Our area of study is sometimes referred to as “book history,” and we will try to define this field together. We will examine sources now considered to be “literature” and those that tend to be more studied in “history,” and we won’t be particularly finicky about the differences. Our strategy is to introduce, each week, a range of topics and questions, including: * Colonization, missionization, and printing * Writing and revolution, printing and politics * Black and Indigenous print cultures * Gender, reading, and book history * Technology and change * Bookselling and marketing. The seminar will be held at the Kislak Center in Van Pelt Library and feature its rare book and manuscript collections. A number of seminar meetings will also be held at the Library Company of Philadelphia (1314 Locust Street), an extraordinary research library founded by Franklin in 1731. Assignments include weekly seminar discussion and posts; brief primary source exercises; and a final research project based upon special collections.
Witches. Cannibals. Popish plots. Mountains of silver and gold. Smallpox blankets. Slave uprisings. Evil ministers. Traitors. Barbarians. Mercenaries. Freemasons. Illuminati. Catholics. Freedom. Slavery. Tyranny. Race war. In this course, we will examine the conspiracies that swirled around early America among the European, Indigenous, and African people of who slept, ate, worked, and fought alongside and against each other. These diverse peoples tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world with the information at hand. Particularly in times of war and instability, rumors ran rampant. Whether these stories were true or false is less important than the fact that real people supposed that they might be true. These stories captured people’s imaginations because they reflected some of their hopes and fears. Only conspiracies that matched people’s expectations would continue to grow. Even false stories had to ring true to continue to circulate and propagate. And sometimes, the stories were all too true. Through a variety of primary and secondary sources, we will study these rumors, conspiracies, and hoaxes of the period not to assess their factual accuracy but to consider why people in early America believed they were possible, plausible, and even likely. The sliver of plausibility and possibility that our early American historical subjects found in these conspiracies will be our way into their political, social, religious, and cultural worlds.
This research seminar provides students with instruction in basic historical methods and an opportunity to conduct collaborative primary source research into the University of Pennsylvania's historic connections to slavery. After an initial orientation to archival research, students will plunge in to doing actual research at the Kislak Center, the University Archives, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and various online sources. During the final month of the semester, students will begin drafting research reports and preparing for a public presentation of the work. During the semester, there will be opportunities to collaborate with a certified genealogist, a data management and website expert, a consultant on public programming, and a Penn graduate whose research has been integral to the Penn Slavery Project.
This course is a survey of the built environment from North America’s first peoples to the rise of the McMansion. Though oriented towards future preservation practitioners, this class welcomes students from across Penn interested in architectural history, U.S. history, buildings, and landscapes. The organization, while broadly chronological, emphasizes themes around which important scholarship has gathered. Rather than utilize buildings or the works of major architects as a unit of analysis, this course explores the interplay between all human-initiated modifications to our shared environment. Our shared central purpose is to explore how the built environment acts as an agent in broader sociopolitical processes and how those same processes are reflected through our buildings and landscapes. To that end, this class will employ multiple methodological and disciplinary lenses borrowed from architecture, history, environmental history, city and regional planning, and historic preservation to explore the history of the built environment. Our class will also embrace the tension between “high style” and “vernacular” architectures while encouraging you to think critically about and beyond such categories. Finally, we will supplement our conversations in class with frequent trips to Philadelphia-area buildings and neighborhoods to further explore change and continuity in the history of the built environment.
Now more than ever a basic understanding of U.S. legal principles is indispensable across a wide array of professional and academic landscapes. This survey course introduces non-law students to all aspects of U.S. law through a combination of case law and some use of the Socratic method, both techniques unique to legal education. This methodology stimulates critical thinking and can be valuable whether you decide to enter law school or not. The course explores the structure of government and the constitutional foundations of the U.S. legal system and covers a wide range of topics in the areas of civil, criminal, and administrative law. The course will incorporate recent cases of note into the curriculum and provide an overview of legal issues which impact professionals in a variety of fields, including but not limited to law. Although the course's primary source material will be a textbook which has been successfully used in prior years, the curriculum will be supplemented by additional readings involving recent cases, many of them local and involving important constitutional issues, to make sure the class is brought current and to further stimulate discussions.
Now more than ever a basic understanding of U.S. legal principles is indispensable across a wide array of professional and academic landscapes. This survey course introduces non-law students to all aspects of U.S. law through a combination of case law and some use of the Socratic method, both techniques unique to legal education. This methodology stimulates critical thinking and can be valuable whether you decide to enter law school or not. The course explores the structure of government and the constitutional foundations of the U.S. legal system and covers a wide range of topics in the areas of civil, criminal, and administrative law. The course will incorporate recent cases of note into the curriculum and provide an overview of legal issues which impact professionals in a variety of fields, including but not limited to law. Although the course's primary source material will be a textbook which has been successfully used in prior years, the curriculum will be supplemented by additional readings involving recent cases, many of them local and involving important constitutional issues, to make sure the class is brought current and to further stimulate discussions.
This course is intended to introduce students to the national institutions and political processes of American government. What are the historical and philosophical foundations of the American Republic? How does American public policy get made, who makes it, and who benefits? Is a constitutional fabric woven in 1787 good enough for today? How, if at all, should American government be changed, and why? What is politics and why bother to study it? If these sorts of questions interest you, then this course will be a congenial home. It is designed to explore such questions while teaching students the basics of American politics and government.
Whether America begins with the Puritans and the Mayflower Compact, or with the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution, it is founded in resistance to empire. In the generations between, Americans have desired, dreaded and debated empire. This course will focus on empire and imperialism in American political thought. We will read primary texts addressing empire: from the departure and dissent of the Puritans, and Burke's Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, to twentieth and twenty-first century debates over America's role in the world. These texts will include political pamphlets and speeches, poetry, novels, policy papers and film.
In 1960, a Democratic candidate won a very narrow Presidential victory with just 100,000 votes; in 2000, the Democratic candidate lost but received 500,000 more votes than his opponent. Still, contemporary scholars and journalists have made a variety of arguments about just how much the American political landscape changed in the intervening 40 years, often calling recent decades a transformation. This course explores and critically evaluates those arguments. Key questions include: how, if at all, have Americans political attitudes and ideologies changed? How have their connections to politics changed? What has this meant for the fortunes and strategies of the two parties? How have the parties' base voters and swing voters changed? What changes in American society have advantaged some political messages and parties at the expense of others? Focusing primarily on mass-level politics, we consider a wide range of potential causes, including the role of race in American politics, suburbanization, economic transformations, the evolving constellation and structure of interest groups, declining social capital, the changing role of religion, immigration, and the actions of parties and political elites. For three weeks in the semester, we will take a break from considering broader trends to look at specific elections in some depth.
This course surveys the institutional development of the American presidency from the Constitutional convention through the current administration. It examines the politics of presidential leadership, and how the executive branch functions. An underlying theme of the course is the tension between the presidency, leadership, and democracy.
This class introduces students to the United States Constitution, specifically Articles I, II, III, the Tenth Amendment, Equal Protection Clause, and the First Amendment. The format for each class will consist of a 45-minute lecture followed by small group discussions on assigned issues and questions.
How do the Constitution's checks and balances work in practice? And where are they not working? This course examines the fault lines between Washington's two most powerful institutions - Congress and the President - how they clash, and where they work together. Students learn how Congress and the President share and compete for power in lawmaking, spending, investigations, nominations, foreign policy, and impeachment. The course is designed to foster skills in formulating strategies for conducting policy in an environment of institutions competing for power.
The Trump Presidency has profoundly shifted America's role in the world and the way in which key institutions of foreign policy making are staffed and positioned to advance America's interests. The ascent of extreme nationalists and nationalism in other power centers in the world along with growing distrust in government and public institutions may have marked the close of the two-decade post 9/11 era. Indeed, the global COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which actors across the international spectrum have responded (or failed to respond) has led many to question the assumptions inherent in the post-9/11 international order and has marked the beginning of a new era of competition, a return to great-power politics, and the diminishing power of traditional actors, systems, and ideals on the global stage. This course will provide students with an in-depth, practical analysis of foreign policy and foreign policy making, with a view from Washington. It will also provide a baseline global literacy, through the lens of emerging ideas, institutions, interests, and actors, and focus on a framework for understanding shifts already underway in how Washington views the world. We will utilize less traditional resources, and instead focus on practical and "real-world" course material as well as less traditional instruction methods - utilizing and analyzing the sources and resources that policy makers in Washington rely upon. These include long-form journalism, official government documents, hearings and Congressional debate, think tank products, and news sources. Students will have the opportunity to engage with a variety of guest-speakers, all of whom have held senior official and non-governmental roles in American foreign policy making and influencing. Guest speakers will provide unique insight into their own experiences at the highest levels of foreign policy making and advocacy, and offer guidance as to how to pursue careers in foreign policy, national security, and international development. In the past, guest speakers have included: Former Deputy Secretaries of State William Burns and Heather Higginbottom; Executive Director of the ONE Campaign; Former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department; Former Ambassadors, Senior Professional Staff from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former Assistant Secretary of Population, Refugees, and Migration, among others.
Recent U.S. elections have increased attention towards how domestic politics can be shaped by identities based on race, ethnicity, nation, and gender. Yet such issues of identity politics have long been the focus of scholars studying other parts of the world. In this course, we ask and try to answer crucial questions regarding identity politics in the ‘non-Western’ world (which for purposes of this class means any region outside of North America and Western Europe). What are ‘identities’ and how do they form? Why do certain social identities become politically significant while others do not? When do many political parties seek the support of specific identity groups while excluding others? Why does identity politics sometimes erupt into violent conflict? And what are the implications of identity politics for outcomes we care about, from development and infrastructure provisioning, to peace and tolerance?
This course will explore Asian America through sociological frameworks and research. At the outset, we will establish a strong theoretical foundation by studying key sociological theories related to race and ethnicity, assimilation, and racial stratification. Additionally, we will briefly review key turning points in Asian American history. Throughout the semester, we will explore a broad range of contemporary topics, such as racial and ethnic identities (including multiracial identities); racialized desire and interracial relationships; controlling media images and subversive representations; transracial adoption; affirmative action; anti-Asian racism; and the role of the "model minority" myth in contemporary U.S. politics. Above all, this class will critically evaluate the viability of an Asian American panethnic identity while also exploring important axes of heterogeneity (e.g., class, gender, and sexuality) within the broader Asian American category.
This course explores racism in America as an historical and contemporary phenomenon. It emphasizes the development of evidence-based knowledge about institutional systems of racism, analytical skill in understanding the complexity of institutional racism and other forms of oppression more broadly defined, self-awareness, and the implications of racism for social work services and practices.
This course will examine the variety of ways that professionals work within American land and political systems to achieve development that supports historically marginalized and under-resourced communities. We will examine the most common strategies through systems and racial equity lenses, challenging students to be thoughtful about this very real professional dilemma: “How do I achieve better social outcomes while working within the white supremist and capitalist systems that created the problems of poverty and disenfranchisement in the first place?” The course will be practical in nature, focusing on real unpacking, debating, and critiquing real examples to see the implications of being a professional in this sector. Coursework will focus on domestic examples, prominently featuring Philadelphia.
Spring 2026 Courses
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).*
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 begin with the history of migration to the US, as well as legal definitions of newcomers, including obtaining documents for lawful permanent residence, refugee status, as well as grounds for exclusion and deportation, and paths to naturalized citizenship. We will then review how a framework of cultural competence, and a strength or asset-based approach can inform service to immigrant clients. The core portion of the course will then focus first on the intersection of immigrants and health, mental health, employment, crimes, public entitlements, and public education. The course will conclude with family issues relevant to immigrant families: women, children, lesbian and gay, and elderly immigrants. Public policy issues will be integrated throughout, and the course will end with specific suggestions on systems change at various levels. By the end of the course students should be able to identify strategies for individual clients advocacy (micro); agency and community strategies (mezzo), and government advocacy (macro) to empower immigrant clients to become full community participants.