I. Crossroads Background Survey Course for Teachers of American History
Session I: North America2. Contact: Europe and America Meet, 1492-1620 [weeks 2-3]
This session introduces the variety of peoples and cultures in North America before the contact with European nations and peoples. It provides a brief introduction to Native American ideas of human beings' relationship with the natural world, government, economy, religion, and law. The principal historiographical focus is on the challenge of chronicling the history of preliterate or nonliterate peoples and societies.
Session II: Central and South America -- Native American Empires
This session introduces the variety of peoples and cultures in Central and South America before the contact with European nations and peoples, emphasizing the great Maya, Aztec, and Inca empires. The historiographical focus is on the nature of Indian empires as mingling high levels of cultural achievement with beliefs, customs, and practices often termed barbaric.
Session I: European Nations Encounter America3. The Founding of New Societies, 1607-1763 [weeks 4-6]
This session focuses on the voyages of exploration and discovery by such European nations as Portugal, Spain, England, and France. It limns the chronology of European exploration, but goes beyond the conventional dates and places to assess the spectrum of motives and goals that the different European nations had.
Session II: The Problem of Contact
This session comes to grips with the range of European assessments of those peoples who were already in the Americas, of the various forms of contact (both benign and tragic) between Europeans and Indians or Native Americans, and of the growing significance of America as an idea in European thought. The historiographical focus is the problem of interpreting what historians have called "the Columbian exchange."
Session I: Planting Colonies4. What Was the American Revolution?: 1760-1836 [weeks 7-9]; The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States
This session assesses the various reasons for which European nations established settlements or colonies in the Americas and traces the development of European colonial settlements in the Americas.
Session II: Understanding Colonial America
This session narrows the focus to the new societies of British North America. It explores the range of colonial forms of organization and politics, the spectrum of religious beliefs and economic practices, and the first stirrings of colonial perceptions that the colonies might share a common American identity. It also presents the remarkably fruitful explosion of colonial historiography. Noting that colonial American history spans nearly two centuries, this session concludes by reasserting the importance of the colonial experience.
Session III: Clashes of Empires
This session depicts the principal factor that obsessed the British colonists in North America between the late 1600s and 1763 -- wars with the French and Spanish colonial empires. It shows how the European powers and their American possessions clashed repeatedly, and (taking account of important advances in the historiography of the "colonial wars") depicts the consequences of those wars for Indians (or Native Americans) as well as for the British settlers and colonists. Finally, it shows, in the triumphant British North America of 1763, seeds of future trouble with the mother country.
Session I: The American Revolution5. The Ambiguous Democracy in America, 1800-1848 [weeks 10-11]
What was the American Revolution? This session begins with the disputes over taxation, law, and constitutionalism between the British colonists and the mother country, tracing more than a decade of conflict until its culmination in the Declaration of Independence. It also sketches the nature of the American Revolution as a military conflict and a diplomatic problem for the new nation.
Session II: An Age of Experiments in Government
This session traces the Americans' grappling with and creative solutions to the problems of establishing legitimate republican governments for themselves in the wake of the collapse of British authority and their similar struggles to cement an American union as a political and constitutional reality. It culminates with the decision to convene the Federal Convention in 1787.
Session III: The Constitution and the Federalist Era
Was the Constitution the culmination of or a repudiation of the American Revolution? This session traces the framing and adoption of the Constitution, and the first decade of that government's operation. It addresses the problems posed by the new government, the struggles of the nation's politicians to make the constitutional system work, and the growing divisions within the nation over issue of principal and partisan rivalry. It culminates with the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson in 1801; but adds an epilogue as the elderly leaders of the Revolutionary generation assess the results of the nation they launched nearly half-a-century before.
Session I: Jeffersonian Democracy and Its Contradictions6. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war": 1848-1880 [weeks 12-14]
This session addresses the nature of the fragile new republic, its unique brand of aristocratic democracy, and its struggles to secure its interests in the turbulent world of European power politics. It culminates with the abrupt ending of the "Era of Good Feelings" in the mid-1820s and its supplanting by the more populist, rough-and-tumble forces of Jacksonian democracy.
Session II: Jacksonian Democracy and Its Contradictions
What was Jacksonian democracy? This session assesses this complex and self-contradictory phenomenon, taking account of the conflicting visions of Jacksonian America prevalent at the time, the profusion of reform movements, and the rapid evolution of Jacksonian historiography.
Session I: The Impending Crisis
This session examines the historical processes and trends that exacerbated sectional divisions and conflicts from the end of the Mexican War to the Southern states' attempt to secede from the Union and the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
Session II: The Nature of the Civil War
This session surveys the history of the Civil War -- providing both a grounding in the chronology of the conflict and an analysis of the war's effects on and cultural significance for the Union and Confederate populations.
Session III: Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution
This session traces both the events and processes of Reconstruction and the development of historical scholarship on the subject. It stresses the leading role played by the freed slaves in attempts to rebuild the polities and societies of the Southern states, and the failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s.