HIST 101 · United States History to 1877 · Richland Community College
Background Essays
Scholarly grounding for every lecture in the course — the argument behind the slides, the evidence behind the argument, and the historiography behind both. Written to be read, not printed.
- Background essays
- 36
- Reconnaissance audits
- 6
- Words
- 185,266
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Historiography
How historians think — the analytical toolkit that runs underneath the entire course.
Background essay
What Is History?
Evidence, interpretation, and the difference between the past and history
Background essay
What Makes History Happen?
Causation, contingency, structure, and agency
Background essay
Why Do Historians Disagree?
Questions, evidence, scale, and judgment in the history of the American Revolution
Chapter 2 · Colonization in North America, 1600–1680
Motive, labor, faith, and the plural authority of the seventeenth-century Atlantic.
Background essay
Why Colonize?
Motive, profit, faith, and the making of an English Atlantic
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Why Did the Colonies Become Different?
Labor, land, and the divergence of Chesapeake and New England
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Building a Puritan Society
Covenant, congregation, and the limits of the godly community
Background essay
Who Controlled America?
Plural authority, Native power, and the myth of English dominion
Research reconnaissance
Chapter 2 Research Reconnaissance
Retroactive scholarly-foundation audit
Chapter 3 · Empires, Indians, and the Struggle for Power, 1670–1720
A frightened continent: war, revolt, witchcraft, and belonging.
Background essay
“The War That Made Colonists Savage”
Metacom’s War, 1675–1676
Background essay
“Now the God of the Spaniards Is Dead”
The Pueblo Revolt, 1680
Background essay
“The Devil in the Shape of an Indian”
Salem, 1692
Background essay
“The Captives Who Wouldn’t Come Home”
Eunice Williams, Esther Wheelwright, and the meaning of belonging
Research reconnaissance
Chapter 3 Research Reconnaissance
Retroactive scholarly-foundation audit
Chapter 4 · Whose Liberty? War, Freedom, and Empire, 1739–1763
Fort Mose to the Peace of Paris — four registers of a single question.
Background essay
The Town Called Mose
Fort Mose, the Stono Rebellion, and conditional freedom in the Spanish borderlands
Background essay
The Republics
Kinship, sovereignty, and the multiethnic towns of the Ohio Valley
Background essay
“No Savage Should Inherit the Land”
Braddock, the Monongahela, and the other 1755
Background essay
Britain Wins a Continent
The French and Indian War, 1758–1763
Background essay
Who Gets to Speak for God?
The Great Awakening, conversion, and the crisis of religious authority
Research reconnaissance
Chapter 4 Research Reconnaissance
Retroactive scholarly-foundation audit
Chapter 5 · Reform, Resistance, Revolution, 1763–1776
Imperial capacity, counterpower, and the contagion of liberty.
Background essay
Can Britain Govern What It Won?
Imperial capacity, Indigenous sovereignty, and the postwar crisis after 1763
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How Do You Defeat a Law Without Holding Office?
Counterpower, nullification, and the repertoire of colonial resistance
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Who Gets to Use the Word Liberty?
Revolutionary language, social conflict, and the contagion of claims
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When Does Resistance Become Government?
The collapse of royal authority and the legitimacy of revolutionary administration
Research reconnaissance
Chapter 5 Research Reconnaissance
Retroactive scholarly-foundation audit
Chapter 6 · The American Revolution, 1776–1789
Survival, legitimacy, and the invention of republican government.
Background essay
Britain Kept Winning. Why Did the Revolution Not End?
Military survival, political legitimacy, and the globalization of the war
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Liberty Was Declared. Who Could Claim It?
Revolutionary language and the people who tested its limits
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The King Was Gone. Who Had the Right to Rule?
State constitutions and the invention of republican legitimacy
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What Could Destroy the Republic: Too Much Power or Too Little?
Postwar crisis, Shays’s Rebellion, and the road to the Constitution
Research reconnaissance
Chapter 6 Research Reconnaissance
Retroactive scholarly-foundation audit
Chapter 7 · Completing the Revolution, 1789–1815
Building a state, competing visions of the republic, and testing a republic against empire.
Background essay
The Constitution Had No Instruction Manual
Turning a constitutional blueprint into a functioning national government
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What Kind of Republic Did the Revolution Create?
Competing visions, parties, foreign crisis, and the invention of loyal opposition
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Can a Republic Have an Empire?
Jefferson, Louisiana, and expansion as a theory of liberty
Background essay
Why Did a Republic That Feared War Choose War?
The War of 1812 and the costs of Jeffersonian statecraft
Research reconnaissance
Chapter 7 Research Reconnaissance
Broad research reconnaissance · roadmap locked
Chapter 9 · The Old South: Slavery and Capitalism, 1790–1850
Cotton, credit, and coerced labor at the heart of the Atlantic economy.
Chapter 10 · Popular Culture in America, 1815–1850
Print, revival, the middle class, performance, and the making of a mass public.
Background essay
The Democratization of Culture
Print, the public sphere, and the new reading public, 1815–1850
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Faith in Action
The Second Great Awakening, the Burned-Over District, and the remaking of American religion and reform
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The Rise of the Middle Class
Work, home, womanhood, and respectable leisure in the North, 1815–1850
Background essay
Staging America
Working-class leisure, minstrelsy, the prize ring, and Barnum’s humbug in the antebellum city
Chapter 11 · Whigs and Democrats, 1815–1848
Postwar nationalism, the Missouri Crisis, the Panic of 1819, and Jacksonian democracy seen from below.
Chapter 12 · Antebellum Reform, 1815–1860
Civil society and the Benevolent Empire, prisons, asylums, and schools as moral laboratories, temperance, and the origins of children’s rights.
Background essay
Civil Society and the Moral Republic
Disestablishment, the Second Great Awakening, the Benevolent Empire, and Tocqueville’s art of association, 1800–1840
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Moral Laboratories
Prisons, asylums, and common schools as experiments in reforming character, 1820s–1860s
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The Temperance Movement and the Origins of Prohibition
The alcoholic republic, moral suasion, the Washingtonians, the Maine Law, and women’s public voice, 1820s–1850s
Background essay
The Children’s Rights Movement
From the Puritan little commonwealth to houses of refuge, orphan trains, Mary Ellen Wilson, and the juvenile court