HIST 213 - Founders and Foundings in US History & Popular Memory

Credits: (3)
College Curriculum: COLL 200
Domain (Anchored): CSI
Additional Domain (if applicable): ALV
The “founders”-revolutionaries, reformers, and framers of the government of the United States-have a driving role in how Americans and the world have come to understand the culture of U.S. nationalism. From George Washington to Frederick Douglass, from Nathan Hale to Nat Turner, and from Mercy Otis Warren to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, human lives have been rendered by popular politics into icons. Their individual contributions have most often featured in broadly palatable nationalist histories of the United States; but are increasingly the heart of critical and revisionist narratives exploring histories of white supremacism, patriarchy, and paradoxical cultures of liberty and oppression in the early republic. These revisions have their own social history, in movement-driven attempts to reform and broaden collective memory, and thereby to make political claims on the present and future of U.S. democracy. This course investigates the processes of history-writing and memory-making by which particular individual biographies have served as shorthand for these larger social processes and moral perceptions in and beyond U.S. nationalism. Through readings that deal with both history and memory; comparisons with national icons beyond the United States; and student-driven investigations of figures not located on our syllabus, we’ll deepen our understanding of the rise of early republican U.S. popular nationalism; the dynamics of elite cultures and political arguments that shaped foundational approaches to slavery, suffrage, and racial modernity; and processes underpinning the social construction of U.S. nationalist collective memory and identity since the 18th century.