TEACHING

At its best, teaching is a collaborative endeavor. My courses emphasize active learning, in which students practice history through critical reading, writing, in-class discussion, and debate. I want my students to leave my classes with the academic skills necessary for their vocational pursuits, but I also strive to develop their creative potential and instill in them a respect for historical contexts not their own.

I regularly teach survey courses in early American history and upper-level courses on early America, the American Revolution, Atlantic World history, a historical methods course for majors, and electives on peace and violence and religious toleration.

Peace in Historical Context

This is an interdisciplinary course that explores peace from an historical perspective. The course considers the history of peace movements and humanitarianism, warfare, slavery and abolition, colonization, and indigenous perspectives on peace. By the end of the class, students will develop an understanding for the field of peace history and the ways historians have defined and understood peace. Above all, students will learn to historicize peace in relationship to violence.

The American Revolution

This course examines the American Revolution from three vantage points — as an Atlantic and continental “event;” as a struggle in which African-Americans, Indians, women, urban laborers, and backcountry farmers demanded greater participation in the body politic; and as a conflict shaped by empire and colonization in North America. We will also consider how the Revolution tested notions of freedom and unfreedom and created a new and uncertain “American” identity. Although the American Revolution may look inevitable in hindsight, this course argues that the creation of the United States was historically contingent– that is, the Revolution was not inevitable, or it could have taken different turns with radically different outcomes.

American History to 1865

This course provides an overview of American history from early colonization through the American Civil War. We will explore how Native, African, and European men and women created a “new world” very different from their “pre-contact” societies. Readings and discussions will focus on the encounters between Europeans and Native Americans; growth of European settlements; circulation of trade goods; cultural and biological exchange, development of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery; gender and the family; and the rise and ultimate dissolution of the British, Dutch, French, and Spanish empires in America. By the end of the course, students will gain an appreciation for how a diverse group of peoples created the United States and an understanding of who was included and excluded from this new national identity. 

Civil War and Reconstruction

This course will examine the political, social, and economic contexts that gave rise to and sustained the American Civil War. Topics will include the legacy of slavery and colonialism in the aftermath of the American Revolution, Indian Removal, the expansion of cotton slavery in the antebellum South, and the sectional crisis. We will also cover the religious and political dimensions of abolitionism and proslavery ideology, as well as the military and cultural contexts to the war. Finally, we will address the Civil War’s legacy in the United States, with attention to Reconstruction and the development of Jim Crow segregation.

Historian’s Craft

Historian’s Craft is intended to prepare history majors for advance coursework. Students will have an opportunity to write an original research paper on any topic related to the theme of “encounters” (broadly defined) in early American history, from early colonization through the mid-nineteenth century. To help get you started, we will explore historical methods, or what it means to “practice” the craft of history. Students will have an opportunity to learn about historiography, develop research and writing skills, and create an original work of historical interpretation based on a sophisticated engagement with primary and secondary sources. 

Religious Toleration and Diversity in America

This course examines the origins, development, and limits of religious toleration and diversity in America. The course is organized thematically and will consider toleration both theoretically and historically. Toleration was (and is) sometimes expressed as an ideal, but more often it emerged in tension with religious, ethnic, and racial diversity. Toleration rarely meant embracing diversity; more often, it meant the opposite – an inability to drive out the “strangers” in their midst forced laity, clergy, and state officials to accept, albeit very begrudgingly, religious and racial or ethnic pluralism. Paradoxically, then, intolerance shaped much of toleration in America (far more than “secularization,” as historians have previously assumed). Religious toleration was also championed as a legal principle, as in Pennsylvania and in the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution. But whether toleration was institutionalized or not, there were always underlying articulations of power and order that served the interests of the “orthodox” (however defined) over those deemed outsider or heretical.