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
- 30
- Reconnaissance audits
- 6
- Words
- 155,551
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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
Background essay
Why Did the Colonies Become Different?
Labor, land, and the divergence of Chesapeake and New England
Background essay
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
Background essay
How Do You Defeat a Law Without Holding Office?
Counterpower, nullification, and the repertoire of colonial resistance
Background essay
Who Gets to Use the Word Liberty?
Revolutionary language, social conflict, and the contagion of claims
Background essay
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
Background essay
Liberty Was Declared. Who Could Claim It?
Revolutionary language and the people who tested its limits
Background essay
The King Was Gone. Who Had the Right to Rule?
State constitutions and the invention of republican legitimacy
Background essay
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
Background essay
What Kind of Republic Did the Revolution Create?
Competing visions, parties, foreign crisis, and the invention of loyal opposition
Background essay
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, literacy, performance, and the making of a mass public.