HSTY 211: The Era of the American Revolution, 1763 - 1789

This is a survey of the Revolutionary period of American history, from the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789. It begins with some background coverage of the colonial period (1607-1763), but focuses primarily on the underlying causes of the American Revolution, the chain of events leading to the Declaration of Independence, the war with England, postwar conflicts of the 1780s, the Constitutional Convention, and the ratification struggle that followed, with a look forward to the so-called Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Lectures, readings, and discussions explore the Revolutionary crisis as a complex, multi-racial, transatlantic struggle involving Native Americans, African Americans (enslaved and free), poor whites, wealthy Anglo-American planters and merchants, Scottish traders, and British administrators, as well as multi-racial and multi-national military forces organized on radically opposing principles. The course also examines competing scholarly interpretations of the Revolution as a progressive or retrograde watershed in American gender relations. Finally, it considers competing interpretations of the aftermath of the Revolution during the 1780s and thereafter as representing either an acceleration of "radical" social change or a conservative "counterrevolution"--with corresponding implications for the lower classes and for other historically disempowered social groups.