Honors College 290C - The American Founding

The historian Edmund Morgan defined a revolution as a change in human affairs so traumatic that no one ever understands it, either at the time or thereafter. In this course, students will attempt to recover the experience of the revolutionary years in all their messy grandeur. We will ask what the major players-- Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and others-- thought they were doing. How did the Revolution look and feel to an ordinary soldier in the Continental Army? Did Abigail Adams believe it was a sexual well as political revolution? What was "the spirit of '76" and to what extent did it necessitate the creation of an independent American nation? These are questions we will address, along the way noticing the participants, like historians now, did not agree on the answers.

Open to Commonwealth College students only.