Sample Courses
As a professor, I teach a wide array of American history courses. These classes range from survey-level lecture courses of several hundred students learning the basics about U.S. history to upper-level undergraduate courses focused on specific topics like the American West, Native American history, the Revolutionary Era, and Colonial America. I also offer graduate level seminars for Masters and PhD students in similar subfields of history. You'll find a sampling of my course syllabi below.
Survey Level- United States History to 1877
This course explores American history from early contact through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Over the span of the semester, we will examine the events that shaped the history of what would become the United States. We will learn about a diverse array of Native peoples, European colonists, and African migrants that experienced, contested, and contributed to the development of our familiar American society. We will examine how issues of religion, class, gender, race, imperialism, economics, and politics affected the course of American history from its early colonial history through the Civil War and its aftermath. We will trace the violent beginnings of European colonization in the Americas, to the Revolutionary Crisis and the great potential of the American Experiment. From there, we will look at how unresolved issues from the Revolutionary and Constitutional decades played out through the era of the Civil War. We will grapple with the tensions between American slavery and American freedom; American democracy and American expansion; the promises of America’s founding juxtaposed with the realities of America’s history. Students will gain a clear understanding of how North America’s earlier history has shaped the history of the United States and our contemporary society even today.
Upper Division- Native Americans in U.S. History
This course will offer students an in-depth study of the Indigenous history of North America. We will be taking the long view, covering topics from pre-contact to contemporary issues, and thinking through the range of experiences Native peoples have had with European empires and the United States. We will explore several central themes, including how Native American cultural understandings shaped interactions between Native peoples and incoming Europeans, how Native American power waned and waxed at various times and places across a continent, and how Indigenous actions shaped U.S. history from the 1700s to the present day. By the end of the course, students will have a clear understanding of the cultures of precontact America, be able to articulate how Native peoples interacted with incoming colonists, explain the variety of ways Indigenous groups resisted and survived colonization, and have a sense of some of the issues facing Native America today. This course will expand on knowledge gained in other U.S. history courses, showing how Indigenous history has contributed to the broader trajectory of American history and society.
Upper Division- Colonial North America
This course offers students an in-depth study of Colonial America from pre-contact Native history through the Seven Years War and its aftermath (1760s). We will explore several central themes, including Indigenous-European relations, the rise of racialized slavery, imperial competition, and provincial culture in the American colonies. By the end of the course, students will have a clear understanding of the cultures of precontact America, be able to articulate how the coming of the Europeans transformed the Americas and led to the formation of an Atlantic World, explain how European empires carried out racialized slavery and dispossession of Native Americans directly, and have a sense of how provincial culture and imperial competition led to the unraveling of metropolitan control in the colonies by the 1760s. This course will prepare students for future courses on Revolutionary America and other U.S. History series but will also serve to connect histories of early modern Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic World with American history.
Upper Division- The Frontier and American West
This course will expose students to an in-depth study of the American West as both a geographic region and a conceptual space in which the processes of encounter, conquest, and resistance took place from early European colonization through the modern era. Throughout the course, we will examine this tension between the American West as a specific place and a historical process. While continuing to interrogate this central question, we will explore several themes relevant to the history of the American West, including cross-cultural interaction, indigenous experiences, familial and kinship structures, gender, U.S. conquest and settler-colonialism, environmental exploitation, contested borders, and racial tensions. Most weeks are designed with one class focused on a specific place in the American West and the other class focused on a process that fits with these main themes. By the end of this course, students will have a clearer understanding of how these central themes played out in the American West’s past and remain crucial to understanding the western United States today. Students will also be able to deconstruct the tradition of the American “frontier” and distinguish cultural mythologies about the West from continental and borderlands realities.
Graduate Level Seminar- Studies in Native American History
In this graduate-level seminar, we will read many of the texts that have shaped the field of Native American and Indigenous history over the past thirty years, exploring the major themes, debates, methodologies, and questions that animate the field. Students will gain a firm foundation in historiographic waves of ethnohistory, “new” western history, “new” Indian history, as well as examples of Atlantic, borderlands, and indigenous studies. We will cover chronological topics that range from early contact through the twenty-first century, while exploring themes of environmentalism, violence, colonization, resistance, accommodation, historical memory, survivance, ethnogenesis, gender, religion, and modernity in relation to American Indian history. Most weeks, we will read one monograph and one relevant article that either contests or furthers the major arguments or topic for that week. Students will be required to lead discussion on these texts several times, as well as submit a major piece of writing or pedagogical assignment over the course of the semester.
Graduate Level Seminar- Studies in Atlantic World History
In this graduate-level seminar, we will read many of the texts that have shaped the emergent field of Atlantic History over the past thirty years or so, exploring the major themes, debates, methodologies, and questions that animate the scholarship. Students will gain a firm foundation in historiographic waves that expanded studies of the “Atlantic World,” and promised to connect histories of West African, early modern Europe, the Age of Discovery, the Caribbean, and Colonial America. We will cover chronological topics that range from early contact through the Age of Revolutions, while exploring themes of slavery, commerce, violence, colonization, resistance, ecology, gender, religion, and modernity in relation to the Atlantic Basin. Most weeks, we will read one monograph and one relevant article that either contests or furthers the major arguments or topic for that week. Students will be required to lead discussion on these texts several times, as well as submit a major piece of writing or pedagogical assignment over the course of the semester.