Foundations of American History, 1600-1890
This first-year survey course introduces American & Canadian Studies students to the early history of colonial North America and the United States.
Law, Land, and Violence in the American West
This intensive final-year course traces the expansion of the United States into the continental interior, over the course of a century from 1776 to 1877. It deals with the myth and history of pioneers, frontiersmen, and explorers; of outlaws and lawmen; of cowboys, and Indians, and slaves. Drawing on a generation of revisionist historiography, it looks for the reality behind the Hollywood image of America’s west. We will study flows of people, trade, and capital; the formation and destruction of communities; the development of law, democracy, and politics; as well as the day-to-day dynamics of gender, race, and class; from the Midwestern prairie to the desert of New Mexico. We will place western history in the context both of the United States, and of the globalising nineteenth-century world, including the west’s role in the Civil War of 1861-65. And we will learn, through primary sources and through recent scholarly debates, how land, law, and violence shaped a nation.
Group Research: History as a Game?
Public understandings of the past and historical processes are shaped not just by education but by entertainment—from films and books to board-games and videogames. In this option, groups will research and analyse the relationship between games and history, in order to understand how interactive media can help shape our ideas about the past, present, and future. Groups may choose to investigate, for example:
Other courses I have taught:
Practising History: Women and the American Revolution
Practising History: Salem Witchcraft
Group Research: Worlds of the Founders
This first-year survey course introduces American & Canadian Studies students to the early history of colonial North America and the United States.
Law, Land, and Violence in the American West
This intensive final-year course traces the expansion of the United States into the continental interior, over the course of a century from 1776 to 1877. It deals with the myth and history of pioneers, frontiersmen, and explorers; of outlaws and lawmen; of cowboys, and Indians, and slaves. Drawing on a generation of revisionist historiography, it looks for the reality behind the Hollywood image of America’s west. We will study flows of people, trade, and capital; the formation and destruction of communities; the development of law, democracy, and politics; as well as the day-to-day dynamics of gender, race, and class; from the Midwestern prairie to the desert of New Mexico. We will place western history in the context both of the United States, and of the globalising nineteenth-century world, including the west’s role in the Civil War of 1861-65. And we will learn, through primary sources and through recent scholarly debates, how land, law, and violence shaped a nation.
Group Research: History as a Game?
Public understandings of the past and historical processes are shaped not just by education but by entertainment—from films and books to board-games and videogames. In this option, groups will research and analyse the relationship between games and history, in order to understand how interactive media can help shape our ideas about the past, present, and future. Groups may choose to investigate, for example:
- A particular game and its relationship with a historical setting or process.
- How games express particular ideas, theories, or concepts within history (e.g. nationalism, religion, or “civilisation”).
- The historical development of games themselves, and changing presentations of the past.
- Games’ relationship to “realism” and their ability to offer experiences of the past.
Other courses I have taught:
Practising History: Women and the American Revolution
Practising History: Salem Witchcraft
Group Research: Worlds of the Founders