This is a public version of the readings for my syllabus for a seminar I am teaching entitled, “The Founding Fathers?—History, Memory, and Politics.” The seminar is for upper level undergraduates and graduate students. It is my first attempt at teaching this course in a way that deals with history, historiography, and contemporary political discourse about the founders. The course meets once a week for almost three hours, and this format limited my ability to assign all of the things I wanted to assign. One of the real challenges was keeping up with the vast and growing literature on the topic, and in terms of syllabus planning, this translated into a struggle to combine classics with more recent works. I’ll try to write about how the course went at the end of the semester. In the meantime, thanks so much to all my twitter acquaintances and friends who offered suggestions, and especially to Michael Hattem who most generously shared lots of his sources.
-Gautham
THE FOUNDING FATHERS?—HISTORY, MEMORY, AND POLITICS
Books for Purchase:
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020)
Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington (New York: Penguin Books, 2020)
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (New York: Atria, 2017), xi-198.
Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin Books).
I. The Rise of “Founding Fathers” and “The Founding”
Course Introduction and the Origins of the Idea of ‘The Founding’
Wednesday, January 27
(to be read before class:) Schocket, Fighting Over the Founders, Introduction
In-class viewing: The Patriot (USA, 2000, color)
19thCentury Americans Create ‘the Founders’
Wednesday, February 3
‘Making history’ in late 18thcentury America:
Michael Hattem, Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution(New York: Yale University Press, 2020), chapters, 5, 6.
From history to myth:
Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation(New York: Penguin Books), Chapters 1-4.
II. Historians Intervene
From Nationalism to Founders Chic: Historians Popularize the Founders
Wednesday, February 10
Why is Founders Chic a problem?
Schocket, Fighting Over the Founders, Chapter 2
Frank Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy(Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2006), 199-229.
Founders Chic By Another Name:
Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington(New York: Penguin Books, 2020), xxv-1, 109-181.
Historians complicate the Founders: Beyond the Founders
Wednesday, February 17
Why go ‘beyond the Founders’?
Jeffrey Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, ed., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
- Pasley et al., “Introduction”
- Pasley, “The Cheese and the Words”
- Zagarri, “Women and Party Conflict in the Early Republic”
- Cornell, “Beyond the Myth of Consensus: The Struggle to Define the Right to Bear Arms in the Early Republic”
Going Beyond the Founders: Theory to Practice:
Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the Early Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), Prologue, Chapters 1-4, and conclusion.
III. The Contested Past
Pop Culture and the Market: People Power
Wednesday, February 24
The Author is Dead. Long Live the Author.
Schocket, Fighting Over the Founders, Chapter 4
Renee Romano and Claire Potter, ed., Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018): essays by Joanne Freeman, Lyra Monteiro, David Waldstreicher and Jeffrey Pasley, Joseph Adelman.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: An American Musical (2015).
Historical Sites and the Founders: Contest
Wednesday, March 3
Space, Place, and Power Relations
Schocket, Fighting Over the Founders, Chapter 3
Museum of the American Revolution website, https://www.amrevmuseum.org/
Thom Nickels, “What the Museum of the American Revolution Gets Wrong—and Right,” Philadelphia Magazine, April 19, 2017, https://www.phillymag.com/news/2017/04/19/revolution-museum-philadelphia/
Rick Beard, Review of The Museum of the American Revolution, Journal of American History104, no. 3 (Dec., 2017), 737-43.
Ian Volner, “Robert Stern’s Museum of the American Revolution,” Architect106, no. 6 (June 2017), 103-8.
George Boudreau, Review of the Museum of the American Revolution, The Public Historian 40, no. 1 (Feb., 2018), 131-6.
Jennifer Schuessler, “A New Museum of the American Revolution, Warts and All,” New York Times, April 13, 2017.
Struggles from Above and Below
Kate Haulman, “George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” Journal of American History
101, no. 3 (2014), 861-66.
Lawyers and Originalism
Wednesday, March 17
The Rise, Sort of Fall, and Further Rise of Originalism
Schocket, Fighting Over the Founders, Chapter 5.
Aaron R. Hall, “Slavery, History, and the Antebellum Origins of Originalism,” Law and History Review 37, no. 3 (August, 2019), 743-62.
Paul Baumgardner, “Originalism and the Academy in Exile,” Law and History Review 37, no. 3 (August, 2019), 787-808.
Saul Cornell, “Reading the Constitution, 1787-91: History, Originalism, and Constitutional Meaning,” Law and History Review 37, no. 3 (August, 2019), 821-46.
Dragooning History: At What Cost?
Logan Everet Sawyer III, “Method and Dialogue in History and Originalism,” Law and History Review 37, no. 3 (August, 2019), 847-60.
Jonathan Gienapp, “Historicism and Holism: Failures of Originalist Translation,” Fordham Law Review84, no. 3 (2015), 935-56.
IV. Historians Strike Back: Clues, Methods, and Frameworks
Historians Re-complicate the Founders: Gender
Wednesday, March 24
Revolutionary Backlash(es)
Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1-10, 46-81.
Mary V. Thompson, “‘As if I Had Been a Very Great Somebody’: Martha Washington’s Revolution,” in Barbara Oberg, ed., Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 128-46.
Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society(New York: Random House, 1996), 3-26.
The Historiographical Future
Nancy Isenberg, “Founding Mothers, Myths, and a Martyr,” Journal of Women’s History19, no. 3 (Fall, 2007), 185-94.
Historians Re-complicate the Founders: Race
Wednesday, March 31
Race as Interpretive Fault Line
David Barton, excerpt from The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, foreword by Glenn Beck (Dallas: Thomas Nelson, 2012), xi-1,
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge(New York: Atria, 2017), xi-198.
Annette Gordon-Reed, “Engaging Jefferson: Blacks and the Founding Father,” William and Mary Quarterly57, no. 1 (Jan., 2000), 171-82.
Discovering and Protecting the Archive
Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), introduction, chapter 6.
Historians Re-complicate the Founders: Context
Wednesday, April 7
The Importance of Institutions
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 1-12, 56-92.
Frederika J. Teute and David S. Shields “The Meschianza,” “The Confederation Court,” “The Court of Abigail Adams,” and “Jefferson in Washington,” Journal of the Early Republic35, no. 2 (summer, 2015), 185-261.
Structure, Agency, and ‘Greatness’
Barry Alan Shain, “American Founding Narratives, Monarchy and Republicanism: The Largely Unsought and Incomplete Democratic Revolution,” Early American Literature53, no. 1 (2018), 185-208.
V. ‘Get Your Politics Out of My History’: Civics, History, and Agitprop
Revanchist Conservatism: The Right Retakes the Past
Wednesday, April 14
From Founders Worship to Deification
Jill Lepore, The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), ix-42, 126-51.
Lauren R. Kerby, Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation’s Capital and Redeem a
Christian America(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 1-52.
David Barton, The Jefferson Lies, 115-140.
The Use and Abuse of History: the Founders in the Age of Trump
Wednesday, April 21
Readings TBA