United States History

OFFERED 2025-2026

Commemorating 250 years of Liberty

1775-76 to 2025-26

  • 2025-2026 Time: Thursdays, 12:30 – 2:00 pm Eastern
  • 2025-2026 Tuition:
    • Seminar with writing tutorial: $90 per month (10 months, August through May)
    • Seminar only: $75 per month (10 months, August through May)
  • Location: Signal Mountain, Tennessee
  • Prerequisite for tutorial portion: Writing III
  • Dual Credit Option through Bryan College: 6 hours of college credit
  • Grades: 9-12 AND 8th grade strong readers; Dual Credit is only available to students in 10th-12th grades
  • Pairing: You can pair this course with British Literature!
  • Description: Students will learn about the significance of the United States. The course will begin with an extensive study of the nation’s colonial era and its growth from the Western Heritage that laid a solid foundation for the new republic. The remainder of the course will show the strengths and struggles of the nation and the more recent departure from the nation’s foundation of liberty, as ideological and political movements of the late-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries led the nation to abandon the Constitution.
  • Assessment:
    • All: Students must complete all readings and daily-work/commonplacing.
    • Writing tutorial only: Each term, students compose two written assignments – one essay or research paper and one exam – and one project – choosing between an academic/artistic portfolio and a history-related handcraft. (Students in both history and literature courses only create one project per term.) In December and May, tutorial students participate in Defense Day by giving a brief presentation on one of their papers and responding to questions from the audience.
  • FINAL BOOK LIST for 2025-2026: (Hard copies are required; recommended editions/translations are listed below)
    • McClay’s Land of Hope – ISBN: 9781594039379 <= Needed the first week of class
    • Primary source anthology, two volumes ($40 total, cost of printing only, available from the tutor)
    • Franklin, Autobiography – Dover, ISBN: 978-0486290737
    • Paine, Common Sense – Dover, ISBN: 978-0486296029
    • ed. Rossiter, The Federalist Papers – ISBN: 9780451528810 (Includes the complete Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and all Amendments – If you do not purchase this edition, you will need to have a hard copy of all of the Declaration, Articles, Constitution, and Amendments)
    • Gentz’s The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution (Liberty Fund, ISBN: 9780865978201)
    • de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (University of Chicago Press, trans. Mansfield and Winthrop, ISBN: 9780226805368)
    • Chambers’ Witness (Regnery, ISBN: 9781621572961)