United States History

OFFERED 2023-2024

  • Time: Wednesdays, 12:15 – 1:45 pm
  • Tuition:
    • Seminar with writing tutorial: $75 per month (10 months, August through May)
    • Seminar only: $60 per month (10 months, August through May)
  • Location: Signal Mountain, Tennessee
  • Prerequisites: Writing II or equivalent writing skills OR take Writing II in addition to this course
  • 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 United States 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 as well as oral exams.
    • Writing tutorial only: Each semester, students write two essays and complete two other written pieces and one semester project. (Students in both history and literature courses only create one project per semester.) At the conclusion of each semester, tutorial students participate in Defense Day by giving a brief presentation on one of their essays and responding to questions from the audience.
  • Books Needed: FINAL BOOK LIST WILL BE POSTED SHORTLY – PLEASE CHECK BACK. THANKS! Books will be the same as or similar to those listed below. (Hard copies are required; recommended editions/translations are listed below)
    • Gwynne’s Grammar (ISBN: 9781984897961)
    • McClay’s Land of Hope – ISBN: 9781594039379
    • 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)
    • 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)
    • Selected primary source documents (These documents are all available online; they include works, or selections from works, such as Franklin’s Autobiography, Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth, and speeches of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, Douglass, Wilson, Coolidge, Roosevelt, and Reagan. Documents available online should be printed by the student, noted by hand, and brought to class. The best online resources for these documents are teachingamericanhistory.org, a project of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, and founders.archives.gov, a project of the National Archives.