Syllabus 2017-18
Term 1
Week 1: Introduction
Thomas Jefferson “Declaration of Independence” (1776)
Alexis de Tocqueville “The Principle of the Sovereignty of the People of America” (1835)
Frederick Douglass, "What to a slave is the Fourth of July?" (1852)
Thomas Jefferson “Notes on the State of Virginia” (excerpt 1785)
Washington Irving “Rip Van Winkle” (1819)
Unit 1: Haiti and the Ocean
Week 2: Leonora Sansay Secret History or the Horrors of St Domingo (1808)
Week 3: Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” (1855)
*Susan Buck Morss “Hegel and Haiti” (2000)
Unit 2: The Frontier
Week 4: Charles Brockden Brown Edgar Huntly (1798)
*Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard (introduction to the Hackett edition)
Week 5: John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854)
Week 6: READING WEEK
Week 7: Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
Unit 3: The Plantation and After
Week 8: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
*Sojurner Truth “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851)
Week 9: Paul Laurence Dunbar, ‘The Lynching of Jube Benson’ (1904); Thomas Nelson Page, ‘No Haid Pawn’ (1887) Charles Chesnut “Po Sandy” (1899)
*Booker T Washington “Atlanta Compromise Speech" (1895)
*Ida B Wells “Lynch Law in America” (1900)
*Strongly Recommended but not mandatory WEB DuBois "Counter-Revolution of Property"Counter-Revolution of Property" Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935)
Week 10: Pauline Hopkins “Talma Gordon” (1900)
*WEB Du Bois “To the Nations of the World” (1900)
Term 2
Unit 4: The Factory
Week 1: Rebecca Harding Davis, 'Life in the Iron Mills' (1861)
* Karl Marx et al.
“Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham
* Henry David Thoreau “Economy” Walden (1854, excerpt)
Week 2: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
Unit 5: Europe and the Empire of Ruins
Week 3: Henry James Daisy Miller (1879)
Optional: Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839)
Optional: Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839)
Unit 6: The Roots of Urban Crisis
Week 4: Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick (1867)
Week 5: Charles Chesnutt of The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
*Strongly Recommended but not mandatory WEB DuBois "Back Towards Slavery" Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935)
Week 6: READING WEEK
Unit 7: Utopias and A Space of Our Own
Week 7: Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
Week 8: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)
Week 9: Sutton E Griggs Imperium in Imperio (1899)
* Martin Delany “Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent” (1854)
Week 10: TBD
