Exploration & Colonization
- “Aliens” in the Empire: Diversity in the American Colonies
- Art and American Identity: 1690–1789
- The Consumer Revolution in Colonial America
- First Look: Interpreting Early European Artistic Renderings of the New World
- Native American-European Power Rivalries
- No Lords, Spiritual or Temporal: The First Great Awakening and the American Revolution
- Puritans in the New World
- The Real Pirates of the Caribbean
- Slavery in the Atlantic World
- Slavery in the Chesapeake
- Teaching the Slave Narrative: The Life of Olaudah Equiano
- Who Are These People: First Contacts between Native Americans and Europeans
- Why Some New World Colonies Succeeded and Others Failed
Revolution & Federalist Period
- African Americans and the American Revolution
- American Rebels in an Age of Atlantic Revolutions
- The American Revolution as Civil War
- The Common Sense of Paine’s Common Sense
- The Constitution
- Consumer Politics in the American Revolution
- Defining a New Nation: 1789–1820
- Deism and the Founding of the United States
- Hamilton’s America — Jefferson’s America
- The Idea of American Exceptionalism
- Imperial Crisis and Revolution in the Spanish Frontier of North America
- Jefferson and Slavery
- John Adams and the New Nation
- The Meaning of “The Star-Spangled Banner”
- Predicaments of the New Republic: America, 1789–1820
- Teaching The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- Teaching the Constitution: A Close Reading Seminar.
- Was the American Revolution Avoidable?
- The Work of Slavery
- Your Revolution and Mine: Native Americans, African Americans in the American Revolution
Expansion
- Buffalo Bill, American Idol
- Building a Nation: Westward Expansion in the Early 19th Century
- The Causes and Consequences of Indian Removal
- Class in the Slave Narrative
- The Cult of Domesticity
- The Hudson River School
- “The Interests of the Many”: The Expansion of Democracy in the Jacksonian Era
- The Mormons and the Settlement of the West
- Teaching “Civil Disobedience”
- Teaching Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: A Close Reading Seminar
- Teaching Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in Context
- Teaching Emily Dickinson: A Close Reading Seminar
- Teaching Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
- Teaching “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”: A Close Reading Seminar
Civil War & Reconstruction
- Big Houses and African Villages: The Plantation Melting Pot
- Civil War Home Fronts
- Civil War Art
- The Civil War in a Global Context
- Emancipation
- The Emergence of Jim Crow
- The Factory v. The Plantation
- For Union and Freedom: African Americans in the Civil War
- John Brown: Hero or Villian?
- Legacy of the Civil War
- Life on an Antebellum Plantation
- Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
- Lincoln’s Presidency
- Making Sense of Battle: Journalism and Photography of the Civil War
- Meaning in Marble: Civil War Monuments and American Identity
- Pre- and Post-Civil War Slave Narratives
- Religious Roots of the Abolition Movement
- The Role of Medical Care in the Civil War: The Hospital and the Battlefield
- The Role of the West in the Reunification of the U.S. after the Civil War
- Southern Women in the Civil War
- Walt Whitman’s Civil War Poetry
- What Caused the Civil War?
- What Did Reconstruction Achieve?
- What It Meant to be Enslaved
- Winslow Homer’s Civil War Art
The Progressive Era & The Gilded Age
- African American Women and Race Relations: 1890-1920
- The American Business Revolution: Corporate Consolidation in the Nineteenth Century
- The Ashcan School
- Becoming American: Immigration and Assimilation in Late 19th Century America
- “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists
- Blessings of Civilization: The Roots of American Imperialism
- The Consumer Economy of the 1920s and the Business of America
- The Car and the City: Popular Culture in the 1920s
- Economic Development of the West in the Late 19th Century
- The Idea of Progress in 19th-Century America
- Industrialism and Progressivism: Humanizing the Machine and Mechanizing the Human
- Jacob Riis and Progressive Reform
- The Meaning of the West in Late 19th Century America
- Opportunity Costs: The Perils and Profits of Assimilation
- Over There: Why America Entered WWI
- Religion and Reform in 19th-Century America
- Rethinking Booker T. and W.E.B.
- “Something to Marvel At”: Urban Life in America, 1880–1910
- Teaching “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Teaching Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd”
Twentieth-Century America
- The 1950s and the Cold War
- The 1970s: The Lost Decade
- Art and the New Negro
- The Causes of the Great Depression
- Civil Rights Rhythm and Blues
- Community in African American Culture: 1917–1968
- The Crash of 1929
- Cuba and the Cold War: Beyond the Missile Crisis
- Do Dates Matter? Chronological Reasoning and Critical Thinking in World History
- FSA Photography and the 1930’s
- Gandhi and King on the March: The Power of Nonviolence
- The Great Migration
- The Great Migration, or Leaving My Troubles in Dixie
- Images of Asians in American Culture
- Imaging Civil Rights: Photography and the Movement
- The Impact of the Cold War on American Society
- In Search of the Civil Rights Movement
- Key Allied Decisions in WWII
- Literature and Essential Philosophical Questions
- Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine
- Moving America Left and Right: 1945–1990
- Nation, Race, and Genocide: Terror in the 20th Century
- New Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis
- The New Negro Movement in a Global Perspective
- Partisan Pictures: Art and Images in the Cold War
- Popular Perceptions of WWII
- The Power of Public Speaking
- Restoring Faith in Capitalism and Democracy after WWII: Up from the Rubble
- The Roots of the Counterculture
- The Scopes Trial and America’s Multiple Modernities
- Teaching William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
- Teaching Flannery O’Connor
- Teaching In Our Time in Our Time
- Teaching Prohibition
- Teaching The Book Thief
- Teaching Richard Wright’s Black Boy
- Teaching Robert Frost: A Close Reading Seminar
- Teaching The Catcher in the Rye
- Teaching The Great Gatsby: A Close Reading Seminar
- Teaching Through Close Reading: Historical and Informational Texts
- Teaching Through Close Reading: Poetry & Fiction
- Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird
- Teaching Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
- The Woman Suffrage Movement
- The Vietnam War in Vietnamese History
- Witches and Communists: The Crucible and the Cold War
- World War I