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Location: Bowdoin / Sarah F. McMahon / Courses / hist231 / readingguide

History

History 231 Reading Guide

Reading Guide and Electronic Reserve Reading Links

Week 1
- Introduction to North American Colonial History
- The Age of Discovery and the Expansion of European Empires
Week 2
- English Heritage: Society, economy, and politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
- First Settlers—First Settlements: “The Importance of Being English”
Week 3
- Native North Americans: The first inhabitants of North America
- Discussion: The Contact of Cultures
Week 4
- The Chesapeake Bay: The instability of a tobacco society
- The Origins of the Slave System in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake
Week 5
- New England: The covenant ideal and the “New England mind”
- The New England Town
Week 6
- The Puritan Family and the Well-Ordered Community
- Disaffected New Englanders: Alienated affections and the “declension” of Puritan New England
Week 7
- Discussion: Witchcraft in a Contentious Society: The late seventeenth century
- The Mid-Atlantic Colonies in the Seventeenth Century: New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania as the “Motley Middle”
Week 8
- The Empire and the Colonies in the Late Seventeenth Century: The Glorious Revolution in America
- Provincial Society: The search for identity
Week 9
- Discussion: American Social Development and the Convergence of Regions in the Eighteenth Century
- Southern Societies in the Eighteenth Century
Week 10
- To be determined
- African American Culture and Communities
Week 11
- Discussion: Evolution of a Chesapeake Community
- New England in the Eighteenth Century
Week 12
- The Mid-Atlantic Colonies in the Eighteenth Century
- The Empire and the Colonies: Colonial warfare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Week 13
- The Fear of “Creolean Degeneracy”: American culture and American identity in the Eighteenth Century
- Discussion: The Evolution of Colonial America: Evidence from everyday life
Week 14
- America at 1750: Toward the American Revolution?
Postcards:

Old Witch House, Salem, Mass., As It Was Up To 1856. (c.1905)

Maine. Old Jail. York. (c.1905)