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  Bowdoin College has been educating leaders for America and the world since the dawn of the American republic. Founded in 1794, Bowdoin is a highly selective college of approximately 1,730 students of distinction from across America and around the world.

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  Bowdoin’s curriculum offers a bold blueprint for liberal education designed to inspire you to become a world citizen and leader with acute sensitivity to the social and natural worlds.

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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
  • African-American Culture and Communities
  • Discussion:  Evolution of a Chesapeake Community
• Week 11
  • New England in the Eighteenth Century
  • The Mid-Atlantic Colonies in the Eighteenth Century
• Week 12
  • Discussion:  The Organization of Society in the Middle Colonies
  • 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)

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