2025-2026 Academic Year

Fall 2025

HIST 117 American Hist 1607 to 1877
This course covers colonial, revolutionary, and national America through Reconstruction. Include attention to historical interpretation. Multiple sections offered.

HIST 204 Intro Historical Methodology
Local archives and libraries serve as laboratories for this project-oriented seminar that introduces beginning majors to the nature of history as a discipline, historical research techniques, varied forms of historical evidence and the ways in which historians interpret them, and the conventions of historical writing. Prerequisite: one previous course in history.

HIST 404 Jacksonian Democracy
In this course we will study the rise of what is called "Jacksonian Democracy." In 1828, Andrew Jackson ascended to the presidency after losing a deeply contested election in 1824, and he brought with him a sense of populist democratic possibility, anger at his political enemies, and a program that relied on loyal advisors over appointed government officials. In doing so, he attempted to centralize power in the executive branch of the federal government all the while arguing for "states rights." How did these at times contradictory notions mesh together? In what ways did he and his supporters insist on the political power and dignity of the common man? In what ways were his most salient policies-slashing government monopolies, tariffs against foreign goods to support small American owners and workers, and removing native peoples from lands east of the Mississippi River-a reflection of changing democratic norms? And what did this mean for his political opponents? We will study these issues, and many others, as we analyze the rise of democratic populism and the central part Jackson played from roughly the1810s to the 1830s.