This module (and its co-requisite Fighting Over Freedom: American Political Ideas from Revolution to Civil War (Masters): B) will allow students to study a historical theme or area in great depth, under the guidance of an individual member of staff drawing on both secondary sources (i.e. books and articles) and primary sources (documents, newspapers etc), both published and unpublished. The module will allow students to study an aspect of history in detail and gain a fuller understanding of how different types of source material inform the historical process. The idea of freedom has been central to the identity of the United States since its birth in a revolution against the British empire. But what did freedom mean, who was it for, and how did it relate to other values, including justice, duty, and equality? This module analyses debates from the revolutionary era to the Civil War a century later, to think through the significance of \"freedom\" in American thought, and the radically different ways it could be understood. We'll focus not just on famous figures like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, or elite thinkers like Henry Thoreau, but also on black radicals like David Walker, feminists like Lucretia Mott, and working-class organisers like Thomas Skidmore. In the process, we'll rethink our own ideas of freedom, what it means in practice, and how we might pursue it as we remake our own world, just as early Americans remade theirs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
analyse and critically appraise key events and historical processes relevant to the subject under scrutiny
analyse and critically evaluate a wide range of relevant primary source material
critically evaluate the historiographical context and trends of the subject under exploration.
Summarise, synthesise and evaluate the subject material in a sophisticated written form
