Sheila Skemp received her B.A. in History from the University of Montana in 1967, and her Ph.D in History from the University of Iowa in 1974. After having taught at a number of colleges and universities in the Midwest and the Northeast, she came to the University of Mississippi in 1980. Recently, she served as Acting Director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women. Her book-length publications include, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (Oxford, 1990); Benjamin and William Franklin: Father and Son, Patriot and Loyalist (Bedford, 1994); and Judith Sargent Murray: A Brief Biography with Documents (Bedford, 1998). In April of 2000 The Colonial Metamorphoses in Rhode Island: A Study of Institutions in Change was released by University Press of New England. This final book by Sydney V. James was edited by Sheila L. Skemp & Bruce C. Daniels. Professor Skemp will become the Clare Leslie Marquette Professor of American History at the start of the 2008-2009 academic year.

Professor Skemp
Office hours: W, Th 11:00-12:00 and by appointment
Bishop 323
915-5868
sskemp@olemiss.edu

Fall 2009

History 400/450
Age of Revolution
Tuesday 4-6:30 pm
Lerner:   Bishop 337
                915-7529
                 mlerner@olemiss.edu
                 Office Hours: Wed. 4:00 - 5:00pm, Th. 3:00 - 5:00 pm, or by appointment
Skemp:  Bishop 323
               915-5868
               sskemp@olemiss.edu
               Office Hours:  Wednesday and Thursday, 11-12, or by appointment

Required reading (all available at Ole Miss Book Store):

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and other Political Writings
Mary Lynn Rampolla, Pocket Guide to Writing History

Course Description:

This course serves three essential purposes.  First, it is intended to enable students to acquire the writing, reasoning, analyzing, and research skills necessary to produce a quality research paper.  Thus the class will be designed in part to help students develop some of the research tools they will need to write an acceptable paper.  They will decide upon a topic, develop a sound bibliography, read, digest, and take notes on their sources, write—and re-write—a final paper (approximately 20-25 double spaced pages in length).

Second, students will develop their skills as oral communicators.  At the end of the semester, each student must make a formal presentation (10 minutes or so in length) to the class.  This presentation will be based on each student’s research project.

Third this course has a substantive element.  While all students will be selecting a relatively narrow topic upon which they will focus their research, they should all come away with a deep understanding of two crucial eighteenth-century revolutions.  Students will examine the ramifications and consequences of the American and French and Revolutions, investigating such questions as whether a unified intellectual world spans the Atlantic community, what relationship these revolutions had with one another, and how those revolutions helped develop modern conceptions of liberty, equality, and revolution.  Students may focus their research on one revolution, or they may decide to study a particular revolution in a comparative context. 

Twenty-five percent of the grade will be based on the quality and quantity of students’ contributions to classroom discussion.  Seventy-five percent will be based on the seminar paper. 

In addition to the specific assignments for each class session, there are a few essential dates that they need to keep in mind:

Topics Selected and Approved:  September 8

Working (Annotated) Bibliography:  September 22

First Draft:  November 10

Final Oral Reports:  November 17 and December 1

Final Paper:  December 1

Please Note:  There will be no excuses for your failure to meet any of these deadlines.  You should organize your schedules to allow for any last minute problems—electrical failures, sick typists, faulty disks, broken limbs, crashed computers, dead grandparents, whatever; i.e. if you wait until the last minute to prepare your assignment, or if you fail to back up your papers as well as on your hard drive, you will do so at your own peril.

Class attendance is essential.  Remember that twenty-five percent of the grade will be based in large measure on your contributions to class discussion.  Clearly, you cannot contribute if you do not attend class or show up for you individual discussions with your professor.

As always, plagiarism is an academic sin of the very worst order.  If you plagiarize—a sentence, a paragraph, an entire paper—you will automatically fail the course.

Class Assignments:

Week One:  Introduction to Class

Week Two:

American Declaration of Independence (xeroxed)
Articles of Confederation
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and Debates (xeroxed)
Sieyes, “What is the Third Estate” (blackboard)
 
Week Three: 
American Constitution
Federalist Papers 10, 39, 51, 84;
French Constitution of 1791 [http://sourcebook.fsc.edu/history/constitutionof1791.html] Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from 1793
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from 1795
Constitution of 1793
Constitution of the Year III--all in “Liberty Equality Fraternity” Web-Site (LEF)

Week Four:

Judith Sargent Murray, “On the Equality of the Sexes”
Elaine Crane, “Dependence in the Age of Independence” (blackboard)
Applewhite, Levy, “Women, Radicalization and the Fall of the French Monarchy” (blackboard)
Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Women (LEF)
Research LEF for more documents concerning women and the French Revolution

Week Five: 

Paine, The Rights of Man [part I] /Common Sense

Week Six:

Comparative Declarations of Independence

History 505
Fall, 2009

Office: 323 Bishop
Phone: 915-5868
E-Mail: sskemp@olemiss.edu
Office Hours:  Wednesday and Thursday, 11:00-12:00 and by appointment

The purpose of this course is to introduce graduate students to some of the main themes, questions, methodological approaches and interpretations of American History through the Reconstruction period.  It is also designed to help students acquire the skills to think, discuss, and write critically about historical literature.  

Course Requirements:

--Two short (8-10 double-spaced pages) historiographical papers based on weekly assignments that focus totally on journal articles, essays, or chapters from monographs.  I will give you a topic for each paper the week before we begin discussing the selections.  (You will have 8 topics from which to choose.)

--Two book reviews (3-4 double-spaced pages) based on assigned monographs and accompanying articles, essays, or chapters.  (You will have 6 books from which to choose.)

These papers will always be due by Thursday, at noon, following the class discussion on Monday.  You may turn them into me in my office, or put them in my mailbox in the mail room across from the History Office.

--One historiographical essay (18-20 double-spaced pages) on an assigned book (one that you will help choose based upon your particular interests).  Your assigned book will be a centerpiece.  You will discuss the books antecedents as well as its contributions to any descendants.  It is due on Monday, December 7,  by 3:00 p.m. 

 Final grades will be based on the paper grades and your participation in class discussion.  Failure to meet deadlines will affect final course grades.  Class attendance is required.  “Incompletes” do not exist for this class.

Note:  Students are expected to have a firm grasp of the historical narrative of the period between 1607 and 1877.  If you need a refresher, you would be wise to obtain—and actually read—a good narrative textbook to accompany your reading. 

Starred items indicate that the selections are on reserve at the John Williams Library, bottom floor check-out desk.  All other selections should be available on line—mostly on J-Stor.

August 24: Introduction to Class

September 31:  Native Americans and the Clash of Cultures

James H. Merrell, Indians New World

James Axtell, “Colonial America Without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections,” Journal of American History (JAH) 73 (1987):981-986.

**Axtell, “The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures,” in Axtell, Natives and Newcomers (2001): 145-173.

Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ) 53 (1996): 435-458.

Adam Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth Century New England,” JAH 73 (1987): 1187-1212.

**James Horn, “Imperfect Understandings: Rumor, Knowledge, and Uncertainty in Early Virginia,” in Peter C. Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 (2007).

August 31: Race, Slavery, and the “Origins Debate.”

**Winthrop D. Jordan, “First Impressions,” in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968): 3-43.

Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans,” WMQ 54 (1997): 19-44.

**Rebecca Anne Goetz, “Rethinking the `Unthinking Decision’: Old Querstions and New Problems in the History of Slavery and Race in the Colonial South,” Journal of Southern History (JSH) 75(2009): 599-612.

**J.H. Plumb, “On Winthrop D. Jordan’s White Over Black, in Allen Weinstein and Frank Otto Gateel, eds., American Negro Slavery (1973): 401-409. 

 William McKee Evans, “From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the `Sons of Ham,’” American Historical Review (AHR) 85 (1980): 15-43.

**Edmund Morgan, “Toward Slavery,” in American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), 295-315.

**Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction, (1982): 143-177.

**Jacqueline Jones, “Labor and the Idea of Race in the American South,” JSH 75(2009): 613-626.

September 7: No Class

September 14: Women and Gender

Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs

Joan W. Scott, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review  91 (1986): 1053-1075.

**Thavolia Glymph, “The Gender of Violence” in Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008).

Richard Godbeer, “`The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England,” WMQ 52(1995): 259-286.

September 21: The Colonial Chesapeake: A Search for Order

**Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in James M. Smith, ed., Seventeenth Century America, 90-115.

**T.H. Breen, “`Looking Out for Number One’: Conflicting Cultural Values in Early Seventeenth Century Virginia,” South Atlantic Quarterly 78(1979): 342-360.

Lois Carr and Lorena Walsh, “The Planter’s Wife,” WMQ 34(1977): 542-571.

Russell Menard, “From Servant to Freeholder: Status, Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,: WMQ 28(1971): 169-198.

**Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, Chapters 12, 13.

**James Perry, The Formation of Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore (1990):70-143.

Jon Kukla, “Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia,” AHR 90(1985): 275-298.

**Stuart B. Schwartz, “Virginia and the Atlantic World,” in Mancall.

September 28: Puritanism and New England

David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment

**Perry Miller, “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity,” in Miller, ed., Errand Into the Wilderness (1956).

**Darrett Rutman, “Community Study,” in Rutman, ed., Small Worlds, Large Questions (1994).

**David Cressy, Coming Over (1987), Chapter 3. 

October 5: Bernard Bailyn and the Cause(s) of the American Revolution

Bailyn, Ideological Origins, Chapters 1-4.

Colin Gordon, “Crafting a Usable Past: Consensus, Ideology, and Historians of the American Revolution,” WMQ 46(1989): 671-695.

Jack Greene, “Political Memesis: A Consideration of the Historical and Cultural Roots of Legislative Behavior in the British Colonies in the Eighteenth Century,” AHR 75(1969): 337-367.

Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” WMQ 25(1968): 371-407.

T.H. Breen, “Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution,” WMQ 50(1993): 471-501.

Mark Egnal and Joseph Ernst, “An Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution,” WMQ 29(1972): 3-32.

**Rhys Isaac, “Preachers and Patriots: Popular Culture and the Revolution in Virginia,” in Alfred Young, The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism 127-156. 

October 12: Complicating the Revolution: Case Studies

Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom

Alfred Young, “George Robert Twelve Hewes, 1742-1840: A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution,” WMQ 38(1981): 561-623.

**Alfred Young, Masquerade (2004), Chapter Two. 

October 19: Results of the Revolution

Bailyn, Ideological Origins, Chapters 5 and 6.

**Silvia Frey, “Liberty, Equality and Slavery: The Pardox of the American Revolution,” in Jack Greene, ed. The American Revolution: Its Character and Its Limits, 230-252.

**Benjamin Quarles, “The Revolutionary War as a Black Declaration of Independence,” in Ira Berlin and Ron Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 283-304.

**Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, chapters 7 & 9.

**Elaine F. Crane, “Dependence in the Era of Independence: The Role of Women in a Republican Society,” in Greene, 253-275.

**David Szatmary, Shay’s Rebellion, chapters 2, 3.

**William Pencak, “`The Fine Theoretic Government of Massachusetts is Prostrated to the Earth’: The Response to Shays’s Rebellion Reconsidered,” in Robert Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays, 121-143.

**Ron Hoffman, “The Disaffected in the Revolutionary South,” in Hoffman, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (1974): 275-316.

**Pauline Maier, “The Transforming Impact of Independence, Reaffirmed,” in James Henretta, et.al., eds., The Transformation of Early American History

October 26: The “Capitalist Transformation” or the “Market Revolution”

Christopher Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism

James Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America,” WMQ 35 (1978): 3-32.

**Winifred B. Rothenberg, “The Moral Economy Model and the New England Debate,” in Rothenberg,  From Market Places to a Market Economy (1992): 25-55.

Paul E. Johnson, “The Modernization of Mayo Greenleaf Patch: Land, Family, and Marginality in New England, 1766-1818,” New England Quarterly  (NEQ) 55 (1982): 488-516.

Allan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” WMQ 46 (1989): 120-144.

Richard L. Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms in Early America,” WMQ 46 (1989): 351-374.

November 2: Political History and the Two Party Systems

Barbara B. Oberg, “A New Republican Order, Letter by Letter,” Journal of the Early Republic (JER) 25 (2005): 1-20.

**Andrew W. Robertson, “Voting Rites and Voting Acts: Electioneering Ritual, 1790-1820,” in Jeffrey Pasley, Beyond the Founders (2004), 57-78.

**David Waldstreicher, “Why Thomas Jefferson and African Americans Wore their Politics on their Sleeves: Dress and Mobilization between American Revolutions,”in Pasley, 79-103.

Michael Wallace, “Changing Concepts of Party in the U.S.: New York, 1815-1828,” AHR 74(1968): 453-491.

**John R. Van Atta, “`A Lawless Rabble’: Henry Clay and the Cultural Politics of Squatter’Rights, 1832-1841,” JER 28(2008): 337-378.

Ronald P. Formisano, “The New Political History and the Election of 1840,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 661-682.

**Michael Holt, “The Election of 1840, Voter Mobilization and the Emergence of the Second Party System: A Reappraisal of Jacksonian Voter Behavior,” in William J. Cooper, Jr., et.al., eds., A Master’s Due: Essays in Honor of David H. Donald (1985):  16-58.

**Joel Silbey, “The Contours of the American Political Nation: The Road to 1838,” in Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893” (1991):  5-32.

**Elizabeth Varon, “The Ladies are Whigs: Gender and the Second Party System,” in Varon, We Mean to be Counted (1998): 71-102.

Glenn C. Altshuler and Stuart M. Blumin, “Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy,” JAH 84 (1997): 855-885. 

November 9: Abolitionism

Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery

Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Parts I and II, AHR 90 (1985):  339-61; 547-566.

John Ashworth, “The Relationship Between Capitalism and Humanitarianism,” AHR 92 (1987): 813-28.

Daniel J. McInerney, “`A Faith for Freedom’: The Political Gospel of Abolition,” JER 11 (1991): 371-394.

James L. Huston, “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse,” JSH 56 (1990): 609-640.

Kristin Hoganson, “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850-1860,” AQ 45 (1993): 558-95. 

Stephanie M.H. Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861,” JSH 68 (2002): 533-572. 

November 16: The Southern “Mind”: Planters, Plainfolk, and Southern “Exceptionalism”

Kenneth Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” AHR 95 (1990): 57-74.

**Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “God and Honor in the Old South,” Southern Review 25 (1989): 283-296.

**Mark R. Cheathem, “`The High Minded Honourable Man’: Honor, Kinship, and Conflict in the Life of Andrew Jackson Donelson,” JER 27(2007): 265-298.

Elliott J. Gorn, “`Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” AHR 90 (1985): 18-43.

Stephanie McCurry, “The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Pro-Slavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina,” JAH 78 (1992): 1245-64.

Michael Wayne, “An Old South Morality Play: Reconsidering the Social Underpinnings of the Proslavery Ideology,” JAH 77 (1990): 838-864.

**Henry L. Watson, “Conflict and Collaboration: Yeoman Slaveholders and Politics in the Antebellum South,” Social History 10 (1985): 273-298.

**Eugene D. Genovese, “Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders’ Democracy,” In Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital (1983): 249-64.

James Oakes, “From Republicanism to Liberalism: Ideological Change and the Crisis of the Old South,” American Quarterly (AQ) 37 (1985): 551-571.

**James M. McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question,” Civil War History 29 (1983):230-244.

November 23: Thanksgiving Vacation

November 30: Reconstruction

Judkin Browning, “Removing the Mask of Nationality: Unionism, Racism, and Federal Military Occupation in North Carolina, 1862-1865,” JSH 72(2005): 589-620.

David Anderson, “Down Memory Lane: Nostalgia for the Old South in Post-Civil War Plantation Reminiscences,” JSH 72(2005): 105-136.

W. Scott Poole, “Religion, Gender, and the Lost Cause in South Carolina’s Governor’s Race: `Hampton or Hell!’”  JSH 68 (2002): 573-598.

**George C. Rable, “Bourbonism, Reconstruction and the Resistance of Southern Distinctiveness,” Civil War History 29 (1983): 135-153.

Robert Kaczorowski, “To Begin the Nation Anew: Congress, Citizenship, and Civil Rights after the Civil War,” AHR 92 (1987): 45-68.

M. Les Benedict, “Preserving the Constitution: The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction,” JAH 61 (1974): 65-90.

Nina Silber, “Intemperate Men, Spiteful Women, and Jefferson Davis: Northern Views of the Defeated South,” AQ 41 (1989): 614-35.

**Eric Foner, “The Making of Radical Reconstruction,” Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988): 228-239.

**William J. Barney, “The Ambivalence of Change:  From the Old South to the New in the Alabama Blackbelt, 1850-1870,” in Walter J. Fraser and Winfred S. Moore, eds., From the Old South to the New (1981), 33-41.

John J. Beck, “Building the New South” A Revolution from Above in a Piedmont County,” JSH 53 (1987): 441-470.