Welcome to History 101

I want formally to welcome you to this class and to encourage you to explore this website thoroughly. Throughout the semester I will post updates, announcements, and new materials for our consideration. This site is a medium through which you are encouraged to interact with me and with your fellow students, and I hope it will be a place where we can all learn together. Again, welcome.

Theme of the Course

History and the past are not the same thing. The past is everything that came before us, wars as well as paper cuts. History is the interpretation of that past, the sifting, organizing, and "making sense" of people, mostly dead, and events, mostly over.

Because this is a history class, then, it has an interpretative scheme, a set of principles that guided the sifting, the organizing, and the making sense -- and I think it is only right that I lay such principles out at the beginning. I believe that history is composed, finally, of life stories. Some of the stories are short, even brutally so -- infants are snuffed out in their cradles, children are sold into slavery and thrown overboard when they sicken. Some of the stories are longer -- men and women grow old and die, warm in their beds, having lived some part, hopefully, of the life they had dreamed for themselves when young.

We will spend considerable time in this course examining America's evolution from a huddled series of seaboard settlements to a mighty empire that, striding to the Pacific, turned suddenly on itself. We will examine major events -- like the Revolution and the Civil War. We will examine major trends -- like Romanticism and commercialization. But we will never forget that individual men and women lived in and through these events and trends, shaping them -- shaped by them in turn -- and teaching us one of history's most enduring lessons: The past may shape and constrain us -- and we must therefore respect and understand it -- but it cannot tell us who we are, much less who we will be. There is much that remains for us to decide.