The Gilder Lehrman M.A. in American History from Adams State University
These innovative courses blend a traditional liberal arts environment with features that can only be found online, combining first-rate scholars and small class sizes with virtual field trips, interactive discussions, and the extensive use of digital history texts. The program requires the completition of nine Gilder Lehrman online courses and writing, along with the defense, of a thesis.
See my course work below along with course descriptions.
AMAZING GRACE: How Writers Helped End Slavery
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Your Soul In Their Soul | |
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EMANCIPATION
(Summer 2015)
Lead Scholar: James Oakes, Distinguished Professor of History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Course Description: The emancipation of four million slaves during the Civil War was the single most revolutionary social transformation in American history. Most accounts focus on the Emancipation Proclamation and oversimplify a process that took generations to complete and involved thousands of men and women struggling for freedom before and during the Civil War. The course will explore the so-call "first emancipation" in the North after the American Revolution, the development of an antislavery movement committed to a number of federal policies designed to bring about that Abraham Lincoln called the "ultimate extinction" of slavery, he implementation of those policies during the Civil war, and their aftermath in Reconstruction. IN addition to the Emancipation Proclamation, we will explore the various antislavery statutes passed by Congress as well as the decision to press for a Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery everywhere in the United States. But we will also try to balance the political history of emancipation with a social history of emancipation as it happened on the ground in the Civil War South. Thus, along with the policymakers in Washington, we will consider the role of the slaves and Union soldiers in the wartime emancipation process, the obstacles to emancipation, and the postwar struggle to secure freedom and expand its meaning.
Weekly Essays
Lesson Plan
THE EMPIRE CITY: New York and the Transformation of American Life, 1877 - 1929
(Summer Seminar 2015)
Lead Scholar: Kenneth T. Jackson, Columbia University, New York, NY and Karen E. Markoe
Course Description: The seminar will emphasize the ways cultural, social, political, and geographic characteristics of New York City shaped newcomers - and the equally important ways that immigrants transformed Gotham. The seminar will feature lectures, discussions, and work with primary sources - as well as visits to landmark sites - to provide an overview of how urban history relates to American history. Topics that will be woven through the program include: the immigrant experience; the concentration of national wealth and power in Manhattan; the evolution of public services and the development of new forms of transportation and leisure; the movement of African Americans from the South to New York City; and the industrialization of the American economy at the turn of the twenieth century.
Lesson Plan
Reaction Paper
Women & Gender in 19th Century America
(Spring 2016)
Lead Scholar:
Course Description:
Essays
Final Paper
Historiography and Historical Methods
(Fall 2017)
Lead Scholar: Jennifer Koshatka Seman, Adams State University
Course Description: A study of the United States Presidency from 1780 to the present, with special attention devoted to the changing scope and function of the office in the changing context of broader American History. Other topics of particular interest are the key figures who have altered the institution and the role of the crisis in changing the scope and functioning of the office.
Response Papers
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Lyndon Johnson
Richard Nixon
Jimmy Carter
Ronald Reagan
Barack Obama
Final Paper
THE SOUTH IN AMERICAN HISTORY
(Spring 2015)
Lead Scholar: Edward L. Ayers, President and Professor of History, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA
Course Description: The South has played a central role in American history from the first permanent English colony though the United States of today. This course will trace that role across four centuries, using video tours to interpret key places in the story. The class will explore the creation of the largest and most powerful slave society of the modern world and the attempt to create a new independent nation to sustain that society. The course will chart the ending of slavery for four million people, the social transformations that followed in Reconstruction, and the upheavals of the first New South. For the twentieth century, the class will document the world of segregation, the overthrow of that system, and the emergence of the complicated and sometimes conflicted South we know today.
Critical Essays
Digital History Lab Work
Digital History Final Project
THE KENNEDY PRESIDENCY
(Summer 2015)
Lead Scholar: Barbara A. Perry, Co-Chair, Presidential Oral History Program, Director, Edward M. Kennedy Oral History Project, Miller Center, University of Virginia
Course Description: More than 50 years after its tragic end, the presidency of John F. Kennedy continues to be the focus of scholars, educators, biographers, journalists, politicians, advertisers, students, and citizens of the nation and the world. Why should a mere thousand-day presidency continue to attract such universal attention? Through the lenses of imagery, symbolism, media, leadership theory, and public policy, this course will explore the strengths, weaknessess, succcesses, and failures of the 35th president of the United States.
Weekly Essays
Lesson Plan
Digital Anthology
THE WORLD AT WAR
(Fall 2015)
Lead Scholar: Michael S. Neiberg, Chair of War Studies, United States Army War College, Carlisle, PA
Course Description: The years 1914 to 1945 created the America we know. They established the United States as a world political and economic power, if a sometimes ambivalent one. They also shaped the social and economic patterns that characterized the country for decades afterward, sometimes in surprising and unanticipated ways. The couse will examine the role of the two world wars in shaping modern American history. If you want stories of George Patton, this is not the course for you. But it is for you if you want to study some of the many scholarly interpretations of what the years 1914 to 1945 meant both for America's role in the world and for the changes to life inside the United States.
Critical Essays
Lesson Plan