Professor Brunsman’s lectures will incorporate the following primary and secondary sources:

Lecture 1: The Cultural Spectrum of Colonial America

• Columbus Reports on His First Voyage, 1493
• Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, account of traveling through North America, 1542
• Great Peace of Montreal (1701) between New France and Thirty-Nine American Indian Nations
• Jane’s Story, Historic Jamestown
• Letter from Richard Frethorne to his parents, March 20, 1623
• Olaudah Equiano on the Middle Passage, 1789
• The Middle Passage, 1749
• Slate, The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes

Lecture 2: Declaring Independence

• Thomas Jefferson’s “Original Rough Draught” of the Declaration of Independence (1776)
• Benjamin Franklin to William Strahan, July 5, 1775
• George Washington, Address to Congress, June 16, 1775 (Washington Accepts Command of the Continental Army)
• Oneida Indians Declare Neutrality, June 19, 1775
• Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, November 14,1775
• Thomas Hutchinson, Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia, in a Letter to a Noble Lord, &c. (London, 1776) (loyalist response to American Independence)
• John Adams and Abigail Adams on the Rights of Women
  • Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776
  • John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776
  • Abigail Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, April 27, 1776
  • Abigail Adams to John Adams, May 7, 1776
  • John Adams to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776
• Declarations of Sentiments and Resolutions, Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, July 18–20, 1848
• Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945)

Lecture 3: Compromises in Adopting the Constitution

• George Washington to James Madison, November 5, 1786
• Virginia Plan, Constitutional Convention
• New Jersey Plan, Constitutional Convention
• Hamilton Plan, Constitutional Convention
• George Washington to Alexander Hamilton, July 10, 1787
• George Mason’s Objections to the Constitution, September 1787
• James Madison, Notes from the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787

Lecture 4: The Jeffersonian Revolution

• Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, May 23, 1792
• Thomas Jefferson to Philip Mazzei, April 24, 1796
• Testimony in the Trial of Gabriel Prosser, October 6, 1800
• Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
• Thomas Jefferson to John C. Breckenridge, August 12, 1803

Lecture 5: Andrew Jackson and a New American Politics

• Andrew Jackson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1829
• Andrew Jackson’s Message to Congress on Indian Removal, 1830
• Memorial of the Ladies of Steubenville, Ohio, against Indian Removal, 1830
• Andrew Jackson to the Cherokee Tribe, 1835
• John Ross, Memorial and Protest of the Cherokee Nation, 1836
• Lowell Mill Girls and the Factory System, 1840
• George Caleb Bingham, The County Election (1854)
• Common Man and Contradictions: A Mock Trial of Andrew Jackson

Lecture 6: The West, Slavery, and Causes of the Civil War

• The Alamo: Virtual Tour
• North Carolina Law Prohibiting Slaves to Read or Write, 1831
• Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” 1852
• The Dred Scott Decision and Its Bitter Legacy
• First Lincoln–Douglas Debate, August 21, 1858
• Letter to the New York Times on the reasons for secession, January 10, 1861
• Fort Sumter Video: “Much More Than Brick and Mortar”