Please click the play button on the showcase below to view lectures by Denver Brunsman recorded for this NEH Summer Institute. You can pause the video and use the arrows to navigate between lectures. Closed captioning is available.

This Institute for K–8 teachers was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this institute do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Below are additional resources connected to these lectures.

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”