American History
To 1877
The field of American History to 1877 provides students an opportunity to explore the social,
economic, cultural, political, military, and legal history of the first contacts between
native Americans, Europeans, and Africans, the founding and development of the North American
colonies, the American Revolution, the constitutional establishment of the United States, and
its development through the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Dissertations currently
in progress include: "Complicated Scene of Difficulties: Nathanael Greene", "The Revolutionary
War and State Formation in North Carolina, 1780-1790", "For the Security and Protection of the Community",
"The Frontier and the Makings of Pennsylvanian Constitutionalism", and "The Restoration in Carolina:
Trade, Plantations, and the New Science."
Ohio State Dissertations in Early American History, recently completed and in progress.
COURSES
COURSES IN AMERICAN
HISTORY TO 1877
Graduate courses are offered
on a regular basis, with a careful consideration of the particular
needs of the graduate students in residence.
Readings in American Colonial
History and the American Revolution (785.01)
Readings in the History of the Early Republic (785.02)
Studies in Mid-19th Century American History (761)
Readings in the History of the United States in the Civil War
Era (785.03)
Topics in American History to 1877
Seminar in Early American History (867)
Seminar in 19th Century American History (868)
Other courses that may relate substantially to American History
to 1877:
Early Modern Seminar (713)
Studies in British History (738)
Readings in African American History (752)
Studies in the History of Religion (753)
Studies in Environmental History (765)
Studies in Military History (767)
Studies in Military Thought and Strategy (768)
Studies in the History of American Foreign Policy (770)
Studies in Women's History (781)
History of American Law and Society (774)
Readings in American Legal and Constitutional History (784)
Studies in American Urban History (788)
Seminar in British History (803)
Seminar in African-American History (875)
Seminar in Women's History (881)
GENERAL EXAMINATIONS
Candidates for the Ph.D. take
written and oral examinations in the year following the completion
of their course work. The faculty in early
American History have developed a series of lists to assist
in preparing for these exams.
FACULTY
Leslie
Alexander specializes in antebellum African-American history.
She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Onward
Forever: Black Political Activism and Community Development
in New York City, 1784-1860", and has delivered a number
of presentations on that subject and on the development of Africana
(African diaspora) studies.
Michael
Les Benedict (Emeritus Professor) specializes in American legal and constitutional
history and the politics and law of the Civil War and Reconstruction
period. He is the author of several books and numerous articles
on American constitutional history and on Reconstruction, including
The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1973) and one of
the leading American constitutional history textbooks, The Blessings
of Liberty (1995).
John
L. Brooke works on questions in American politics, culture,
and society, ranging from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth
century. He is the author of The Heart of the Commonwealth:
Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts,
1713-1861 (1989) and The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon
Cosmology, 1644-1844 (1994), both of which have won multiple
book awards, including the Bancroft Prize. The working titles
of his current projects are Columbia: Civil Life in the World
of Martin Van Buren's Emergence, 1776-1821, and Habermas in
Tocqueville's America: Civil Society and the Public Sphere in
Early America.
Joan
Cashin teaches and researches in the social, cultural, and
economic history of nineteenth-century America. She is the author
of A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier
(1991, 1994), and the editor of Our Common Affairs: Texts from
Women in the Old South (1996), and The War Was You and Me: Civilians
in the American Civil War (2002). She presently at work on a
biography of Varina Howell Davis (Mrs. Jefferson Davis).
Saul
Cornell specializes in American intellectual history, the
founding of the republic, and legal and constitutional history.
He is the author of The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and
the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (1999) and has
edited a collection of essays, Whose Right Bear Arms did the
Second Amendment Protect? (1999). His current book manuscript,
due from Oxford in Fall 2005, is titled "Armed in the Holy Cause
of Liberty": Guns and the American Constitution. Cornell is
the Director of the Second Amendment Research Center at the
John Glenn Institute of Public Policy. His next project will
be a constitutional and cultural history of the Alien and Sedition
crisis of 1798.
Alan
Gallay will join the department
this year as the first Warner Woodring Chair in Atlantic History.
An historian of Early America with a focus upon Atlantic, Southern
and Native American history, he is author of The Formation of
a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier
(Georgia, 1989) and The Indian Slave Trade: the Rise of the
English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (Yale, 2002),
recipient of the Bancroft Prize. His edited books include Voices
of the Old South: Eyewitness Accounts, 1528-1861 (1994) and
The Colonial Wars of North America, 1512-1763: an Encyclopedia
(1996). Currently he is editing a collection of essays titled,
"Indian Slavery in Colonial America," and writing
a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh.
C.
Mark Grimsley is the Lincoln Prize-winning author of The
Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Towards Southern Civilians,
1861-1865 (1995) and the editor of books both of source materials
and essays on the Civil War. He specializes in military history,
the Civil War and Reconstruction, and racism in nineteenth-century
America; he is currently writing a book on race and war in nineteenth-century
America.
Lucy
E. Murphy specializes in the history of the interaction
of Native Americans, Europeans, and bi-racial people on the
American frontier. Her recent book A Gathering of Rivers: Indians,
Metis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737-1832 (2000)
examines the economy of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin
during the fur trade and lead mining eras. She has also coedited
an essay collection on the history of women in the Midwest.
Murphy teaches primarily at the Newark campus.
Margaret
E. Newell teaches colonial American history and the history
of the American Revolution. She is the author of many articles
and essays and From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution
in Colonial New England (1998), and is currently working a book-length
project on the enslavement of Native Americans in early New
England.
Randolph
A. Roth teaches and researches in religion, reform, and
community from 1764 to 1850. He is also expert in quantitative
methods. He is the author of numerous articles and The Democratic
Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut
River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850 (1987). He is currently completing
a book on The Puzzle of American Homicide, an interregional
study of murder in America.
Walter
Rucker works in seventeenth
and eighteenth century African-American and African-Caribbean
history. He currently is completing a book on African cultures
and the American slave experience.
Richard
D. Shiels is the author of several highly-regarded articles
on American religious history. Shiels teaches primarily at the
Newark campus.
EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY SEMINAR
Founded in 1992, the early
American seminar draws together faculty and graduate students
in history, art history and literature from around the state
of Ohio. It meets several times a year on the Ohio State campus
to discuss a research paper that has circulated among participants
in advance of the meeting. John Brooke and Margaret Newell currently
convene the meetings.
Click here for
a complete list of papers discussed in past seminars.
THE EARLY MODERN SEMINAR
Graduate study at Ohio State
offers the unique opportunity for graduate students to situate
their interests in early American history in a wider global
context through History 713, The Early Modern Seminar, covering
roughly the epoch between 1350 and 1800. A year-long readings-and-discussion
course, the Early Modern Seminar features presentations of research
by eight-ten scholars in a variety of regional fields. Students
have the opportunity to engage in the fertile cross-regional
thematic and methodological discourse that has made historical
work on the wider early modern period such a critical source
of innovation in the discipline as a whole. In 2002-2003 the
Seminar will consider issues in "Religion." The seminar
cycles through topics in military, diplomatic, and political;
religious, intellectual, and cultural; and social, demographic,
and economic history.
RESOURCES FOR RESEARCH
IN AMERICAN HISTORY TO 1877 AT OSU
THE LIBRARY
The Ohio State University Library
is one of the largest public libraries in the United States,
with over five million volumes and subscriptions to over 36,000
journals. It has an outstanding collection of secondary materials
in American history to 1877, virtually everything published
on the subject in English, and many foreign languages as well.
The library also has large holdings of primary materials. It
has all the material in the Early American Imprint series (pre-1801)
in microform, and has much of it in the original as well. The
materials in the English Short Title Catalogue are available
in microform and, in may cases, in print.
The library holds over a million
titles relating to history, women's studies, African-American
studies, foreign relations, and government in microform, including
selected British and American newspapers. You can check out
the newspaper holdings at http://library.ohio-state.edu/search/m?SEARCH=Newspapers.
It also holds microfilmed manuscripts relating to the American
Revolution, wide-ranging microfilmed sources on American women's
and family history, African American history and slavery, microfilmed
and published correspondence of American political leaders.
Beyond these on-campus resources,
the library is connected to a broad number of bibliographical
electronic databases and on-line journals and other materials.
It also has access to the Center for Research Libraries, which
has a large collection of primary and secondary sources in American
history, and to all the books and materials held in other Ohio
research libraries, through OhioLink.
Visit the OSU Library Web site
at http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu/
and take a look!
THE OHIO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Columbus is home to the Ohio
Historical Society, a rich source of material on nineteenth-century
Ohio, regional, and national history. Besides holding the state
archives and nineteenth-century court records, it houses the
private papers of Ohio political, social, and cultural leaders;
nineteenth-century Ohio newspapers, catalogued by date and location
of publication; city and county guides; and numerous artifacts.
The Society also maintains collections of local court and other
records at several regional locations and maintains historical
sites around the state. Visit its Web site at www.ohiohistory.org
and take a look for yourself!
C.I.C. AMERICAN INDIAN
STUDIES CONSORTIUM, NEWBERRY LIBRARY
OSU graduate students also
have the opportunity to pursue scholarship in the context of
the American Indian Studies Consortium, newly established at
the Newberry Library in Chicago, under the auspices of the Committee
for Institutional Cooperation, including leading universities
from throughout the Midwest. Graduate students at CIC institutions
will be able to apply for 20 months of short-term fellowships
to support dissertations on topics in American Indian topics,
and to attend annual conferences and more frequent work shops
and seminars. For more information about the CIC, visit their
Web site at http://www.cic.uiuc.edu.
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