Aug. 29: What Do You Want to Learn from this Course?

Welcome! I hope you all had enjoyable summers and made it through the hurricane without any trouble. I wanted to let you know about a few items before we meet on Wednesday at 4:00 pm in Namm 1022.

1) Please download a PDF of the course syllabus here and review it before class on Wednesday. We will go over it together, but it would be good to look it over beforehand in case you have any questions.

2) There are two books required for this class, and they should be available now at the NYCCT bookstore:

• Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, Volume I: To 1877, Sixth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.
• Frederick Douglass and David W. Blight, ed. Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, with Related Documents, Second Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

3) Lastly, you also have a very brief assignment for class on Wednesday. (No worries–it doesn’t require any reading!) Using the “Leave a Comment” function below, name one issue, theme, or event in American history (up through the Civil War) that you hope to learn more about in this course. Explain why you find this issue/theme/event important, troublesome, or hard to understand. Everyone in the course is required to provide an answer of at least three sentences. Ideally, you should follow the guidelines for posting on the course website on pages 3 and 4 of the syllabus.