HIST 613 - American Revolution

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HIST 613 is a history/public history course designed to create primary source document collections for a website on the American Revolution aimed at teachers and students. Those collections will focus on the aspirations and experiences of ordinary people in the American Revolution. Students will locate documents, research to better understand them, and write “context narratives” to assist online users. The end product will be small collections accompanied by introductory essays that place the documents in historical context and aid in their interpretation.

In terms of content, the course works in conjunction with its undergraduate counterpart, HIST 413 (a lecture-based course on the American Revolution). Students will attend the lectures to familiarize themselves with the Revolution and to get a sense of historical events and issues around which they might center a document collection. Content will also come from the work of academic historians that students will consult as they build the introductions to their document collections.

The class also gives students hands-on experience presenting history to different public audiences. Much of that experience will be web-based, as students design their own individual projects to be hosted on the larger site. We will analyze other sites that present primary source documents on the Revolution and explore the possibilities for different kinds of presentation formats. Students will learn best practices for creating an online archive and document sets for high school/college students. The end result will be something students can put on a resume to show potential employers.
Course ID: 102311
Components: Lecture
Grading Method: R