Western Traditions 203

American Experiences

and

Constitutional Change

First Things First

• “Things You Need to Know” handout• Course website• Discussion sections• Close reading, thinking, talking, writing

– Example: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address– Terrorist: “Sic Semper Tyrannis!”

• Define “history” – product or process?– Example: George Washington

Whose “History”?

• Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)– Power privileges texts– Whose version is the “official story”?– From subatomic physics, Heisenberg’s

Uncertainty Principle• Act of measuring something changes the thing

• No such thing as an “impartial observer”

“What we see is not nature, but nature subjected to our means of questioning.”

-- paraphrased from Werner Heisenberg (1927)

Enduring Conflicts

• Influence of $$$ on govt.• Interests of many vs. few

– Class struggle– populism

• Agrarian vs. urban culture– Counterculture

• War & national identity vs. peace & internal dissension

• Confrontation with land

• Human migrations– Immigration– Slavery– Gold Rush– Movement of African

Americans to North– Transience of middle-

class– Porous southern

border

Christopher Columbus& John Smith

• Columbus (1451-1506)– Heroic navigator

– Mistaken explorer

– Agent of destiny

– Genocidal conqueror

– “dis-” coverer or “un-” coverer?

• Smith (1580-1631)– Leader & savior of

Jamestown Colony

– Raider of Indian towns

– Romantic interest of Pocohontas

– Public relations expert

Primary Sources

• Original words of contemporary participants and commentators

• Need close reading

• Avoid “presentism”– ”Strip ourselves in imagination of all the

surroundings of our own lives . . . [the past] is another planet, another human universe”

– -- Fernand Braudel (1949)