Explore how war, expansion, constitutional conflict, religious revival, literature, and democratic thought reshaped the early American republic while exposing persistent tensions over power, liberty, race, and national identity.
Presented by
Explain how virtue, property, decentralization, commerce, equality, and majority rule shaped competing understandings of republican government.
Analyze how trade restrictions, impressment, frontier conflict, sectional resistance, and national ambition contributed to the War of 1812 and its aftermath.
Compare nationalist programs with Old Republican arguments about federal power, banking, tariffs, internal improvements, state sovereignty, and strict constitutional construction.
Evaluate how western settlement, slavery, Native sovereignty, and the Missouri Compromise intensified disputes over expansion and political balance.
Interpret how literature, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, revivalism, nativism, and voluntary association influenced American identity and debates about liberty.
Assess the tensions between professed commitments to liberty and equality and the era’s practices of slavery, Indian removal, privilege, coercion, and exclusion.
This course examines the early American republic through the political, constitutional, economic, religious, and cultural conflicts that followed the founding era. It traces Jefferson’s embargo, the War of 1812, postwar nationalism, the American System, the Second Bank, and the Missouri Compromise, showing how commerce, expansion, slavery, federalism, and sectional power tested republican principles. The course contrasts nationalist programs with Old Republican defenses of agrarian independence, strict constitutional construction, and resistance to concentrated privilege. It also explores how James Fenimore Cooper, the Transcendentalists, the Second Great Awakening, anti-Catholic nativism, and Tocqueville’s democratic analysis shaped debates over American identity, virtue, conscience, equality, and association. The concluding treatment of Andrew Jackson brings these themes together by weighing frontier republicanism and opposition to banking privilege against violence, slavery, Indian removal, and executive power.
Professor of History · Hillsdale College
Bradley J. Birzer is a historian, author, and the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College.
View full profile