Shannon Duffy

HIST 1310 | Survey of US History to 1877
This course examines life in early America, including its economic, political, intellectual and social aspects. You should leave this class with a general understanding of the political, social and cultural forces that helped shape our country in the period up to the end of Reconstruction. The class will also work to improve general comprehension and writing skills.

I examine US history through a focus on the impact of diseases and epidemics. While it not generally a topic that people think about in terms of history, diseases and epidemics have played a huge role in our history, from the Columbian Exchange to the present, and have had a broad impact on governmental power, immigration policy, military actions, and even how we think and talk about groups and individuals that we perceive as threatening (“quarantining” fascism during WWII, or stopping the “contagion” of communism in the Cold War, for example). Many of our primary documents will focus on disease, and we will be doing deeper dives into several episodes, including the impact of smallpox on Colonial and Revolutionary America, the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic, and the effect of cholera at the start of industrialization.

HIST 1320 | Survey of US History Since 1877
This course examines life in 19th and 20th century America, including its social, economic, political, and intellectual aspects. You should leave this class with a general understanding of the political, social and cultural forces that helped shape our country. I examine US history through a focus on the impact of diseases and epidemics, from cholera and typhus in the 19th century through AIDS in the 1980s. While it not generally a topic that people think about in terms of history, diseases and epidemics have played a huge role in our history, from the Columbian Exchange to the present, and have had a broad impact on governmental power, immigration policy, military actions, and even how we think and talk about groups and individuals that we perceive as threatening (“quarantining” fascism during WWII, or stopping the “contagion” of communism in the Cold War, for example). Many of our primary documents will focus on disease, and our main supplemental collection will be a deeper dive into an event currently very much in the news again: the H1N1 Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919.

HIST 3363 | Colonial America to 1763
This course is an intensive study of the settlement and expansion of British North America, including the development of American cultural, political and intellectual traditions. It investigates the culture of colonial America, the creation of American political institutions, and the political developments leading to the revolutionary crisis. The course concentrates on political and intellectual history, but also delves into the social and cultural history of colonial America.

HIST 3368B | Witches, Whores, Murderers & Thieves: Capital Crime in Early America
This course is an in-depth investigation into the social and legal culture of Early America. We will concentrate on a series of capital crimes, ranging from murder to witchcraft. The time period with be the 17th century up to the Civil War.

Early American penal codes were a draconian lot, proscribing the death penalty for over a dozen crimes, ranging from murder to masturbation, heresy, and witchcraft. But the actual conduct of the Early American legal system was more complicated, as court priorities and punishments evolved in response to a constellation of ideas about virtue and vice, sexuality, social hierarchy, and shifting social priorities. As Early American legal procedures were significantly different from today, and admitted into evidence a great deal of “hearsay” testimony from family and neighbors as to the character of the accused, court records can sometimes provide a unique opportunity to reconstruct the lives of ordinary Early Americans, people who rarely left diaries, letters, or papers, and so are often invisible to the history record. Other evidence of social attitudes and details of everyday life can appear in newspaper accounts of the crimes and popularizations of the stories.

Microhistories, a relatively new form of history, use the legal records surrounding a single court case, in combination with other primary records such as probates, wills, execution sermons and newspaper accounts, to open a window into the lives of a community at that particular time and place. Students will gain a greater knowledge of the interaction between social values and the development of legal codes and traditions, and the chance to critically analyze primary records from the period. 

HIST 3365 | The Early American Republic
This course is a study of U.S. history from the writing and ratification of the Constitution through the presidency of John Quincy Adams. It investigates the rise of the first party system, the growth of popular democracy, the development of the American presidency and the federal government, the expansion of the West, the increasing conflict with Native American groups, and the tensions produced by the growth of slavery in the Antebellum South. The course also looks at social and cultural changes affecting the new nation, including the rise of industrialization, and the social reform movements and evangelical revivals, and the growing market economy.

HIST 3368Y | Walking in the Way of Peace, War & Slavery: Quakers in American History
From their earliest roles as agitators to the Puritan “Citty on a Hill” and as founders of Pennsylvania, “The Best Poor Man’s Country,” to their early embrace of abolition and notable pacifist resistance in the Revolution, Civil War, WWII and Vietnam, the Society of Friends has played an outsized role in American History. This course will take a thematic approach to focus on several key points at the intersection of Quaker and American history, concentrating particularly on three issues: religious toleration, the Quaker relationship to slavery and the slave trade, and the Quaker response to warfare. The timeline will run from the period of early colonization in mainland America and the Caribbean through the Vietnam War.

HIST 3341 | History of the United States, 1914-1945
This course is an intensive investigation into the cultural, social and political history of the United States in the period from the First World War to 1945. It explores the cultural and political consequences of WWI, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression and World War II on American society through a close reading of the documents of the period.

HIST 4304 | Ancient Rome and the Mediterranean, (753 B.C. - A.D. 476)
This course examines Roman history from the foundation of the city until the fall of the Western Roman Empire in A.D. 476. It looks at the growth of the Roman political system and the client-state network, the development of Roman culture, values and ideals, and the expansion of Roman power and influence throughout the Mediterranean world. The class falls roughly into three sections, covering the establishment and growth of the Roman Republic, the transformation of the Republic into the Roman Empire, and finally the later imperial period and the rise of Christianity.

HIST 4365 | History of Revolutionary America, 1765-1791
This course is a history of the American people during the age of the American Revolution, from the beginning of the crisis with Britain to the ratification of the Constitution. It examines the political, constitutional and intellectual developments that inspired the Revolution and guided the creation of the new country, as well as the social and cultural changes of this period.

HIST 5313 | War & Society in Early America
“Change the timeline, and you change the perspective.” (Fred Anderson) The near-ubiquitous tendency to subdivide Early American History into Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early National shapes our common understanding of the period in ways that are sometimes unconscious. By adopting a longer perspective, we can see events in the period in new ways. The imperial rivalry between England and France, and their mutual pursuit of territories and Native America alliances, fundamentally shaped the history America even after political independence.

This course will focus on the American experience through the lens of five wars: King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion (1675-1678), The French & Indian War (1754-1763), the American Revolution (1775-1783), and the War of 1812 (1812-1815). We will look at changes in the tactics and ethos of warfare against different types of combatants, as well as effects of these military actions on colonial politics, economics, society, and culture.