Instruction

This course begins with a sentence written in 1776 and asks what Americans did with it for the next two and a half centuries. To answer, you need to know where its ideas came from and how historians read a document like it.

The Enlightenment context. The founders were readers of the Enlightenment, the European movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that applied reason to government, science and religion. John Locke argued that people have natural rights to life, liberty and property, that government exists to protect them, and that a government which violates them may be replaced. Montesquieu argued that liberty survives only if legislative, executive and judicial power are separated. From English history the colonists took Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the idea that free people may be taxed only by their own representatives. From their churches, many took the conviction that rights come from God, not from kings. That is why the Declaration calls rights unalienable and says they are endowed by their Creator: if rights come from God or from nature, no government granted them and none may take them away.

From Declaration to Constitution. The first national government, under the Articles of Confederation, could not tax, regulate trade or enforce its laws. In 1787 delegates met in Philadelphia and wrote a new Constitution built on compromise. The Great Compromise gave states equal votes in the Senate and votes by population in the House. The compromises over slavery were the costliest: enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person for representation, Congress could not ban the Atlantic slave trade before 1808, and free states had to return people who escaped slavery. Ratification set off a national argument. Federalists such as Madison and Hamilton defended a stronger union; Anti-Federalists warned that it would crush the states and the liberties of the people. Several states ratified only on the promise of amendments, and in 1791 the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were added.

Reading like a historian. A primary source is evidence, not an answer. Historians ask four questions of every document, and you will use them all year. Sourcing: who wrote it, when, for what audience and purpose? Context: what was happening that shaped it? Close reading: what exactly does it claim, and what words does it choose? Corroboration: what do other sources say, and where do they agree or conflict? (RH.11-12.1 asks you to connect these insights to the text as a whole.)

A worked example. Take the Seneca Falls Declaration. Sourcing: written chiefly by Elizabeth Cady Stanton for a women’s rights convention in New York in July 1848. Context: women could not vote anywhere in the country, and married women in most states could not own property in their own names. Close reading: the text copies the Declaration almost word for word and adds two words, and women. Corroboration: Douglass, who attended Seneca Falls and signed its declaration, used the same strategy four years later. The two documents together show a pattern: people excluded in 1776 did not reject the founding; they held the nation to it.

Judging the founders in context. The analysis skill HI.3 asks you to interpret the past in its own context rather than only by present-day values. That does not mean excusing slavery; many people at the time, enslaved and free, condemned it. It means asking what was possible, who argued what, and why the outcome went the way it did. Hold two facts together all semester: the founders wrote a universal promise, and they built a government that denied it to millions.

Formative check

Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.