Teaching

Early American History Qualifying Exam Preparation | History 3010

Offered: 
2012

Directed reading for doctoral oral exam preparation.

Major Works in the History of American Civilization | Am Civ 200

Semester: 
Fall
Offered: 
2012

A survey of the field, with an emphasis on the range of interdisciplinary methods in the humanities, history, and social sciences.  Required of first and second-year graduate students in American Civilization and open to others by permission of the instructor.

How to Read a Book | History 74b

Semester: 
Fall
Offered: 
2012

This hands-on interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar is for students who want to think about what a book is and how to read one. Readings include historical and literary narratives of reading by Cervantes, Richardson, Franklin, Sterne, Ellison, and Bradbury, together with research exercises in Harvard library and museum collections.  Jointly taught by Jill Lepore (History) and Leah Price (English).

Historical Methods | History 97

Semester: 
Spring
Offered: 
2012

History 97 is a team-taught introduction to the discipline of history.  Over the course of the term, you will explore the historian’s craft by studying and practicing four methods:  narrative history, biography, intellectual history, and cultural history. After discussing each approach in seminar, you will analyze a collection of primary sources and secondary works, and write your own histories, to be discussed in tutorial.

The American Revolution | History 1404

Semester: 
Spring
Offered: 
2012
Course Website

This hands-on research seminar and conference course will take you out of the classroom and into the archives. An intensive study of the political, cultural, literary, and social history of the American Revolution, with an emphasis on Boston from the Writs of Assistance, in 1761 to the British evacuation of the city, in 1776. The class includes field trips to Boston and Cambridge historic sites, archives, museums, and graveyards.

Dickens in America | Freshman Seminar 36n

Semester: 
Fall
Offered: 
2011
Course Website

The seminar investigates Charles Dickens’s visit to the United States in 1842.  Readings will include Dickens’s bitter and controversial account of that trip, American Notes; an American parody called English Notes; Dickens’s American novel, Martin Chuzzlewit; and accounts of his visit by Americans, in diaries, letters, and newspapers. We’ll also read other antebellum travel narratives, including those of Frances Trollope and Alexis de Tocqueville, and, after a field trip, we’ll write some Dickensian travel narratives of our own.

Historical Writing | History 2616

An intensive writing workshop for history graduate students across field groups.  Readings consist of essays on historical writing and samples of particularly effective prose.  The purpose of the readings is to help you think about how and maybe even why you want to write about the past.  The work of the course consists of weekly writing assignments that we will together critique in class, paying special attention not only to standards of evidence and modes of argument but also to plot, character, and storytelling.  

Early American History | History 2600

This graduate seminar explores the historiography of early America.  Readings proceed chronologically, from 1492 to 1800.  But since what constitutes “early America” is in dispute, we begin with that debate.

The Election of 1800 | Freshman Seminar 47x

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson ran against the incumbent, John Adams, in arguably the most important presidential election in American history.  Students in this seminar will re-visit the election by researching the debate, state by state, in newspapers, political pamphlets, and the private letters of politicians and political observers.  Meanwhile, as the semester progresses, we will watch the current presidential election unfold, giving us ample opportunity to contrast contemporary political rhetoric with the charged campaigning of two centuries past.