Problem of Class in Early America

This seminar considers economic inequality in colonial British North America and the new United States. Studying everyone from sailors, servants, and slaves in the seventeenth century to industrial capitalists and slaveholders in the nineteenth century, this course will look at the changing material structures of economic inequality and the shifting arguments that legitimated or challenged that inequality. Readings will explore how historians have approached the subject of inequality using on class as a mode of analysis. Students will write extended papers that place primary research in conversation with relevant historiography. Enrollment limited to: 20. Written permission required.