America in Question: Founding, Redemption, and Crisis

America in Question: Founding, Redemption, and Crisis examines the United States as an ongoing experiment in freedom and equality. The course traces how founding principles are articulated, contested, and reimagined across moments of transformation and strain. Beginning with the American founding, we consider how ideals such as liberty, equality, and constitutional government were established and justified. We then turn to efforts at redemption, especially during Reconstruction and the long struggle for civil rights, where actors sought to bring practice into alignment with principle. Finally, we examine moments of crisis in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when the meaning and viability of these commitments are thrown into doubt. Throughout, the course asks what it means to inherit a political tradition and whether democratic faith can be sustained under conditions of injustice, conflict, and uncertainty.