The American Founding and the German American Intellectual Encounter

3–5 credits · Undergraduate

The origins of transatlantic perceiptions: how Germans and Americans think about each other. The culture of German settlers in colonial America in the age of the Revolution; Pennsylvania Pietists vs Boston Puritans; Poetry and Rhetorics of revolution in Boston and Prussia; the Declaration in Germany; von Steuben and the foundation of the American military; post-revolutionary fiction; Emerson and Goethe; travel literature (J.Q. Adams in Silesia, Lenau in America); on the Constitution (Schurz, Douglass, Lincoln); DuBois on Wagner; Walt Whitman as a source for German democracy ; Hannah Arendt on the American Revolution.