MENTAL HEALTH|PSYCHIATRY|GLOBAL HEALTH|LOW AND MIDDLE INCOME COUNTRIES.

This optional single module aims to develop students’ understanding of the impact and significance of the social context and social determinants of...

Mental Health in a Social and Global Context (PSBS0012)

AMERICAN HISTORY|MODERN HISTORY|UNITED STATES|CIVIL WAR|CONTROVERSY

This module is for half-year affiliate students only. Please see the 30-credit full-year version, HIST0088, for the full module description.

Please be aware...

The Disunited States: Contested Visions of America, 1775-1860 (HIST0123)

This module is for half-year affiliate students only. Please see the 30-credit full-year version, HIST0088, for the full module description.
Please be aware that you will only be covering half of the module content described in the full module description (content covered in Term 1 or Term 2, depending on your time with us).
If you require any further information, please contact the History Taught Programmes Team.

In 1782, following the American Revolution and the establishment of their independence from Great Britain, the United States Congress adopted a new motto for...

The Disunited States: Contested Visions of America, 1775-1860 (HIST0088)

In 1782, following the American Revolution and the establishment of their independence from Great Britain, the United States Congress adopted a new motto for their new nation: the Latin E Pluribus Unum (literally, “out of many, one”). Lawmakers hoped the motto would reflect the ties that bound their new states – originally created individually as former British colonies – into one new nation. The idea of perfect union, however, was much more elusive than the motto implied. Though American policymakers claimed a United States under their new constitution in 1789, for almost a century the American continent would remain a deeply contested and disunited space.

This module will explore the ways that Americans and outsiders challenged the U.S. government’s claims to dominance over the continent, discovering an unconventional and unexpected history of the American continent from the founding of the United States to the Civil War. Throughout our course of study, we will range both chronologically and geographically across the area that is today the continental United States. Because ideas of place are central to this course, each week our readings centre on a particular geographical location which was a flashpoint for a particular controversy over or for an aspirational vision for the future of the continent. In seeking to understand the full extent and diversity of antebellum peoples’ visions of this continent, we will examine a diverse cast of characters, ranging from Comanche imperialists on the Great Plains and proslavery Southern imperialists in Nicaragua, to Mormon nation-builders in Utah and a same-sex couple in Vermont. As we range across the course, we will seek to explore these groups’ different visions of America on their own terms, as well as in terms of the challenges to American state formation and imperial control that they posed, and the ways that American officials sought to respond to them.