HIST137 Pursuits of Happiness: Ordinary Lives in the American Revolution | Bell
Fields: United States; Cultural and Intellectual; Economies, Labor, and Capitalism; War, Peace, and Society; Empires and Colonialism
What is happiness and how do we pursue it? In America before, during and after the Revolution, that simple question became a national obsession. Thomas Jefferson thought that he knew and so too did all the other famous founding fathers committed to the protection of private property and the restoration of traditional political liberties. But what did happiness mean to the common people? What did happiness mean to soldiers, to midwives, to clerks, to smugglers, to shopkeepers, to shoemakers or to enslaved people – to the men and women, European, Native and African, on whom the success or failure of the revolutionary movement would ultimately rest?
Online Asynchronous
Material covered in this course includes:
- Colonial America
- Early American Economic Trends
- Peace and Revolution
- Early American Daily Life and Culture
- Demographics