Columbia Interactive - Slavery and Emancipation Seminar 2: The Struggle for Freedom

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E-Seminars in This Series

E-Seminar 1
The Origins of Slavery in the New World

E-Seminar 3
The Old South

E-Seminar 4
Abolitionism and Antislavery

E-Seminar 5
The Civil War

E-Seminar 6
The Meaning of Freedom

E-Seminar 7
Radical Reconstruction

E-Seminar 8
Retreat from Reconstruction

Slavery and Emancipation
A Series of Eight E-Seminars

Slavery and Emancipation
E-Seminar 2, The Struggle for Freedom
Taught by: Eric Foner

Description

E-Seminar Description

In The Struggle for Freedom, the second e-seminar of the eight-part series Slavery and Emancipation, Professor Eric Foner examines slavery and the American Revolution. He discusses the dramatic struggle for freedom waged concurrently by American colonists against the British Empire and by blacks against the institution of slavery. While blacks seized the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality to justify their natural right to freedom, the U.S. Constitution protected the institution of slavery. Some of the Northern states enacted laws to abolish slavery gradually, but these were small steps. Professor Foner discusses how blacks were excluded from the body politic, partly by the Constitution and partly by emigration and naturalization laws. By providing a framework for understanding how Americans in the new republic defined nationality and citizenship, Professor Foner unmasks the meaning of we the people.

E-Seminar Length:	3-5 hours
Start Date:	Anytime
Credits:	Not-for-Credit
Prerequisites:	None
Moderator:	None
Columbia Students, Faculty, Staff, and Alumni:	FREE

Interested in this e-seminar? Go to the e-seminar now*. Note: Columbia students, faculty, staff, and alumni will need to use their University Network ID (UNI) to access e-seminars.

E-Seminar Objectives | Outline | Instructor's Background | Recommended Reading | Technical Requirements

E-Seminar Objectives

•	Understand the role of freedom and slavery in the debates leading up to American independence.
•	Examine how the American Revolution affected the institution of slavery in the United States.
•	Discuss the U.S. Constitution's main provisions regarding slavery and how they affected American society and politics.
•	Compare how blacks and whites responded to the struggle for American independence.

Outline
1. Introduction
2. Meanings of Freedom
3. The American Revolution
4. The Constitution
5. The Turning Point
6. American Nationhood
7. Conclusion

Instructor's Background

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, received his Ph.D. in American history at Columbia under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter. His publications have concentrated on the intersections of intellectual, political, and social history and the history of American race relations. Among his books are Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970, 1971, 1995); Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976); Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980); Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983), and Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988, 2002), winner of the Bancroft Prize, Parkman Prize, Avery O. Craven Prize, Owsley Award, Lionel Trilling Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. With John A. Garraty, he edited The Reader's Companion to American History (1991). His most recent books are The Story of American Freedom (1998) and Who Owns History: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (2002), a collection of his recent essays.

A winner of the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates, Professor Foner is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy. He served in 1993-94 as President of the Organization of American Historians, and in 2000 as President of the American Historical Association. He has directed summer seminars for college and high-school teachers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, and is the editor of The New American History (1990, 1997), a collection of essays sponsored by the American Historical Association and designed to acquaint high-school teachers with the latest trends in historical scholarship on the American past.

Recommended Reading
Davis, David B. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

MacLeod, Duncan J. Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Miller, John C. The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia in association with the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1991.

Technical Requirements
You will need to use a computer with Internet access to complete this course. We recommend the following minimum configurations:

IBM-COMPATIBLE PC
Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, or NT
64 MB of RAM (128 recommended)
Monitor: 800x600 resolution recommended
Connection: Internet service and 56K modem minimum
Browser: Internet Explorer 4 or above (Internet Explorer 5 strongly recommended) or Netscape 4.7 or above
Sound Card (if you can hear audio you have a sound card)
Plug-ins: RealPlayer 7 or later; Flash Player 5 or later; Acrobat Reader 5 or later
(all plug-ins are free)

MACINTOSH
MAC OS 8.6 or higher
64 MB of RAM (128 recommended)
Monitor: 800x600 resolution recommended
Connection: Internet service and 56K modem minimum
Browser: Internet Explorer 5 or above or Netscape 4.7 or above
Sound Card (if you can hear audio you have a sound card)
Plug-ins: RealPlayer 7 or later; Flash Player 5 or later; Acrobat Reader 5 or later
(all plug-ins are free)

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