John Harpham (Social Studies)
First-Year Seminar 73M | 4 Credits (Spring 2025) | CANVAS SITE
Monday, 03:00 PM–05:00 PM
This seminar will explore the complex relationship between slavery and freedom–the two most powerful ideas in the American political tradition. We will consider the extent to which slavery and freedom have shaped each other: how freedom has often been understood as the absence of slavery and slavery has often been seen as the opposite of freedom. And we will also consider the character of the nation that has been formed in the course of these entanglements. Even as we inquire into the past, then, our interest in the past will be informed by our concern for the present and future.Our focus in this seminar will be on the period in which slavery and freedom were much more than American ideas: they were also the terms attached to institutions that shaped the lives of real persons. Most of the texts we read will come from the period before the Civil War. They will be works of literature and travel narratives, philosophical reflections and public political speeches, and judicial decisions and autobiographies and poems. Some of these texts are well-known, but most are not. And we will place particular emphasis upon the writings of African-Americans as essential texts in the attempt to understand the relationship between American slavery and American freedom.
NOTE: In addition to focused, spirited, and inclusive in-class discussion, this seminar will include a visit to the rare book library at Harvard, Houghton Library, as well as field trips to the Freedom Trail and the Museum of African American History in Boston.