This course surveys the origins of American literature in the age of discovery through the Civil War. Readings in representative texts from British colonial, revolutionary, antebellum, and Civil War periods introduce Cadets to the earliest expressions of American identity and to the formation of a national literature. Cadets explore the crafting of the founding documents, Transcendentalist thought, and westward migration. Topics may include Puritanism; agrarianism and urbanization; technology, slavery, and labor; settlers and Native Americans on the frontier; American innovations in autobiography; and literary accounts of the war.
