HIST 367
American Political Manifestos Spring 2018
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

Is there an American style or tradition of writing political manifestos? Given the United States’s origins in revolution, the answer would seem on the surface to be a definitive “yes.” But is it possible to trace coherent historical patterns among these public political declarations — of the sort we would term “manifestos” — and how might we even choose to define that term? What have been the most pronounced influences over time on manifesto writers? We will explore these questions in two ways: first, through close readings and analyses of manifestos at three historical junctures in U.S. history (the Revolutionary era; the 1830s-1850s; and the decades following World War II); and second, through students’ original research projects into manifestos of their own choosing.