Unsettlers: An American History

This course is a survey of American history told as the story of how a self-selected, restless people built and remade a republic. It opens on the wager of the Atlantic crossing — who boarded at known odds, and what that selected for — and runs through the design of 1787: federalism, separation of powers, the Bill of Rights and the amendment process, the political breakdown over slavery's expansion, the Civil War as the violent resolution of that conflict, and the Reconstruction Amendments as a second founding. Wars appear when they decided something important about the republic; they are not the main events.

The course runs from the wager of the crossing to the modern republic, and is honest about failures and injustices without letting them organize the narrative. Two named ideas do that explanatory work: moral nearsightedness, which examines how a society lived beside a real evil without seeing it at full size, and the Conservatism of Continuity, the human attachment to familiar arrangements that hardened the South's defense of slavery — both offered as explanation, never excuse. Government is taught inside the story rather than bolted on: a full unit walks through how the system actually works, and the amendment units show it being corrected under pressure. The final unit, The Inheritance, is the capstone turn: what was built, and what now belongs to the student.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.