About the Class — HIST 3603

Hist 3603: Colonial/Revolutionary America is an upper level history course at the University of Arkansas. The goal of this course has always been to debunk many of the myths surrounding the colonial and revolutionary periods (like Pocahontas!) and to center individuals from marginalized communities within the narrative. This year, we decided to bring what we have learned in this course to the broader public through a digital history class project.

Students engaged in two historiographical analyses of 3-4 scholarly works based on their chosen group. These readings incorporated some of the seminal works on the American Revolution, such as Gary Nash’s Forging Freedom, to more recent publications, such as Barbara Oberg’s anthology on Women in the American Revolution. Students were then required to find, using digital archives, two primary sources that focused on their chosen group. As collaboration is key to any digital history project, be it interdisciplinary collaboration or historians collaborating with other historians to perfect an analysis that is public facing, these students then pooled their primary sources and various interpretations of the secondary sources to create a a single group narrative and design for their part of the site. Throughout this entire process, students learned about the problematic nature of archives and how difficult it can be to extract the voices of marginalized communities from primarily white narratives. The open format of the project — that is, students chose the primary sources, worked together to formulate a specific argument, and designed a project with minimal intervention from the instructor — also provided students with an opportunity to think critically and freely about how they approached the concept of a “multiplicity of revolutions.” They also learned more technical skills such as the importance of transparency in historical research, proper citations, and critical analysis of sources.

Although this project is finished for now (F22), digital history continues to be an expanding field and there are still many more stories to tell about the ways individuals understood and engaged with the American Revolution. John Adams once wrote: “But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.” Consequently, we hope that future classes, future student historians, will expand on our work! There is more to come. Keep watching this space.