This course explores American history through a thematic survey of colonial British North America and the early United States, from the first permanent English settlements of the early seventeenth century to the onset of the American Civil War. It studies how the United States, at first only a series of borderland outposts, became a sprawling republic for the purpose of investigating factors that brought Americans together and those that tore them apart, as they struggled passionately over racial, religious, and sectional values.