Teacher Development Program

Perfecting the Union: Leadership in American History

Instructor: Fred Beuttler
Monday through Friday | June 22 – July 2 | 10am – 12pm CT
Remote via Zoom

This course will examine the question of leadership in American history, from the Founding to the present, focusing on expressions of justice and morality in the practice of self-governance and the setting of national policy.  Using a combination of primary source documents from the time, as well as secondary interpretive accounts, it will look at the interactions of individual leaders in their institutional contexts, considering both public political leaders and private citizens, and how they shaped the public sphere.  It will look at the leadership qualities of Washington, Lincoln, Grant, Roosevelt, Wilson, Wells, King, Eisenhower, Johnson, Reagan, among others, as we seek to understand how leaders shape opinion and events in a democratic-republic.   

The Founders and the Classics II

Instructor: Kendall Sharp 
Monday through Friday | July 6 – July 17 | 9:30am – 11:30am CT
Remote via Zoom

In this course, we trace through close readings of primary sources the influence of the ancient Greek practice of political freedom through self-rule. The Framers of the US Constitution relied on the ancient classics self-consciously for their own essential ideas, especially liberty. By way of especially the Declaration of Independence, discourse about freedom and self-government reflects the influence in the Civil War generation. The influence is seen also in colonial accounts of Native government, where classical models and practices are deployed to describe how indigenous peoples ruled themselves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Authors to be read include Herodotus, Aristotle, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, the Federalist Papers (Madison & Hamilton), Francis Parkman, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and WEB Du Bois.

*Note: Slightly more than half the readings appeared on the syllabus of last year’s course, The Founders and the Classics, with almost half being new. The familiar friends we will discuss from a different angle than last year, namely, the specific angle of freedom. The new additions include descriptions by Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s and by Ben Franklin in the 1740s of the republican political institutions they found Native Americans practicing, when not a colonist in North American was free in the ancient Greek sense, but the Iroquois were. Finally, in honor of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we’ll read the Gettysburg Address and Frederick Douglass on the significance of July 4, and the chapter, “General Strike” from Black Reconstruction by WEB Du Bois.