Project Appleseed

Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu) is currently offering a free course on American Heritage. 

History 102: American Heritage--From Colonial Settlement to the Reagan Revolution

Every Monday a new lecture is released, along with study materials, recommended readings, and a discussion board dedicated to the topic of the lecture.  You can post questions to the discussion board for the lecturer to answer, (a video Q&A is released on Friday) though there is no guarantee that all questions will be answered.  The discussion board is lively with intelligent debate and participation from a broad cross section of America. 

Weeks 1-3 are archived, but still accessible.  We are currently on week 4, which covers the American Founding. 


Class schedule is as follows:


    "Introduction: How to Think About American History"
    Larry P. Arnn

    "Colonial Settlement"
    Mark Kalthoff

    "Enlightenment and Natural Rights"
    Terrence Moore

    "The American Founding"
    Paul Rahe

    "Democracy: American Promise and its Dangers"
    Paul Rahe
    Lecture Available March 25

    "The Crisis of the Union"
    David Raney
    Lecture Available April 1

    "The Gilded Age and the Robber Barons"
    Burt Folsom
    Lecture Available April 8

    "Progressivism"
    Paul Moreno
    Lecture Available April 15

    "America as a World Power"
    Tom Conner
    Lecture Available April 22

    "The Reagan Revolution"
    Terrence Moore
    Lecture Available April 29

The courses are absolutely free.  Hillsdale College offers a companion reader for this course, titled "American Heritage, A Reader".  You can get it free with your donation of $100 to Hillsdale College.

To sign up for this course, and to gain access to previous archived courses, please visit http://online.hillsdale.edu/


About Hillsdale College: (quoted directly from their website)

Hillsdale College was founded in 1844 by men and women who proclaimed themselves "grateful to God for the inestimable blessings resulting from the prevalence of civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land," and who believed that "the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings."

Hillsdale was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, sex, or national origin. Associated with the anti-slavery movement from its earliest days, it attracted to its campus anti-slavery leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Edward Everett, who preceded Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Several of the College's leading men were instrumental in founding the new Republican party up the road in Jackson, Michigan, in 1854. And Hillsdale sent a larger percentage of its students to fight for the Union in the Civil War than any other American college or university except West Point. Two of those Hillsdale veterans helped carry Lincoln's casket to the slain president's final resting place in Springfield, Illinois.

Hillsdale's modern rise to national prominence began in the 1970s, when the federal government attempted to impose a host of regulations on the College--including racial quota requirements that violated Hillsdale's principled policy of nondiscrimination. When the Supreme Court upheld these regulations in the 1980s on the basis that Hillsdale students received federally funded grants and loans, the College decided to refuse even this indirect form of federal aid, replacing all federal student aid with privately funded grants, loans, and scholarships.

Hillsdale's Board of Trustees pledged first that the College would continue its long-standing policy of nondiscrimination, and second that it would not accept any encroachments on its independence. It is a pledge that has been renewed several times in subsequent years and stands to date.

Today an independent, coeducational, residential liberal arts college with a student body of some 1,450 undergraduates, the College continues to carry out its original mission. With a core curriculum that comprises about one-half of courses a student needs to graduate, Hillsdale maintains its strong fidelity to the liberal arts.

In its outreach, too, the College teaches those same ideas that advance "civil and religious liberty." Its many programs include the Center for Constructive Alternatives, one of the largest college lecture series in America; the Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence, which holds seminars for high school teachers of civics and history; the National Leadership Seminars; the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, in Washington, D.C.; and Imprimis, a monthly newsletter that reaches over two million people.

Opened in the fall of 2012, the Hillsdale College Graduate School of Statesmanship offers an M.A. and a Ph.D. in politics.

For more information about Hillsdale College, please visit Hillsdale.edu.

Here's an example of the study guides that are provided with each weeks' lecture.

This one is from Week Four, which covers the American Founding.

Enjoy!

I noted that week 2 covered only one (Puritan) of the four 'folkways' mentioned by the esteemed David Hackett Fischer in his book "Albion's Seed".  I highly recommend the book itself.  If your genealogy has 'old American roots' you may learn things about where some of your own family traditions came from - I did!

The lecturer gives credit to Dr. Fischer for coining the term, and expresses his sorrow at his inability to cover more than the first of these folkways in his lecture- there simply isn't time enough allotted for one lecture, to cover all four.  Rather than a hodge-podge of information that inadequately covers all four, he wisely devoted his lecture to the first of these four folkways, the Puritans. 

Quote from: Nero on March 18, 2013, 10:35:57 PM
I noted that week 2 covered only one (Puritan) of the four 'folkways' mentioned by the esteemed David Hackett Fischer in his book "Albion's Seed".  I highly recommend the book itself.  If your genealogy has 'old American roots' you may learn things about where some of your own family traditions came from - I did!