The Search for National Identity

Abstract

This is a brief description for a special number of the American Journal of Legal History, of a legal history course and seminar that I have been developing over the past dozen years. In it we study the historical context of the constitutional system of the USA, looking especially at the idea, and the construction of the idea, of the diverse communities of the United States as a single nation. This is an introductory course, and we address both substance and procedure. We spend a good deal of time talking about the need to establish the facts of a situation or event before framing general ideas about it. I try to explain that this is what lawyers and business people, as well as historians, do: they confront an unedited mass of facts, try to make sense of them, and to form a theory of the case. They then test their ideas against further investigation into facts. Students are required to consult primary materials as much as possible. Our own library has only limited holdings of historical materials, but the libraries of nearby Dartmouth College are open to them and digitized materials are increasingly available on the web. I don’t use a casebook or a treatise, not having found one that is suitable for this seminar, but have assembled materials that are posted on the course's TWEN page, where the students also conduct preliminary discussions of each week's reading assignment.