Lately the historical Interwebs has been talking about the new Grant bio by H.W. Brands. I read his life of Andrew Jackson several years ago and thought it was pretty good, even if the availability of Robert Remini’s one-volume abridgment version of his multi-volume work made another popular Jackson bio seem a little superfluous.
The Grant and Jackson books are both part of a series of biographies which will constitute a complete history of the United States, with Brands using each individual exemplifying a particular era. It’s a pretty interesting idea.
I wonder if you could do the same thing for a survey course, organizing each lecture around the life of some historical figure. Could students learn history just by getting acquainted with individuals whose life stories reflect their respective time periods or subjects? Here are a few possibilities:
- Pocahontas for early colonial Anglo-Indian relations with her first encounters with the Jamestown colonists, her capture, baptism, marriage, and eventual death
- Jacob Leisler for the evolution of the colonial-English relationship in the late seventeenth century
- Jonathan Edwards for the intellectual/religious developments of the early eighteenth century
- John Adams for the Revolutionary and Federalist eras, with the emergence of his commitment to independence and the development of his ideas on government
- John Sevier for the trans-Appalachian frontier, with his career as Indian fighter, leader of a dissident separatist movement, land speculator, and state governor
Past in the Present 