Writing Early American Lives: Gender, Race, Nation, Faith
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this literature course on how identity was written and spoken about in the Americas between roughly 1550 and 1850, well before nineteenth-century race categories hardened into law and slavery's economics. Readings draw on travel writing, captivity narratives, orations, letters, and poems by Native American, English, Anglo-American, African, and Afro-American authors, tracing how each group described selfhood, nation, and faith in their own terms. The course materials include the full reading list and syllabus from MIT's course, structured around primary texts rather than later theoretical frameworks. It treats race and identity as historically contingent categories, asking what these words meant to the people who used them centuries before the meanings we now take for granted. No video lectures are included, but the syllabus and text list are complete enough to follow as a self-directed reading course.