Through a Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia course, assistant professor of history Sarah Gronningsater and her students resuscitate early American history.
2 min. read
“To have a functioning republic, you need citizens getting education,” says assistant professor of history in Penn’s School of Arts & SciencesSarah Gronningsater, from a podium in David Rittenhouse Laboratory. Classrooms in this building are usually reserved for introductory math, physics, and astronomy courses, but this one happened to be the only room big enough to accommodate Gronningsater’s 150 history students.
This is the third time Gronningsater has taught this class since the spring of 2020, during a pandemic pivot to online learning. Since then, her class size has tripled and the course became part of the SNF Paideia program.
The class, Hamilton’s America, is a Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Paideia course that illustrates the political, constitutional, and social history of colonial America and the United States from 1754 to 1804.
Hamilton’s America outlines the nascent U.S. republic, beginning with the Seven Year War and running through Thomas Jefferson’s heated ascent to the presidency, an election he won against incumbent John Adams—a Federalist embroiled in a rocky stand-off with Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s America is not a biographical course of the influential U.S. statesman, though. Instead, the titular character serves as a lodestar, as well as a familiar reference for a generation of students who grew up with the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical.
Over the course of a semester, Gronningsater introduces both familiar and unfamiliar topics—the Revolutionary War, the creation of the U.S. Constitution, slavery and antislavery, Native American power and loss, religious awakenings, the history of Haitian independence, and the rise of partisan politics. To punctuate lectures, she shows movie excerpts and song clips—one student even brings her own mic to class to sing along.
Gronningsater also holds one attendance-optional “flex day” per semester, a “cocktail party without cocktails,” with snacks and conversation. Every year, more than half the class shows up, a testament to how they feel about the class community, she says.
That’s especially poignant now, she adds, in a time of heightened political rhetoric, and as the country nears the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Gronningsater believes in the study of history, and she’s keeping the faith: “If I teach the history on its own terms, in its own moment, with its own lessons in its own past context, inevitably the students will be able to understand their present world in new ways,” she says. “Because, by definition, we live in the world that the past made.”
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