Primary Readings:

Thomas Paine - Common Sense (1776)
The Declaration of Independence (1776)
Hugh Henry Brackenridge – The Battle of Bunker Hill (1776); selected sections.
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur – Letters from an American Farmer – “Letter XII” (1784).
- Washington Irving - The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne – “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux” (1840)
- Herman Melville - Israel Potter; His Fifty Years of Exile (1855)
- Sinclair Lewis – It Can’t Happen Here (1935); selected chapters.
- Paul Beatty – A White - Boy Shuffle (1996); selected chapters.
- Aaron McGruder – The Birth of a Nation (2012)
- The 1776 Report (2021) – the 1776 Commission.

Secondary readings:

1. Wood, Gordon S. “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution”, The William and Mary Quarterly 23, No. 1 (1966), pp. 3-32.
2. Bercovitch, Sacvan. “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution”, The Massachusetts Review 17, No. 4 (1976), pp. 597-630.
3. Robert A. Ferguson. “The Commonalities of Common Sense”, The William and Mary Quarterly 57, No. 3 (2000), pp. 465-504.
4. Portelli, Alessandro, Il re nascosto
5. Reynolds, Larry J. “Revolution and warfare”, in Devils and Rebels. The Making of Hawthorne’s Damned Politics. Ann Harbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008, pp. 14-50.
6. Zaller, Robert. “Melville and the Myth of Revolution”, Studies in Romanticism 15, No. 4 (1976), pp. 607-622.
7. Tendler, Joshua. “A Monument upon a Hill: Antebellum Commemorative Culture, the Here-and-Now, and Democratic Citizenship in Melville’s Israel Potter”, Studies in American Fiction 42, No. 1, pp. 29-50.