America at 250:  Founding and Forging a Democracy

The Duke Sanford School of Public Policy is challenging students to deepen and renew their understanding of American civics in its innovative class titled, “America at 250:  Founding and Forging a Democracy.”  This spring class offered undergraduates the chance to engage with primary documents and experiments with how to teach university students about the foundational principles of America’s democracy. 

The class is part of a broader civics education partnership between Duke Sanford and the National Archives Foundation focused on university student audiences. Supported by the Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free -Inquiry, and Belonging, this course brought together Duke’s best faculty and outside speakers to provide students with a unique opportunity to reflect on our nation’s history and think about our future. 

Rather than approach the past 250 years as an exercise in memorizing dates, the course challenged students to examine our nation’s journey through the lens of various themes, connecting pivotal stories and movements to America’s democracy. Taught by Duke Law School’s Joseph Blocher and the Department of History’s Thavolia Glymph, the course leverages the university’s academic strengths to create a new interdisciplinary model for teaching our students about America’s unique system of government. Each class focuses on foundational documents that shaped the country’s democracy - diving into the holdings of the National Archives. 

Students spend the semester building their capacity to engage in deliberative inquiry and discussion with peers on topics related to history, law, and democracy. With the guidance of Blocher and Glymph, they learned the methods and tools of historical research as they analyzed primary documents and practiced skills of legal analysis, particularly related to constitutional interpretation. 

Blocher shared his thoughts on the course’s analytical approach, “When it comes to some of the central questions of constitutional law – like the power of judicial review or the abomination of Dred Scott v. Sanford – I’ve taught this class the same way I teach my law students, albeit with even more attention to the primary documents that animate those questions. Together, we’ve done our best to inhabit the world in which those documents were written, and to see things through the eyes of John Marshall or Dred Scott. And I think that historical orientation has contributed to a richer understanding of the foundational commitments and questions our democracy faces today.” 

The course covered the full breadth of America’s history, starting with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and ending with classes focused on the complexities of modern America. 

Reflecting on the course’s unique curriculum and the emphasis on student engagement with primary resources, Glymph said, “Primary documents have had a prominent place in all the courses I have taught. This course fortified my belief in their extraordinary power to convey the convictions and passions of people who lived in different times, along with the indispensable value of historical context and legal thinking." She added, "We have watched with delight as students encountered and grappled with documents from the nation’s past—from laws, court decisions, and matters of foreign policy to letters written by the literate and the barely literate—that tell the story of our nation’s history over the past 250 years. The excitement in the class has been palpable as students debated and wrote compellingly about the foundational documents they were reading, some for the first time and others they thought they knew only to discover complications and complexities they had not before considered.”

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The courses featured guest speakers who have led lives devoted to public service and scholarship, offering students unique perspectives and adding depth to classroom discussions. The project connected history, law, and policy with guest lectures from Sanford’s Polis Distinguished Fellows, former Assistant Secretary of State John Hillen and former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel.  These remarkable guest lectures highlighted the through line between how history shapes the present and underscored how questions facing the nation’s founders persist to this day. 

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The course also included a special trip to Washington, DC to visit the National Archives and meet people working on policy and in politics - like a special fireside chat with Senator Ted Budd and former Senator Richard Burr.

For the students in this course, a semester-long journey with the Duke’s top faculty and engaging guest speakers was a special opportunity that will shape their Duke journey and beyond. 

Duke Sophomore student Charlotte Wu looked back on the semester, “This class has been such a joy because Professor Blocher and Professor Glymph are always pushing us to think differently, whether we're talking about why events unfolded the way they did or what lessons we might carry forward to contemporary times.”