In the face of a spate of executive orders about education and what we can and cannot teach about the United States, particularly with regard to race, I’m posting here the course description for my American Political Theory class that I’m teaching this term.

It’s high time that those of us, particularly with tenure, who teach American history or American politics or American political thought or anything in that realm, stand up and speak out on behalf of what we teach. Not in a defensive or apologetic crouch, but proudly and loudly, affirming that we offer students an in-depth approach to central problems of the American experience.

My course opens with readings from Aristotle and the Hebrew Bible on slavery, and from Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton on capitalism (and slavery). I feel absolutely confident and certain that I am asking my students to faithfully and intelligently reckon with central currents of the American experience, with foundational questions of freedom and democracy, markets and liberty, personhood and property.

If you want to know what it is that we teachers do in our classroom, here it is:

This course will take up two elements of the American experience: slavery and capitalism. How do these institutions—one ancient, the other modern—relate, reinforce, and/or undermine each other? Through writings from the American canon—from Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton to W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass—and contemporary scholarship in history and the social sciences, we’ll examine how slavery, which many thought doomed to extinction at the founding of the American republic, grew and expanded as the United States developed into a more egalitarian democracy in the nineteenth century. We’ll look at how political writers and thinkers grew increasingly committed to slavery, and how they justified it as the foundation of democracy and capitalism. We’ll discuss the abolition of slavery, which generated one of the largest mass movements for emancipation across the world, and the effort to overturn that abolition under Jim Crow. Students should come away from this course with a better understanding of central political concepts such as freedom, labor, the market, racism, and domination—and how to apply those concepts in today’s world.