In this compressed survey of American literature from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, we'll be looking at how European settlers, African Americans, and Indigenous people told stories about themselves and the places they lived against a backdrop of settler colonialism and the growing entrenchment of a slave economy in the U.S. The course examines two broad themes: first, how different writers claimed North America/the U.S. as their own, and second, how a group of writers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century began to redefine what prose fiction and nonfiction could and should do. In relation to those two themes, we'll also be discussing the emergence of African American and Indigenous literary traditions in the context of  their political struggles. This is a writing intensive course: in addition to reading at least 150 pages a week, you'll be writing every week in discussion boards, then writing four papers. Writers covered include Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau.