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Reply #4: I do a project with my college kids [View All]

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Home » Discuss » Topic Forums » Books: Non-Fiction Donate to DU
enlightenment Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-23-08 06:15 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. I do a project with my college kids
(who aren't that much more advanced than yours) that looks at some of the primary foundation documents in Britain and compares them to the Declaration and the Constitution. In addition to the Magna Carta, I use the English Bill of Rights, the Petition of Rights, the Declaration of Arbroath, Ordinances of William I, and Henry I Charter of Liberties.

I introduce the documents in class and put them into their historical context - which gives you the opportunity to cover important points in British history - and then ask them to read the documents and look for places in the US documents that echo the concepts they found in the UK documents.

I also include a pretty substantial discussion of the Enlightenment and introduce them to some of the heavy hitters - Voltaire, Kant, Hume, Smith, Hutchison, etc. Some discussion of coffee house culture also seems to help them get a handle on where people's heads were at during the period in question! There's a great book, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America by David S. Shields, that might be helpful in that regard. Lawrence E. Klein has also done some wonderful work with coffee house culture, in article form, that is very interesting.
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