American History before 1877

Professor Mark Stoll

Texas Tech University

Spring 2026

The Professor
and how to reach him

• Professor Mark Stoll

• Doctorate from UT Austin, 1993

• Specializes in American, environmental, and religious history

• Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America

• Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism

• Profit: An Environmental History

• Humanities 454

• Tuesday & Thursday 11:00–12:15 p.m. and by appointment

• Mark.Stoll@ttu.edu; https://markstoll.net

Teaching assistants

• TAs attend classes, take roll, advise students, lead review sessions, and grade exams

Readings

• No standard (and expensive) textbook

• Six short books, available in the bookstore, read according to the course schedule:

• Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

• Peter Charles Hoffer, When Benjamin Franklin Met the Reverend Whitefield: Enlightenment, Revival, and the Power of the Printed Word

• Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

• Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America, Second Edition

• James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam

• Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History

• Reference: The American Yawp: http://www.americanyawp.com/

Lectures

• The heart of the course

• Buy a notebook and take copious handwritten notes

• PowerPoint slides show the main points, names, dates, and information

• Slide text provides essentially lecture outlines, the skeleton of the information

• Slide text only will be posted online shortly before class

• If you miss class, get notes from a classmate

Exams

Attendance

Electronics in the classroom

• Turn off all electronic devices in class

• Students may ask for permission to use laptops

• Cellphones serve no educational purpose in the classroom

• Reading physical books improves comprehension and memory

• Taking physical notes improves comprehension and memory

Electronics in the classroom

• Electronic media and the Internet have been connected with:

• Declining attention spans and falling proficiency in reading and math

• Americans who read a book for pleasure dropped 10% since 2015

• Depression, anxiety, unhappiness, isolation, relationship disfunction, even suicide

• Misuse of AI weakens basic life skills related to understanding and analyzing information

• Using AI for schoolwork is like sending a robot to the gym for you. Neither brain nor brawn improves!

• Three times as many hours spent on Roblox last week than to build all Wikipedia

Map quiz must be passed before Spring Break

About the class

• History is a story we write or remember about the past

• “History” and “story” are related to French histoire.

• From Latin historia, from Greek ἱστορία (historia)

• Historia means “inquiry, knowledge obtained by inquiry, narrative” (hence “natural history”)

• From histor (ἵστωρ), “someone who knows things by inquiry”

• This calls to mind the one in ancient societies who kept tribal wisdom and memory

• Stories are what bind societies together

• History is everybody’s autobiography, & tells who we are, and why

• Every lecture is a story from our shared past

• We have hardly anything else in common

Why Are You Here?

• Legislative requirement since 1955

• Cold War legislation to prevent Texas students from the temptations of Communism!

• Part of a “liberal arts” education (B.A.)

• Ancient Greek & Roman artes liberales

• Most people were unfree (liber = free)

• Civic responsibility of being a free person

• Liberal arts = the art of being a free person

• Necessary for taking part in civic life

• Essential for a citizen of a republic

History major?