James McWilliams
Professor of Practice
Office: TMH - 107
E-mail: jm71@txstate.edu
Phone: 512.245.3455
Current Project
In 2025 the University of Arkansas will publish my book The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford. It will be the first biography of this elusive but quietly influential poet of the American South. To write the book I did over 200 interviews, researched it for over 7 years, and learned that a man can live a full lifetime in 29 years, the age at which Stanford died.
Courses Taught
HIST 1310 | America to 1877
This lecture-based course surveys the major themes and events in American history from the pre-Columbian era to Reconstruction. An overview of the overlapping political, cultural, social, and intellectual trends in American life encourages students to learn a critical approach to understanding change over time. Based in the premise that a diversity of voices has articulated the past, students will explore the broad contours of historical development through a wide range of perspectives.
HIST 3342 | Social and Intellectual History of the US
This course examines the social and cultural history of North America from 1607 to 1865 through a close examination of 27 primary source documents. Every class will consist of a 5-question reading quiz, in-class journal writing, and a brief lecture, followed by a class discussion of the assigned primary documents. We will focus on the related lost arts of close reading, historical interpretation, effective group discussion, and clear writing. The plan is for you to leave this class a better thinker, reader, conversationalist, and writer.
The American Revolutionary Era
This course examines the American Revolutionary Era (1763-1789) through a scope wide enough to include the British colonial and early American periods. Weekly lectures, primary documents, and five secondary texts place the pivotal events of the Revolutionary generation into a larger context of historical change. Wednesdays will consist of lectures. Mondays will be dedicated to discussion of the assigned readings for that week.
HIST 5313 | Graduate Seminar in Early American History
This reading seminar introduces graduate students to a small sampling of the most influential and innovative scholarship done by historians of colonial British America over the past thirty years. Meetings will focus on a selection of defining historiographical questions, themes, and problems raised by a generation of American historians who have collectively reinvigorated the study of colonial America (after decades of neglect). While we will closely study the work of individual historians, I hope that we will also draw larger conclusions about the North American societies (society?) that comprised the first British Empire.