As the nation approaches its semiquincentennial, narratives can easily slide into a comforting, predictable recounting of American greatness. But in history professor Gautham Rao’s classroom this past spring, students peeled back the layers of myth to look at the founding “down to the studs.”
Rao designed the course to explore the history, culture, and complicated politics of the early American republic. The class acted less as a political corrective, he says, and more as a way to measure how American political culture and our expectations of history have shifted over time.
“In all of my classes, I tend to start with the original primary sources—and in no case was this more significant than this class, where our understanding of a lot of the primary sources from the Revolutionary era and the founding tend to be focused through our own assumptions and politics,” Rao says.
Students confronted the canon—the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution—alongside documents that often receive shorter shrift, like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the personal correspondence between John and Abigail Adams. By tracking committee edits and historical back-and-forth, students learned to view these texts not as sacred, untouchable artifacts, but as practical, deeply human documents born out of real-time debate and compromise.
The course brought together history majors and nonmajors alike for classroom discussions that were distinctly Socratic, driven by elaborate reading notes and annotations students prepared ahead of time. This emphasis on analog annotation served an intentional dual purpose in the age of artificial intelligence, Rao says.
“It’s very tempting to possibly say, ‘OK, let me see what a machine thinks, and then I’ll spruce it up to make it look better,’” he explains, but the assignments required students to engage directly and genuinely with the text. To ensure every voice was captured—including the quieter students—Rao had them submit discussion notes at the end of every session to track what was resonating.
The coursework balanced this critical rigor with creative imagination. For their final project, students translated the Declaration of Independence into modern vernacular. Slang and profanity were explicitly permitted to capture the raw, passionate energy of the revolutionary moment. Students anchored their contemporary translations with strict citations, evaluating what the founders intentionally overlooked.
For Cathrine Volk, SIS/BA ’27, the assignment transformed into a profound historical thought experiment. Rather than simply swapping outdated words for modern equivalents, Volk looked at how history might have diverged if the contemporary values Americans agree on today had been present at the nation’s inception.
Volk’s rewritten Declaration systematically targeted foundational systemic gaps. Grounded in legal scholarship, she altered the iconic phrase “all men are created equal” to “all people”—an explicit inclusion meant to grant women immediate political power and spare them centuries of protracted legal battles.
Her modern rendering went further, modifying the judicial grievances against the king to mandate a “trial by a jury of one’s peers” to challenge historical racial biases in the justice system. She also replaced the clause regarding the naturalization of foreigners with a mandate for immediate, sweeping citizenship for all individuals present in the territory—including enslaved and Indigenous peoples—effectively drafting an alternative history where institutional disenfranchisement was barred from day one.
For Rao, this level of creative, deeply analytical engagement represents the ultimate reward of teaching.
“What I love is what I call the light bulb moment, where I can see students who may otherwise have thought, ‘Thomas Payne, what a snooze,’ all of a sudden have a twinkle of interest,” he says. “That, to me, is what I’m in it for in a lot of ways.”
The class has been so successful that its impact is already extending into future semesters. It inspired Rao’s new undergraduate history course scheduled for the spring 2027 semester: Alexander Hamilton and His World. This class will take the Hamilton that everyone thinks they know from pop culture and demystify him, exploring historical questions surrounding the slave trade, Native relations, and early American identity.
By equipping students with the tools to read beyond the current political moment, Rao ensures that the next generation can engage with the nation’s founding documents with an analytical, deeply critical eye.
“Occasionally, we hit moments of inflection where having a critical eye and understanding context can be decisive,” Rao says. “Critical thinking is the ability to go back to the original text—to examine our own assumptions—especially when it comes to matters of real civic importance.”