The men who founded the new United States in 1776 had high hopes for the future, but few of their hopes and dreams worked out quite as they expected. They hated political parties but parties nonetheless emerged. Some wanted the United States to become a great fiscal-military state, like those of Britain and France; others wanted the country to remain a rural agricultural state very different from the European states. Instead, within a few decades of the revolution, the United States became something neither group anticipated. This class charts the pivotal era between the American Revolution and the Civil War, a period which saw tumultuous change in all aspects of American life - politics, society, economy, and culture, as America took its first unsteady steps as a new and rapidly expanding nation. Lecture style with question and answer time.