Scott McDermott

Background

About Scott McDermott

I have six years of college teaching experience and have successfully taught both halves of the World and U.S. History surveys. I am a dynamic and innovative teacher. In order to reach today’s students, I use “active learning” techniques on a daily basis in the classroom. While keeping lectures to a minimum, I use classroom time to mentor students who work in groups as they read and analyze primary source documents. On a typical day, students work together with my assistance to answer questions or complete a chart on their group’s document, then share their findings with members of the other groups. Students then study their results to prepare for a quiz on the following day. I also employ many other active learning methods, including role-plays and debates. My Ph.D. dissertation at Saint Louis University, “Body of Liberties: Godly Constitutionalism and the Origin of Written Fundamental Law in Massachusetts, resulted from my search for the roots of written constitutionalism in America. It has long been assumed that natural rights thinking and other ideas from the medieval Christian tradition came to the Founding Fathers after first being radically transformed by the Enlightenment. My research on Massachusetts Bay’s first law code, the 1641 Body of Liberties, shows that these concepts were already deeply embedded in American political culture long before the Enlightenment. Proponents of the Body of Liberties, whom I call “godly constitutionalists,” drew on medieval and early modern, Protestant and Catholic traditions to develop an enduring vision of a just community. I am currently revising the dissertation for publication. My next book will focus on the Harvard Indian College, a seventeenth-century educational experiment which promoted intercultural exchange between Indian students and Anglo-American alchemists on the natural sciences, especially medicines and minerals, and other scholarly topics.