Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A comparative exploration of the colonization of North and South America by the various European empires together with the role of Native and African peoples in the Americas, from the late fifteenth century to the onset of political independence three hundred years later. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

The histories of the Indigenous peoples who call the Americas home—numbering in the millions at the end of the fifteenth century and consisting of hundreds of distinct peoples with almost as many languages, and organized in a diverse range of societies—are punctuated by stories of dramatic change.  These include accounts of events like surviving the challenges of post-glacial climate change, developing the valuable food maize from teosinte, and building confederacies and even empires.

The Spanish voyages of Christopher Columbus from 1492 to 1504 mark the introduction of a set of new variables into this dynamic history.  As the start of permanent contact with Europe and soon Africa, they inaugurated a period of exchange, conquest, and colonization whose effects persist into the present.  The European colonization of the Americas that began at this time was characterized by the twin prongs of dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands and organizing enslaved labour, mostly African, to extract wealth from these lands.  The coming together of peoples from three different continents in their distinct interactions with these systems would produce, in the words of historian Colin Calloway, “New Worlds for all.”

This course explores this important period in the history of the Americas, beginning with its original inhabitants’ first sustained encounters with European visitors.  We will follow the increasingly entwined histories of Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Africans in this shared colonial space over the ensuing three centuries.  Our journey will take us into the early nineteenth century, when a degree of independence from Europe was achieved through political revolutions in most of the hemisphere’s settler colonies.  We will conclude with an examination of the different visions of decolonization and freedom in circulation at this time, which with varying degrees of success worked to loosen the Americas from the grip of European empires and colonial ideologies.

Given the expansive geographic and chronological scope of this introductory course, rather than attempting a comprehensive examination of the history of the Americas the focus in our lectures will be on identifying and comparing key processes at work during this period across the entire hemisphere: colonization, economic development (especially the development of slave labour regimes), the formation of racialized social hierarchies that governed colonial societies, and emancipation (of peoples and colonies).  The outlining of these broad processes will be complemented by tutorials, which will emphasize the lived experiences of individual historical actors, mainly through developing our skills in interpreting the past through the fragments that have come down to us in the form of primary documents.

Grading

Materials

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