This course explores the history of the four continents on the Atlantic rim—Europe, Africa, North and South America—and their increasing interconnectedness in the wake of Columbus’s voyage in 1492. It takes the Atlantic Ocean and its peripheries as a common zone of interaction, where peoples, cultures, ideas, goods, foodstuffs, and pathogens came into contact from diverse regions. The course begins with a portrait of Amerindian, African, and European civilizations c. 1400 and ends with an overview of the protracted struggles for decolonization and emancipation from slavery in the 19th-century Americas. Throughout these five centuries of profound transformation, we will study conflict and encounter between the region’s many diverse peoples.

This course explores the history of the four continents on the Atlantic rim—Europe, Africa, North America, and South America—and their increasing interconnectedness in the wake of Columbus’s voyage in 1492. It takes the Atlantic Ocean and its peripheries as a common zone of interaction, where peoples, cultures, ideas, goods, foodstuffs, and pathogens came into violent contact. The course begins with a portrait of Amerindian, African, and European civilizations c. 1400 and ends with an overview of the protracted struggles for decolonization and emancipation from slavery in the nineteenth-century Americas. Throughout these five centuries of profound transformation, we will study conflict and encounter between the region’s many diverse peoples. Topics include Indigenous survival amid the violent reconfiguration of their worlds; the rise of African slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and African diaspora in the Americas; the origins of ideas of race and racialization; European imperialism, coercive labor practices, the rise of racial capitalism, and the consolidation of an increasingly integrated Atlantic economic system; as well as the strategies of resistance, accommodation, and insurgency employed by men, women, and children in each of these groups. Unfamiliar perspectives will be offered on familiar stories, and students will frequently be asked to think comparatively about parallel processes at work in different regions, as well as the many connections between them. Throughout the semester we will link these processes to their ongoing impacts and afterlives for us in the present day. In this course students will learn to think like historians. That means constructing and deconstructing historical arguments. Students will develop the ability to analyze the writing of historians, as well as the building blocks with which historical arguments are made—the documents, objects, and artifacts that historians call primary sources. Through class discussion, writing assignments, and exams, we will practice using primary sources to build compelling arguments of our own. We will also hone our sensitivity to the silences and erasures that plague historians’ archives. In this class we will be thinking creatively about what constitutes “a historical document” and how to read all our sources carefully and critically—what historians call “against the grain.” In so doing we will learn to make convincing historical arguments about the origins of the world that we inhabit today. All reading materials are available digitally for this course.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills