U.S. Borders, North and South

Catalog description

The borders that separate the United States from Canada and Mexico are among the longest in the world. The southern border with Mexico receives a disproportionate amount of attention from policymakers, journalists, and artists, while our northern border is largely unfamiliar to most Americans. This course offers a necessary corrective: a comparative examination of these two North American borderlands, from their 16th-to-18th century colonial antecedents to contemporary challenges related to commerce, environmentalism, indigenous rights, immigration, border fence construction, drug smuggling, and pandemic-related travel restrictions. The course demonstrates that both the US-Mexico and US-Canada border zones have been, and remain, sites of conflict and cooperation, nationalism and globalization, sovereignty and subordination. (HIST-HNA)