Vast Early America

Catalog description

This course offers an expansive history of early North America that is attentive to the diversity of peoples, cultures, animals, and environments that comprised this complex and dynamic region. Looking beyond the history of the thirteen British colonies, the class explores North America as an inter-imperial contact zone and nexus of global circuits linking the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.Topics will include: the histories of Indigenous peoples; early contact, diplomacy, exchange and conflict; gender, race, and religion; environmental change; commodity and ecological frontiers; migration, colonization, settlement, and enslavement; shifting borderlands; warfare and violence; processes of dispossession, removal, marginalization, and racialization.