History of the Incas

Catalog description

This course examines the political, social, cultural, environmental and religious history of the Incas and their Andean subjects from the 15th century to the present. Via written and visual primary and secondary sources, the course explores how the Incas built the largest Indigenous empire of the Americas, and how their descendants and subjects experienced that empire¿s 16th century invasion and takeover by Spain's conquistadors, surviving to shape the world¿s adoption of their environmental innovations. The course will then survey how Incas and Andeans rose up against Spain in the 18th century, and in the 19th through 21st century fought against their economic marginalization by collaborating in the resurrection of the Incas as national, archaeological, and touristic ancestors in republican Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, with varying success.