Colonial America

Catalog description

This class covers the first centuries of European colonization of North America. While this course begins in the fifteenth century and at times considers the Caribbean and the trans-Mississippi West, we will focus most of our attention on eastern North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The major themes include initial encounters, subsequent exchange between Native peoples, Europeans, and Africans, and the creation of a “new world”; alliances with Indigenous peoples and competition among European empires; the development of colonial societies and plantation slavery, an Atlantic economy, and an increasingly integrated British Empire in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This course ends with the Seven Years War, which was global in scope but began in the Ohio Valley, and which catalyzed the movement for British American independence.