The Historian's Craft is an introductory course that teaches students about historical methods, historical inquiry, and historiography. Students will practice interpreting and integrating primary source documents into historical narratives, critically analyzing secondary sources, critiquing documentary films and/or historical films, evaluating digital history web sites, and developing skills framing historical questions and focused research topics. Students will also learn how to locate sources, form historical arguments using sources, and organize and present research in oral and written form.

This course begins in the fifteenth century as the peoples of Africa, Europe, North America and South America “crashed violently together” and were profoundly shaped by their encounters with one another. Instead of acting as a barrier, the Atlantic Ocean increasingly facilitated connections, becoming a dynamic space defined by the movement and interconnection of people, pathogens, plants, animals, and ideas. As a result, polities, societies, cultures, economies, and environments on all four continents were reconfigured. The emphasis of this class will be on the new mixtures of cultures, ideas, and identities forged in this volatile, often exploitative, world. Inhabitants of colonial North America proactively reconfigured their diets, adopted new ideas and religions, recruited new allies and trading partners, and altered many facets of their identities. Many enduring features of American society have their beginnings in the colonial period.

This course will introduce students to the major themes of, and approaches to, the entangled histories of science, medicine, and empire in the early modern Atlantic world (1500-1800). Students will examine the role of science and medicine in creating, upholding, and governing empires. It asks how scientific and medical concepts were used as tools by various Atlantic empires, including the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, British, and French empires. Students will also investigate how imperial expansion and participants around the Atlantic, including Amerindians, free and enslaved Africans, and women, transformed and shaped emerging scientific and medical ideas.

This course will begin with an introduction to theories and definitions of imperialism and colonization, and a discussion of the motivations of, and explanations for, the European quest for colonies. During this semester we will focus on the British Empire.

The field of Atlantic history examines links between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe. This course will introduce students to the Atlantic World as a unit of analysis and conceptual framework. The seminar will include readings in selected topics in the history of the Atlantic World.