HIST 373: North American Conquest, 1500-1900

Fall 2025: This course is mostly an online, "flipped" classroom. Lectures are prerecorded and available on Canvas a week before the scheduled meetings. The "lecture period" will be on Zoom to discuss lectures and readings in depth. The exams, though, will be held in person at SFU Burnaby. The course examines the long contest among Indigenous, imperial, and mercantile groups who all sought to control portions of North America. The narrative arcs from the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s to the surrender of Goyaałe (Geronimo) in 1886. Lectures and readings explore the processes and consequences of colonization from many angles, paying equal attention to American, Canadian, Dutch, English, French, Indigenous, Mexican, Russian, and Spanish actions.

Topics: processes of dispossession and incorporation; reciprocal relationships between nature and imperialism; global linkages in imperial contests; aboriginal agendas and responses to expansionism; political and economic development; spatial and historical implications of settlement.

Course Prerequisites
45 credit hours including 9 hours of lower division history credit and one of HIST 101, 212, or permission of the department.

Required Texts
John Demos: The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (Vintage Press, 1995)
Roberty Morrissey, People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America (Washington, 2022)
Theodore Binnema, Common & Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Toronto, 2001)
Gray Whaley, Oregon & the Collapse of Illahee: US Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859 (UNC, 2010)
Primary documents available on the Canvas website
  
Course Evaluation
Quizzes                   10%
Midterm exam          30%
Research paper        30%
Final Exam               30%