HIST 373: North American Conquest, 1500-1900
Fall 2023 Alert: This course will be taught as a "flipped" classroom. Lectures will be prerecorded and available online a week before the scheduled meetings. The "lecture period" will instead focus on discussing lectures and readings in greater depth.
Fall 2023: Examines the long contest by Indigenous, imperial, and mercantile interests to control the North American continent from the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s to the surrender of Goyaałe (Geronimo) in 1886. Lectures and readings will explore the processes of colonization from many perspectives, paying equal attention to Aboriginal, American, English, French, Russian, and Spanish ambitions and activities.
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)
David Edmunds & Joseph Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mequakie Challenge to New France (Oklahoma, 1993)
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%
Fall 2023: Examines the long contest by Indigenous, imperial, and mercantile interests to control the North American continent from the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s to the surrender of Goyaałe (Geronimo) in 1886. Lectures and readings will explore the processes of colonization from many perspectives, paying equal attention to Aboriginal, American, English, French, Russian, and Spanish ambitions and activities.
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)
David Edmunds & Joseph Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mequakie Challenge to New France (Oklahoma, 1993)
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%
