HIST 252
North American Histories to 1865
Last Offered Spring 2017
Division II
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Class Details

This course surveys North American histories from ancient Indigenous pasts to the U.S. Civil War. Beginning with the diverse Native societies that have long lived and interacted in specific Indigenous homelands, it then traces Indigenous encounters with a range of expansionist European colonial projects, and the dynamic, contested quality of these relationships and resistances. The course delves into the origins, evolution, and violences of the transatlantic slave trade, and the ways that peoples of African descent created new lives and identities in the Caribbean and North America. The transformations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are examined in detail, including political, economic, cultural, and religious transformations and upheavals that fostered new senses of individual and collective identities. Connecting the pivotal Seven Years War and American Revolution, the course traces out the legacies of these contestations for multiple empires, nations, and communities. The last section of the course examines the antebellum era, multiple struggles for rights, land, and autonomy, and the coming of the U.S. Civil War as well as its ongoing legacies. The course introduces students to a wide range of historical methodologies and critical approaches to the past, and moves from large-scale vantages to on-the-ground accounts of how specific people experienced historical changes. The course conveys a sense of how key debates and struggles from the past have shaped North American presents and futures, and how scholars and communities have grappled with these topics. It also provides opportunities for engaging original archival and material culture collections at Williams College.
The Class: Format: lecture; lecture/discussion
Limit: 30
Expected: 15-20
Class#: 3508
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: class participation, short writing assignments, reading responses, final essay
Prerequisites: none; open to all
Enrollment Preferences: first- and second-year students
Distributions: Division II
DPE Notes: This course deeply engages a multiplicity of communities' experiences in North America over many millennia, including Native American/Indigenous people and sovereign nations, and African diasporic populations and transatlantic networks. It introduces students to a wide range of critical approaches, methodologies, and historiographies, including decolonizing and indigenizing techniques. It emphasizes the inherent and long-term diversity, plurality, and contestation of North American histories.
Attributes: HIST Group F Electives - U.S. + Canada
HIST Group P Electives - Premodern

Class Grid

Updated 12:23 pm

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