AMST 360
The Atlantic World: Connections, Crossings, and Confluences Fall 2024
Division II D Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed HIST 361 / CAOS 361

This course considers the Atlantic World as both a real place and a concept: an ocean surrounded and shaped by diverse people and communities, and an imagined space of shared and competing affiliations. Moving from “time out of mind” to the early nineteenth century, it examines ecological, cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and spiritual transits as well as exchanges among Indigenous/Native American, African and African American, Asian and Asian American, and Euro-colonial people. It introduces conceptual dimensions of this Atlantic paradigm and case studies that illuminate its human subtleties, with the goal of examining “early American” histories through transnational and transoceanic lenses. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to these intertwined histories, and reckons with how the very construction of “history” has, at different turns, affected what is shared, known, valued, and commemorated–or overwritten, denied, or seemingly silenced. Attentive to the structures of power that inflect every part of Atlantic histories, it offers specific ethical frameworks for approaching these topics. Blending methods grounded in oral traditions and histories, place-based knowledge systems, documentary/written archives, songs, archaeology, material culture, and other forms of expression and representation, it invites class members to revisit the nature and meanings of these connected spaces. The course consistently connects historical experiences with the twenty-first century, and how communities today are grappling with the afterlives and ongoing effects of these Atlantic pasts through calls to action for reparations, repatriation and rematriation, Land Back, climate justice, and other forms of accountability. The course also provides an opportunity to engage with original materials pertaining to Atlantic World histories in the Williams College Archives/Special Collections and Art Museum.