History 170 - The American Peoples to 1865

This course surveys the history of Indigenous worlds, colonial projects, enslavement, and the contested transformation of lives and communities in North America through the U.S. Civil War. How did settler political and economic strategies shape the land and life upon it? How did Native people and people of African descent claim sovereignty, create new bonds, and partake in the creation of new nations in landscapes of violence and subjugation? Topics include cross-cultural encounters; competing religious and social visions; the formation of the United States and the evolution of its political system; gender and sexuality; the development of racial capitalism; and the coming of the Civil War.