History 105: Histories of North America, c.1600-1890

North America at the turn of the 17th Century was home to more nations and languages than Europe. During the next several centuries, tiny European colonies began a long project of conquest and empire, swelling with settlers, importing enslaved workers, trading and fighting with neighbors, and remaking both landscape and political geography. The settler colonists of England and Spain eventually claimed nationhood, becoming the US, Mexico, and (later) Canada, creating new "national" policies about borders, neighbors, citizenship, government. In the 19th Century we will focus more on the nation-building project of the United States -- a "republic" of freedom and slavery, an imagined empire spanning the continent, vast immigration from unimagined places -- and its challenges confronting paradoxes of sovereignty, slavery, and Enlightened "equality." Our US exploration takes us through Civil War into the continued quest for empire and the new racializations bequeathed to the 20th Century (to around 1890).