Topics in History (492-0-28)

Topic

Atlantic Histories

Instructors

Paul F Ramirez
847/491-7444
Harris Hall Room 233

Meeting Info

Harris Hall room 101: Wed 5:00PM - 7:50PM

Overview of class

This topics seminar is for graduate students with research interests in the Atlantic world, roughly spanning the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. A proliferation of edited volumes, journal issues, dissertations, and historical monographs on connections and continuities in the early modern Atlantic has aimed to reorient the field away from its conventional northern Atlantic focus and demonstrate African, Amerindian, and Iberian influences. What is the current state of the field, an inherently comparative, transnational, transcultural, and oceanic approach to the past? In what ways is the scholarship most persuasive? What insights and analytical frameworks can scholars of Latin America, Africa, Europe, or the United States glean from this recent turn in Atlantic history? Seminar participants will read examples of this scholarship, with an eye toward prevailing trends, methodologies, and topics, as well as ongoing debates about chronology, scope, and concepts—e.g., region, empire, nation, subject, citizen, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, commodity, ecosystem, sovereignty, and revolution.

Learning Objectives

This course is designed to further our study and understanding of the historiography of the Atlantic. By historiography we mean the different ways scholars have reconstructed and conceived of this historical material. For our purposes, the substance of the books and articles selected for common reading is secondary in importance to the major themes, frameworks, sources, and methods.

Evaluation Method

Review essays (15% each), class participation (40%), final assignment (30%)