New Lectures in History (300-0-24)

Topic

Cannabis: Global History

Instructors

Lina Britto
Harris Hall 304
Professor Lina Britto is a Colombian-American historian and journalist. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean History from New York University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University. She is the author of Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise (University of California Press, 2020), and co-editor of Histories of Solitude and Histories of Perplexity, two volumes on Colombia, 19th to 21st centuries (Routledge, 2024). Her teaching philosophy is to help students to develop critical reasoning skills, analytical abilities, and organizational capacities. She uses multiple written, oral, audiovisual, cartographic, and pop-culture materials in her teaching. Her interdisciplinary approach includes history, journalism, anthropology, and cultural analysis to explore the past and its connection with the present.

Meeting Info

Kresge Cent. Hall 2-380 Kaplan: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This course examines the history of cannabis in a global perspective to understand how and why a plant that has been crucial to most civilizations for thousands of years became one of the most consumed intoxicants in human history, and one of the most demonized, criminalized, controversial and profitable commodities of the modern world. We consider archeological evidence to explore the earliest uses and meanings of the plant in antiquity and how it spread from Central Asia to the rest of the planet. We also examine various types of historical works to comprehend what roles cannabis played in the rise of maritime empires and the formation of a global capitalist world. Then, we revisit some of the urban and rural cultures in various parts of the world that modernized the plant's uses and meanings in the 20th century. We also study scientific, legal, and pop-culture materials to elucidate what was at stake in the most heated controversies and campaigns against and in favor of the plant. We conclude analyzing the most recent debates and policies on decriminalization and
legalization in North and South America in a comparative perspective, and their socio-economic, political, and environmental implications. We address these topics reading history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and journalism; and watching and analyzing critically songs, advertisement, literature, feature films, and documentary movies.

Learning Objectives

The objective is for students to get to know the depth of the history of humanity's relationship with one of the most consumed psychoactive plants on Earth and comprehend how and why the history of cannabis defies rigid conceptualizations at various levels, such as North and South, centers and peripheries, legality and illegality, femininity and masculinity, black and white, archaic and modern, etc. Ultimately, students learn, apply, and practice interdisciplinarity to get comfortable with indeterminacy, contingency, flows, transitions, and plurality in history.

Class Notes

History Major Concentration(s): Americas, Global
History Minor Concentration(s): United States, Latin America, Law and Crime, Economics and Labor

Class Attributes

Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
SoC Additional Distro

Associated Classes

DIS - Harris Hall L28: Fri 11:00AM - 11:50AM

DIS - University Hall 412: Fri 12:00PM - 12:50PM

DIS - Harris Hall L06: Fri 1:00PM - 1:50PM