Introduction

Welcome to Colonial Encounters. This webpage should provide access to all of the resources you need to do well in this class.

Course Objectives

This course explores Latin American society from the initial encounters between Europeans and Native Americans to the early nineteenth-century Wars of Independence. Lectures and reading focus on interactions among Native American, African and European peoples and institutions, and trace the emergence of a range of multiethnic colonial societies in the New World. During the semester, we will analyze overlapping structures of class, gender, labor and ethnicity in various colonial contexts, including the political, economic and religious. Geographic concentration highlights mainly the principal Spanish districts with large and diverse Native American populations, namely Peru, Central Mexico and the Maya lands, although attention is also drawn to the slave-based dominions in Portuguese Brazil, French Saint Domingue (Haiti) and British Jamaica.

This course has two primary objectives: to develop a basic knowledge of historical events, personalities and processes of colonial Latin America; and to provide an introduction to the methods and sources for historical thinking and writing.

Schedule | Requirements| Bboard

History Department Home Page| Skidmore Home