HIST 220 Latin America: Pre-1821

Teaching and Learning Approach

HIST220 unfolds as a combination of lectures, discussion-based seminars, and workshops aimed at developing academic and discipline-specific skills in reading, analytical thinking, research, and written and oral communications. Exams, assignments, and in-class exercises enable students to put the knowledge and skills they are acquiring to work in a variety of contexts while providing some flexibility to pursue areas of specific interest. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to consider continuities that link the contemporary world to issues and events of the past while observing the pitfalls of ‘presentism,’ or the evaluation of the past through the lens of contemporary expectations as to ‘how things should be.’ A detailed weekly schedule of lecture and seminar readings and activities will be distributed at the start of the course.

Learning Resources

Required: Keen, Benjamin, and Keith Haynes, A History of Latin America, 9th edition (Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013) – digital copies (about $80) are available at: https://www.cengage.ca/c/a-history-of-latin-america- 9e-keen-haynes/9781133050506/ *Note that a copy of the 8th edition of this book would work fine Additional materials including the following will be provided via the course's Learn (Moodle) site: Holloway, Thomas H. "What’s in a Name?," pp 3-8 of Holloway, Thomas H., ed. A Companion to Latin American History. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Wallerstein, Immanuel. "The Modern World-System as a Capitalist World-Economy: Production, Surplus Value, and Polarization." In World-Systems Analysis: An introduction. Duke University Press, 2004. Münkler, Marina. "Experiencing Strangeness: Monstrous Peoples on the Edge of the Earth as Depicted on Medieval Mappae Mundi." The Medieval History Journal 5, no. 2 (2002): 195-222. Vespucci, Amerigo. "Letter of Amerigo Vespucci on the Islands Newly Discovered in His Four Voyages. First Voyage of Amerigo Vespucci." Cortés, Hernando. "Second Letter of Hernando Cortés to Charles V." de las Casas, Bartolomé. The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account. Translated by Herma Briffault. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Clendinnen, Inga. "‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty:’ Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico." Representations 33 (1991): 65-100. Crosby, Alfred W. "Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans As a Biological Phenomenon." In The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, edited by Donald Worster, 103-17. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Geary, Dick. "Accommodation and Resistance: Slaves in Brazil, 1780-1850." Studia Historica. Historia Antigua 25 (2007): 577-94. Bolivar, Simon. "The Angostura Address [1819]." In Born and Blood and Fire: Latine American Voices, edited by John Charles Chasteen. W.W. Norton, 2016. Brown, Kendall W. A History of Mining in Latin America from the Colonial Era to the Present. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012 (Chapter 1).