HIST 418 - Beyond Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World

FC SSCI CD WINT

4 credits
This course is a seminar intended to help students build and refine skills in historiographical analysis and writing. Students will review some of the major debates and new perspectives in the historiography of Atlantic slavery through course readings, in-class discussions, and review of two films. The organization of this course is thematic, but also roughly chronological. Atlantic slavery as it is generally defined spans the Americas, Africa, and Europe, between Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Caribbean in 1492 and Brazilian abolition of slavery in 1888 (the last in the Americas). We will not be able to discuss the specifics of every time and place, so we will focus on the most important debates and examples that reaffirm or challenge assumptions about slavery. The course moves away from understanding slavery in the Antebellum U.S. South as a general model to focus on the diversity of unfree labor situations within the Atlantic World, centering Latin America and considering examples that affirm or diverge from patterns across time and Atlantic geographies.