Atlantic World

0 or 3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The events and processes initiated by Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1492 transformed the world of Columbus’s contemporaries and shaped the world we live in today. Drawing together the histories of four continents, Europe, Africa, North America and South America, this course explores the new Atlantic world created as a consequence of the Columbian encounter. History 106 examines the Atlantic world through the experiences of the people who inhabited it from the mid-fifteenth century through approximately 1900. The final two weeks explore the legacies of Atlantic history on Georgetown's own campus and beyond. A volatile mixture of people and pathogens, of labor systems and crops, of nations, empires, and subjects, contributed to the painful and unexpected emergence of this new Atlantic world. The unforeseen and, for many, tragic consequences of this process of cultural conflict and exchange lie at the heart of this class. Topics will include the destruction and reconfiguration of indigenous societies, the labor migrations of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, the new and transformed societies that developed in all four continents of the Atlantic world, independence movements, piracy, slavery, abolition, disease, commodities, and different strategies of accommodation, resistance, and rebellion.