The Americas II

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Europeans linked the peoples of the Americas to global processes after 1500. Long histories within European empires and global capitalism led to regionally diverse societies that became the bases of national projects. Beginning in the 1770s, nations were shaped by diverse ways of power and life within—while linked together and facing global challenges that changed over time. We focus on the US, Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba, exploring their complex political, social, and cultural trajectories as they evolved together in a world of change. Before 1800, Mexico made silver to fund global trades sustained by enduring indigenous communities, while Brazil set enslaved Africans to making sugar and gold. Both were pivotal to capitalism before 1800—while Cuba and the US found lesser dynamism. After decades of conflict and reconstruction from the 1790s to the 1830s, Brazil revived making coffee, Cuba led the world in sugar, and the US rose as an industrial power built on cotton—all made by enslaved hands. Meanwhile, Mexico revived silver and built industries, all sustained by family growers—to face a US invasion in the 1840s that blocked its northward expansion. From 1865 to 1888, the US, Cuba, and Brazil struggled to end slavery while the US drove west to claim continental hegemony. From 1895 to 1959, Cubans and Mexicans pressed revolutions seeking social justice in the shadow of US power, while Brazil struggled to industrialize after slavery, and the US fought to assert global hegemony set in social diversity. Then after 1950, globalization drew power to US cities while insecurities plagued families and communities across the world.