Introduction to Early American Studies

Graduate / Professional

This seminar offers a graduate-level introduction to early American studies, an interdisciplinary field that combines historical, literary, geographic, scientific, cultural and religious studies scholarship to understand the cultural and political landscapes of “early America.” The course combines both historical accounts of the field and field formation but also explores important critiques by historians of Native America and historians of slavery of the evolution of the field and its prerogatives; indeed, depending on who you ask, “early America” describes an era between the start of the Paleo-Indian period (15,000 BCE) and 1900, and standard definitions of “early America,” as the saying goes, are only “early” to settlers. This course is bookended by a hard stop in the 1830s and begins in the early colonial period with Native histories. Early America is, as the Omohundro Center bills it, quite vast, so this course in no way claims to offer a regionally, historically, or topically comprehensive account of the field. Instead, it seeks to introduce students to key histories, subfields, scholarly conversations and questions of field formation that provide a foundation for students who plan to engage early American studies scholarship in later work. Topics include the multilayered colonial histories (French, Spanish, British, Comanche) of various regions of North America; cultures of labor and racialization; histories of slavery; histories of encounter, trade, war, and genocide between colonial entities and Native nations, from the northeast through the southwest; the sedimentation of British colonial control of the east coast and the development of colonial and later state and federal governance; histories of culturally-specific forms of gendered and sexual expression; and histories of scientific thought. M 1:30pm-3:25pm