Islam and America from 1492 to Civil War

Undergraduate

This course argues that Islam and America have been connected from the beginnings of the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere until today. We cover in this class roughly the first 350 years of this history. The first Muslims in the Americas came in the heads of Spanish colonists. The first living and breathing Muslims soon followed. They were enslaved West Africans brought to work on Spanish plantations in the Caribbean. From these beginnings, Islam remained both real and imagined in the Americas. Until the Civil War, the vast majority of the Muslims in the Americas were enslaved West Africans. Some others though, came too--a supposed Algerian in Jamestown and a "Turk" in Manhattan. Throughout the course, we examine how the language of Islam came to be used to understand Native America. We think about how the experiences of Islam from around the Old World--phenomena like trade, war, and cultural borrowings--shaped European colonization in the New World. What was the place of the Inquisition in the Americas? How did Islam shape the Founding Fathers? What was the racialization of Islam in the Americas? Why was the Arabian Nights so popular? Why was the United States' first foreign war in North Africa? How did Americans experience the Middle East when they began traveling there in the nineteenth century. This course offers a new way to understand both American history and the history of Islam. HU 0 Course cr HTBA