Indians and Empires in North America

In this course you will be asked to re-think American history.   That is, we will approach the history of America as a continental history.  This will require that we think of North America as a New World space, a place that was inhabited and occupied by indigenous peoples, and then remade by the arrival and settlement of Europeans.  You will be asked to imagine a North America that was indigenous and adaptive, as well as colonial and Euro-American.  This approach to the study of North American history is designed to challenge the epistemology and literature of the history of colonization and American expansion, which displaces Native peoples from the central narrative of American history by placing them at the physical margins of colonial and national development.  Instead we will explore the intersection and integration of indigenous and Euro-American national identity and national space in North America and trace their co-evolution from first contact through the early nineteenth century.