Spring 2025 Religion GU4998 section 001

RELIGION AND THE INDIAN WARS

RELIGION AND THE INDIAN W

Call Number 00516
Day & Time
Location
R 2:10pm-4:00pm
To be announced
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Tiffany Hale
Type SEMINAR
Course Description

The frontier is central to the United States’ conception of its history and place in the world. It is an abstract concept that reflects the American mythology of progress and is rooted in religious ideas about land, labor, and ownership. Throughout the nineteenth century, these ideas became more than just abstractions. They were tested, hardened, and revised by U.S. officials and the soldiers they commanded on American battlefields. This violence took the form of the Civil War as well as the series of U.S. military encounters with Native Americans known as the Indian Wars. These separate yet overlapping campaigns have had profound and lasting consequences for the North American landscape and its peoples.

This course explores the relationship between religious ideology and violence in the last half of nineteenth century. Organized chronologically and geographically, we will engage with both primary sources and classic works in the historiography of the Indian Wars to examine how religion shaped U.S. policy and race relations from the start of the Civil War through approximately 1910.

Web Site Vergil
Department Religion @Barnard
Enrollment 8 students (15 max) as of 5:05PM Sunday, December 8, 2024
Subject Religion
Number GU4998
Section 001
Division Barnard College
Section key 20251RELI4998W001