Schedule, 1110 with LAS

This is a prospective course schedule with Latin American Studies content integrated into the first half of the US History survey.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

[Schedule expressed in Units rather than weeks to facilitate adaptability to different parts of term; each Unit would correspond *roughly* to about 2 weeks of a 15-week term.]

Week 1: What is History and how do we study it?

This time is spent doing introductions, discussing the Historical discipline, how the course is organized, etc.

• The 5 C’s of Historical Analysis handout
• Andrews and Burke, “What Does it Mean to Think Historically?” AHA Perspectives 2007

Unit 1: First Peoples and Colonialism

Unit Readings: American Yawp Chapters 1–3
Guiding Questions:

• What did the Americas look like on the eve of European colonization?
• What patterns did European colonization follow and what were First Peoples’ responses?

LAS content in support of this Unit [Click here for curriculum plan]:

• Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Updated Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
• Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).
• Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,” American Historical Review 108(3), June 2003: 659–687.
• Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, “Mexico Before and After Cortez: A Brief Account,” Historia Chicana, October 2012.

Unit 2: Revolution and Nation Building

Unit Readings: American Yawp Chapters 4–7
Guiding Questions:

• What were the main political, economic, and social markers of eighteenth-century colonial European societies in North America?
• What were the causes of the American Revolution and how did it affect various groups of people across ethnic and gender lines?

LAS content in support of this Unit [Click here for curriculum plan]:

• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (New York: Beacon Books, 1995).
• UNESCO Slavery and Remembrance: A Guide to Sites, Museums, and Memory, “Latin American Revolutions” and “Haitian Revolution.” Accessed 20 April 2021.
• Maurice Jackson, “‘Friends of the Negro! Fly with Me, The Path is Open to the Sea’: Remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music, and Culture of the African American People,” Early American Studies (Spring 2008): 59–103
• PBS Egalite for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution (2009). On YouTube: https://youtu.be/pBdlwuEoCCU

Unit 3: Indigenous Peoples and Slavery

Unit Readings: American Yawp Chapters 8 and 11
Guiding Questions:

• What types of economies took hold in the North and South during the first half of the 1800s, and why?
• What place did enslaved African and Native peoples have in the Jeffersonian Republic that took shape in the first decades of the 1800s?

Unit 4: Democracy and Reform

Unit Readings: American Yawp Chapters 9–10
Guiding Questions:

• In what ways is the Age of Jackson considered the beginning of “true” U.S. democracy?
• What role did religious (and other) reformers play in shaping U.S. social and political relationships between 1820 and 1840?

Unit 5: Manifest Destiny and US-Mexico War

Unit Readings: American Yawp Chapters 12–13
Guiding Questions:

• What crises emerged in the 1850s and how did they relate to the U.S.-Mexico War?
• What was Manifest Destiny and how did it relate to the U.S.-Mexico War?

LAS content in support of this Unit [Click here for curriculum plan]:

• Ernesto Chávez, The US War With Mexico: A Brief History With Documents. The Bedford Series in History and Culture(Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2008).
• Timothy J. Henderson, A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War With the United States (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007).
• Michel Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review 118(5), December 2013: 1345–1375.

Unit 6: Civil War and Reconstruction

Unit Readings: American Yawp Chapters 11
Guiding Questions:

• What were the reasons for the U.S. Civil War and what was at stake for different groups of people?
• What was Reconstruction and what are its ongoing legacies?

LAS content in support of this Unit [Click here for curriculum plan]:

• Alice Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2020).
• Sarah E. Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1837–1857” The Journal of American History (September 2013): 351–374.
• Claire M. Wolnisty, A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).