We will then delve into how everyday people in specific situations confronted these challenges. By examining how slaves sought their freedom, why poor farmers joined the Mexican Revolution, how workers organized unions, why Indians struggled for civil rights, how torture victims confronted their assailants, or how immigrants dealt with life in the United States, students will not only learn about Latin America, but about the constraints and possibilities people face in making history. What we now call Latin America was where the modern world we inhabit began. Three peoples and their cultures from the Americas, Africa and Europe came together in the New World, often involuntarily, to create heterogeneous communities that were the forerunners of our own society. Therefore, this course is not only, or perhaps, not simply a story of Latin America, but of the world centered around the Atlantic Ocean that created Latin America and the results of this creation for all the residents of the Americas, including the United States.
Slavery is a tragic part of the shared histories of all American societies.
Most students have some notion of U.S. slavery and its abolition, but little sense that this is not a unique history, but also the past of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese America. This course will introduce students to the centrality of slavery for the formation of American societies and the broader Atlantic World of the 15th through 19th centuries. We will begin by examining the origins of slavery in Europe and Africa and its transplantation to the New World. Then the course shifts to understanding the economic, social, cultural, familial and political lives of slaves and freedpeople in the Americas. The last third of the course treats abolition, especially the role Africans and African-Americans played in the struggles for their own emancipation.