L57 RelPol 330

Native American/Euro-American Encounters: Confrontations of Bodies and Beliefs

Fall 2017, T/Th 11:30AM–1:00PM

This course surveys the history and historiography of how Native Americans, Europeans, and Euro-Americans reacted and adapted to one another’s presence in North America from the 1600s to the mid-1800s.

WUCRSL
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Biography

This course surveys the history and historiography of how Native Americans, Europeans, and Euro-Americans reacted and adapted to one another’s presence in North America from the 1600s to the mid-1800s, focusing on themes of religion and gender. We will examine the cultural and social implications of encounters between Native peoples, missionaries and other European and Euro-American Protestants and Catholics. We will pay particular attention to how bodies were a venue for encounter-through sexual contact, through the policing of gendered social and economic behaviors, and through religiously-based understandings of women’s and men’s duties and functions. We will also study how historians know what they know about these encounters, and what materials enable them to answer their historical questions.

  • I loved the topics explored in this course. It was intellectually stimulating and was a course I commonly talked to friends and family about.

    — Fall 2017

  • Being able to examine the actual works of the time period allowed me to form my own opinions and reexamine previous beliefs.

    — Fall 2017