HIST 390O: Topics in History

Course Description

Topic: The Native American Past. This course introduces students to the long and rich history of America's First Peoples from earliest times to the present. Although the topics covered in class will be wide-ranging, the course emphasizes certain unifying themes: the diversity of indigenous peoples and cultures; the agency of First Peoples; the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of European/Indian accommodation and resistance; the evolution of government Indian polices and Native American responses to them; and contemporary issues confronting native peoples. The course examines the Native American Past from native people's perspectives, by including the unfamiliar voices of those peoples in more familiar accounts of America's past, and by introducing students to ways of studying neglected parts of the past and to some of the varied ways that historians (both Native and non-Native) have interpreted the Native American past.