The concept of Atlantic world history wasn’t really around until the 1990s, but as soon as I heard of it, in graduate school, it seemed natural to me.  It embodied the way I had always wanted to approach early American history.  As a middle schooler in Michigan, I had had a full year of Latin American and Canadian history, which focused almost entirely on Native cultures and the European colonial era.  (I was later surprised to discover that many U.S. students never studied these regions at all.)  As a college student, I focused on American and European history, mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but I dabbled in other fields—medieval Europe, colonial Latin America, India—all of which became lifelong interests for me.  As a graduate student in early American history, I did half my coursework on early modern Europe, developing a strongly trans-Atlantic view of eighteenth-century America.  It was a relief, in the long run, to start teaching these topics in a manner that illuminated the connections between four continents and a host of highly individual societies.

My year-long Atlantic World course is structured in four quarters. The first quarter focus on Western European, West African, and Native American societies in the centuries before 1492 and in the very early stages of contact.  We consider the Norse colonization of Greenland and the English conquest and colonization of Ireland as possible prototypes for European colonization of the Americas; we dive into the history of European-West African trading relations with John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1998) and a selection of letters by Afonso I of Kongo; I introduce the concept of environmental history, using Shawn Miller’s Environmental History of Latin America (2007) as a touchstone; and students research the stories of individual crops and animals in the Columbian Exchange.

The second and third quarters focus on American societies in the era of intensive colonization, beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese empires.  When we reach the French empire, we spend several days reading and discussing excerpts from the Bedford teaching edition of The Jesuit Relations, edited by Allan Greer, and later watch the film Black Robe.  When we move on to discuss the history of slavery and African American cultures in the Americas, we delve into the primary sources in Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg’s Slavery, Freedom, and the Law in the Atlantic World.  Again, we do this as a collective effort, working in small groups or as a whole class.  At one point, I worried that my course suffered from a paucity of primary sources and, perhaps, a paucity of human interest.  Incorporating the two Bedford readers allowed me to have students wade into the interpretation of challenging, often opaque primary sources in a thematically coherent way.

In the spring, the class studies the American Revolution briefly, with an accent on its international impact.  Bernard Bailyn’s essay “Atlantic Dimensions,” in To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (2004) is a favorite article to assign, and I always mention David Armitage’s The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2008).  We also study the Haitian Revolution, mostly through primary sources, the Spanish American revolutions, and the anti-slavery movement.  The year wraps up with a brief survey of Latin America after independence, focusing in particular on the Latin American economy, environmental issues (the later chapters of Miller’s Environmental History of Latin America), and racial identities and racial politics in Latin America, for which I assign two chapters of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Black in Latin America (2011).  The course concludes with a series of student-taught lessons on aspects of the recent and contemporary Americas.

I market Atlantic World to students as a course that’s particularly suitable for those whose interests lie in environmental studies, science, or social science.  This is an optimistic assertion, because it is, for the most part, a conventional history course; the environmental history thread, though continuously present, is not the main focus, and topics such as genetics and linguistics arise only a few times over the course of the year.  Yet it seems to work to create the sort of community of inquiry I want in the classroom.  Past students have told me that Atlantic World challenged or changed their conception of what history can be.  I make a point of explicitly addressing questions of how we construct knowledge that’s elusive: how much can we learn about indigenous peoples’ beliefs through the lens of Jesuit reporting, for example, or what we can construct of African American cultures in the Atlantic world through the lens of Atlantic creole languages or through the current beliefs and practices of Afro-Atlantic religions such as Haitian Vodou and Brazilian candomblé.

Atlantic world history is a huge topic, and any survey of it is necessarily selective and incomplete.  It is also disconcerting, and students who come into a course like this assuming the material will be culturally familiar are likely to be stymied.  But precisely for that reason, Atlantic World History is a body of material that speaks to twenty-first century students.  It unlocks a past world of epic diversity and complex identities, which reminds them of the world they inhabit today.

Footnote: Here are some general resources for teaching Atlantic world history.

In 2013, I wrote an essay on teaching Atlantic World history for Common-place.  It describes an earlier version of this course, but much of what I wrote then still holds.