At one point, I had an idea book of links and readings on Atlantic World History posted here. In the end, I decided to remove it; it got little traffic, and it was a nuisance to maintain. But I am leaving up the section below.

Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review (June 2006): 741-757 offered an overview of the field at a crucial moment. Jack P. Green and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford U.P., 2008) collected short essays on aspects of Atlantic world history at about the same moment, just as the field was coalescing. Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s The Atlantic in World History (Oxford U.P., 2012) offers a brief, conversational introduction to the topic, while Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Harvard U.P., 2005) traces the emergence of the field.

Harvard University’s International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World hosts a collection of syllabi, as well as an extensive bibliography of “Recent Works in Atlantic History.” Oxford Bibliographies offers numerous thematic bibliographies related to Atlantic world history.

Several textbooks on Atlantic world history are available. The one I have most often taught is Thomas C. Benjamin’s The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Their Shared History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge U.P., 2009). Dense and sophisticated, with an organizational scheme that is more thematic than chronological, it can be tricky to use, but it devotes lengthy chapters to topics such as Europeans’ ethnographic writing about Native Americans and the comparative history of women in different Atlantic societies, so it’s a great resource with which to launch probing classroom discussions.

Another engaging single-author textbook is John K. Thornton’s A Cultural History of The Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge U.P., 2012). As Thornton explains in a preface, this book developed out of a course pack of notes he prepared for his own Atlantic World course, through an iterative process of teaching and student feedback. The first two-thirds of the book examine the early modern European, African, and American worlds and analyze patterns of interaction between the different societies. The final third of the book focuses on “Cultural Transition in Change,” with deep dives into language, religion, and aesthetics. With a comparative perspective and a rich array of specific examples, this book is also highly discussable and thought-provoking.

Donald R. Egerton, et al., The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) is a more conventional textbook. Two primary source readers are Major Problems in Atlantic History (Cengage, 2008), edited by Alison Games and Adam Rothman, and The Atlantic World: A History in Documents (Rutledge, 2008), edited by Brett Rushforth and Paul Mapp. Alan Taylor’s American Colonies (Penguin, 2002), which offers a wide perspective on the early history of North America, works very well in an Atlantic world course if combined with one of the textbooks on colonial Latin America mentioned below.

If you’re not a Latin Americanist, take heart: there are some excellent textbooks on colonial Latin America. My standbys are Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman Johnson’s Colonial Latin America (Oxford U.P., 8th ed., 2012) and Jonathan C. Brown’s Latin America: A Social History of the Colonial Period (Wadsworth, 2004). Another excellent resource is Duke University Press’s series of Latin America readers. There are about a dozen, with titles such as The Mexico Reader, The Brazil Reader, and so forth. Each offers a large selection of primary sources and secondary readings, sorted by theme and period; they emphasize the post-independence era but include some earlier material as well. Kenneth Mills, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, eds., Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) is a leading one-volume reader.

Several individual episodes of Liz Covart’s podcast “Ben Franklin’s World” are listed in the idea book, but you may also want to browse the whole archive. The “Doing History” episodes may be particularly suitable for classroom use. If you’re fond of podcasts, Melvin Bragg’s BBC 4 “In Our Time” may also be useful–only a few episodes address the Atlantic world directly, but many others, such as Slavery and Empire and Tea, address British imperialism in broad terms.

Here’s the advice I give my students about getting oriented geographically and chronologically.

And finally, John Mack Faragher’s “Tell Me What You See,” a tribute to Edmund Morgan’s research seminar, is an extraordinary essay on how to teach research skills.