History 656: Course Description

Seeing might be believing, but it is not necessarily understanding. When Europeans began exploring the globe, many of the plants, animals, peoples, and landforms they encountered were incomprehensibly foreign to them. The new world had to be translated into terms Europeans could understand. They juxtaposed their own experience with the texts they knew best, from antiquity.

In addition to the logistics of maritime travel before steam, this course surveys Europe's early encounters with the new world in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, before focussing on the construction of human and natural science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. We will read classic accounts by European travelers, examine the early reception of those travel reports by European social critics, and finally observe the construction of global scientific systems by Linnaeus, Buffon, Humboldt, Lyell, and Darwin.

Books - required of all:
J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New (1970)
A. Grafton et al., New Worlds, Ancient Texts (1992)
A. Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (1993)
Sandra Herbert, Charles Darwin, Geologist (2005)
The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca (1542)
Bartolomé Las Casas, Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552)
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Cosmos (1835)
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1835)
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1862)

Books - select one from each set:

• Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World
• William Dampier, Buccaneer Explorer

• Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time
• Steven Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

• Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A Worldview
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
• Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Seminar Paper
20 pages, due December 13.  See the writing page.

Grades: