HIST 339 - Colonial British America

• Conceptualize an American history outside the framework of a national political narrative.
• Develop a capacity for empathy towards and engagement with the diverse peoples of early America.
• Engage with people unlike themselves (such as Native Americans and African Americans) on their own terms - rather than as passive victims or “savages” (noble or otherwise).
• Identify, author, and read several genres of historical writing.
• Formulate historical questions, identify relevant evidence, and create convincing interpretations that answer those questions.
• Reconstruct patterns of historical developments, and apply them to fundamentally historical questions about continuity, change, and historical causation.
• Identify and characterize the global forces at work in particular, highly localized colonial societies.
• Apply basic concepts drawn from disciplines such as economics, literary criticism, anthropology and sociology to the study of early American history.