Histories of Art, Race and Empire: 1492-1865

Course Material

• American Nations, by Colin Woodard¹⁶
  • This work recasts American History not as a story of a unified country, as we so often tell it, but rather as a story of various nations of people who have, due to historical circumstance and sometimes necessity, found themselves presenting as a single country, the United States. It then uses this framework to examine, amongst other questions, how the different “American Nations” treated the indigenous people so differently, from the intermarriage and benign treatment of the French to the exploitative and hostile attitudes of the early English Puritans, and how these attitudes informed the actions of the United States all the way through westward expansion. This book, particularly the first set of chapters about the founding of the nations through Greater Appalachia, will be very valuable not only as a different way of looking at history, but will provide further depth to the Alien Invasion narrative device.  Ask the students, what if different factions of aliens treated your people differently than the others, some better, some worse.  How would you react?
• America Pox, the Missing Plague¹⁷
  • It would be irresponsible to talk about the history of colonization without addressing the part that disease played in paving the way for the colonial powers in the New World. This video discusses some of the horrors of the plague of new disease that swept through Native American populations after the beginnings of European exploration, but is primarily focused on a question which is not often asked: Why didn’t a corresponding wave of disease hit Europe in return?  The reasons for this lack of “America Pox” in the history of medicine cast new light on how the people of the New World lived, and encourages students to break from a purely Occidental focused worldview to better appreciate the ways in which Pre-Columbian American society was, in some ways, superior to that of their European counterparts.  This can be used to not only allow for a better understanding of plagues of the New World, but also to reframe students’ understanding of the entire colonial process, as well as helping to answer common questions such as “why couldn’t the Indians fight back effectively?”
• Yale Art gallery
  • Due to its generous access policy regarding usage of its artwork for these course units (and indeed in general) the Yale Art Gallery holds a large amount of artistic works suitable for discussion on this topic. As a result, I have made an effort to pull as many of these works as possible from their collection, both for the simplification of copyright issues in this unit, as well as to allow for easy access and presentation to any teachers who want to use it in the future. I encourage any teacher reading this to take some time to browse through the University’s expansive archive for any striking pieces of art not mentioned in this course unit summary, and replace any mentioned pieces of art with ones that they find more striking or relevant to their class’s interests.