history

Directions

Please write a 7-9 page essay answering ONE of the following questions. Please indicate at the beginning of your essay, which question you are addressing. Essays should be written in twelve-point font and double-spaced with one-inch margins. Please read the question carefully and answer all parts of the question in your essay. Evidence for answering these questions should come ONLY from lectures, classroom discussions, and readings from this part of our course. No outside sources are permitted without prior approval by me.

To receive full credit, an essay should reference and/or cite specific evidence from Townsend, Lane, Boyer and Spurling texts, AND Lasso. All references, quotations, etc. should be cited with parenthetical citations or as footnotes. Please be consistent with your citations. References without quotes or citations will be treated as plagiarism. You may use material from the Restall & Lane textbook with proper citations as well. You may use material from course lectures without citations.

Essays should make a specific argument and avoid laundry lists of meaningless facts, plot narrations, and facile generalizations. Additionally, papers should be clearly organized and written in clean, readable prose. Because these are BIG, BROAD questions, I expect you to select themes within your chosen question, rather than trying to summarize/synthesize every possible instance relevant to that question in our course. In other words, go for depth rather than breadth.

Questions

1. Using specific examples from our course, identify several important characteristics of colonialism. How did Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese) colonialists advance these ideas? What challenges did these colonial projects face? In what ways were they left unfinished?

2. Iberian colonialism in the Americas involved the racial, cultural, and social mixture of three distinct societies (European, African, and Indigenous) that had little to no prior knowledge of each other. Colonizers imposed categories of difference upon this mixture to make sense of what they saw as a chaotic situation. Over more than 300 years of colonialism, these structures evolved and changed. For this essay, please select a few categories of difference (i.e. racial, political, gender, class, occupational) and discuss how colonizers envisioned them to work. How did they work in reality? What room for flexibility/disregard existed between these categories as they evolved? Finally, what can these categories tell us about the long history of colonialism in Latin America?