North American Borderlands explores the physical, social, political, cultural, and economic spaces that borders create and purport to divide. The course covers a long history and a wide variety of material - with subjects ranging from 17th-century contests between Algonquian peoples and Dutch traders along the saltwater frontier to the Gilded Age story of a Texas slave who reinvented himself as a Mexican millionaire, to the sulfur dioxide that blew up from U.S. power plants to fall as acid rain in Canada and sour relations between the two nations in the 1980s. By the end of the course, students will be able to recognize borderlands as distinctive spaces of conflict, exchange, dispossession, and opportunity. |