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CS92PROD
Junior Colloquium: New England and Empire

AMST 206
Spring 2018 not offered
Course Cluster: Caribbean Studies Minor

Using history and literature, this Junior Colloquium focuses on the role of New England in the transformation of the United States from colony to world power. Major forces effecting this metamorphosis have their roots in this area. Mercantile entrepreneurship and the drive of commerce and trade, such as the slave trade, the ivory trade, and the West and East Indies (China and India) trades, opened the larger world to merchants and consumers in New England. Discourses of race, religion, civilization, and science created universities, produced missionaries and merchants, explorers and colonizers, writers and artists who went to the far corners of the world--the Caribbean, Hawaii, China, and Japan--and brought the world back home. The vaunted mechanical and technological ingenuity of the Yankee peddler, seen in a grandiose version in the eponymous inventor of the famous Colt revolver, backed territorial expansion and insinuated New England culture in to those newly acquired territories. A developing sense of racial entitlement and racial confidence legitimated expansion--into Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines--and produced military and cultural imperialism. The domestic, woman-centered "parlor" culture of New England both displayed the wealth of empire and hid its existence.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA AMST
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (CBST-MN)

Last Updated on APR-16-2024
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