HIST2606 - Travel Accounts and Atlantic Histories 1400-1800

This course will focus on the boom in travel writing from 1400 to 1800, a period marked by sustained contact between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. However, rather than pursuing a traditional focus on authors as ‘explorers’ and ‘discoverers’, we will examine the ways in which such accounts can be used to tell a variety of histories, including those of Indigenous and local peoples around the Atlantic. What can travel narratives written primarily by European elites really tell us about the men, women and children they encountered along the west African coast? What do they have to teach us about the diverse groups inhabiting the Americas at this time: indigenous, enslaved, and formerly enslaved people as well as colonists? Incorporating book history and the study of material texts, the class will meet regularly in Kislak Special Collections to examine original travel accounts from the period and will also make use of the Common Press letterpress studio. It will ask students to think about the nature of travel writing, the concept of the ‘Other’, ideas of belonging, scientific discourses, the materiality of texts, and the ways in which the available archive shapes the histories we write.