LFU:online

Ausweitung des traditionellen Blickwinkels, Einsicht in die weltweiten Verflechtungen historischer Entwicklungen.

What is Atlantic History and how has it changed, challenged, and reinvigorated American, European, Latin American, and African history in recent years? The complexity and the diversity of the many approaches to the history of the Atlantic World means that we will begin by looking at the genealogy of Atlantic history and its evolution in broad thematic categories. We will consider an overview of the founding debates of the wide and dynamic field of Atlantic history and the transnational and comparative research it has generated before moving to a series of broad categories under which this extensive scholarship may be gathered, including the issue of encounter in the Age of Discovery; the circulation of people; the formation of slave and migrant societies in and around the Atlantic Basin until the middle of the 19th century; the circulation of commodities and pathogens and the formation of merchant and trading networks that accompanied transatlantic trade and development. We also consider the circulations of ideas and cultures over the same period and point to the importance of postcolonial and imperial historiographies in recent social, cultural and material histories of the Atlantic world.
Our overarching goal will be to re-discover the complicated but vibrant role that the encounters brought about by the emergence of the Atlantic World –the contacts, collisions, relationships– played in shaping the world and that the world played in shaping the Atlantic World.

Each week a lecture will be given introducing you to main topic and historical approach to the Atlantic World and the specific theme of that lecture. We will refer to the recommended reading for that lecture and discuss it in context and relate it to the previous readings we have encountered. This course incorporates both lecture and discussion components. Students are encouraged to think critically about the material and to come to class prepared to discuss your ideas and questions as a collective.

A spoken or written test (Klausur) at the end of the semester; other forms of assessment will be considered.

Detailed information on literature will be announced in the course and according to individual language ability. Recommended readings in advance of each lecture will be available online.

Students might want to familiarize themselves with the following English-language works if they so wish:

·         Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario, 20(1) (1996), 19-44

·         D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard, William O’Reilly, The Atlantic World. (London, 2015), Ch. 1, “The Atlantic World: Definition, Theory, and Boundaries’.

·         Nicholas Canny & Philip Morgan (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World 1450-1850 (Oxford 2011), esp. Chs. 1, ‘ Introduction: The Making and Unmaking of an Atlantic World’; Ch.18, William O’Reilly, ‘ Movements of People in the Atlantic World, 1450–1850’.

·         William O'Reilly, ‘Genealogies of Atlantic history’, Atlantic Studies, 1:1 (2004), 66-84.

·         William O’Reilly, ‘Lost Chances of the House of Habsburg,’ Austrian History Yearbook, 40 (2009), 53-70.

·         Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches’, William and Mary Quarterly 65.1 (2008): 167–170.

·         William O’Reilly, 'Emigration from the Habsburg Monarchy and Salzburg to the New World, 1700-1848' in: Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit, 5.Jg. 2005, Heft 1, pp.7-20.

·         ‘Roundtable Conference: The Nature of Atlantic History.’ Itinerario 23.2 (1999): 48–174.

Registration required. This course will be held in English but questions and correspondence in German is possible.

This course is also considered Extra-European History I or II for students of the curriculum BA History (2009). In this case, a reduced workload applies.