Explore colonial Latin America from pre-Columbian civilizations and Iberian expansion through conquest, colonial institutions, labor, religion, intellectual life, and the reforms and grievances that prepared the way for independence.
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Compare the political, religious, economic, and environmental patterns of Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations with those of Iberian society before sustained contact.
Analyze how disease, diplomacy, Indigenous alliances, interpreters, warfare, and existing institutions shaped the conquests of Mexico and Peru.
Evaluate how cities, encomienda, mining, commerce, missions, and royal administration organized colonial society while generating conflicts among competing groups.
Explain how Indigenous and African labor systems, slavery, geography, production, family life, and legal classifications influenced colonial social relations.
Assess the roles of evangelization, natural-law arguments, the Inquisition, convents, scholarship, mysticism, and censorship in colonial culture.
Trace how Enlightenment thought and Bourbon reforms altered trade, administration, education, military organization, and church-state relations, sharpening grievances that favored independence.
Colonial Latin American History traces the formation of Spanish and Portuguese America from the societies that existed before contact to the intellectual and political pressures preceding independence. The course compares Mesoamerican, Andean, and Iberian institutions before examining Atlantic encounters, epidemic disease, the Columbian Exchange, and the conquests of Mexico and Peru. Using accounts from conquerors, Indigenous communities, and colonial observers, it considers how alliances, interpreters, warfare, and institutional continuity shaped conquest. Later lessons explore cities, mining, trade, encomienda, Indigenous and African slavery, racial categories, family networks, evangelization, and disputes over natural law and coerced conversion. Religious and intellectual life appears through the Inquisition, convents, Sor Juana, and Rosa of Lima. The course concludes by connecting Enlightenment ideas and Bourbon centralization to conflicts among the crown, Creoles, clergy, and regional interests, while examining colonial Latin America as a setting for enduring debates about rights, authority, inequality, and liberty.
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief · South Dakota Historical Society Press
Dedra McDonald Birzer is a historian, lecturer, and publisher whose work explores the American West, women’s intellectual history, and American literature.
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