Dr. Mark D. Szuchman
Offie: DM 395-A; office hrs: Wed. 2-5 pm

Lectures: Díaz-Balart 1100, Wed / Fri 10:00 - 10:50 am
Discussion Sections: Mon 10:00 - 10:50 / 11:00 - 11:50 / 12:00 - 12:50
Graham Center 271A, 273B, 275B, 286, Chem & Phys 115
(check your course registration information for your discussion section location and time)

Introduction
Preliminary explanatory, situational, or contextual text that forms part of a course syllabus should be neither accidental nor incidental. Students sometimes make the mistake of ignoring such preliminaries, thinking them to be irrelevant to success. Too often, such a mistake turns into self-inflicted and possibly fatal wounds. Read on.

Course objectives
-- to provide a basis for presenting the major social, economic and political developments that went into shaping the Latin American experience, starting with European, African and Amerindian antecedents to contact and ending with the late twentieth century
-- to understand connections between economic and political dimensions and their effects on regional societies
-- to present the nature of leadership and governance as a “historical problematic.”

Learning outcomes. Students will
-- express orally and in writing the complexity of within-group and inter-group social interactions in the context of multi-racial societies
-- express orally and in writing the contextualized nature of social and cultural concepts, law and its implementation, and common practices of different social and ethnic groups within the temporal and spatial settings of the historical actors, as distinct from present-day values
-- express orally and in writing the complex processes involved in nation-building and the challenging nature of political legitimacy over the course of time.

Grading
The course is designed as an overview of the major social, economic and political processes that, since the late 15th century, have weaved together the Latin American experience. Your grades will depend on the quality of your understanding of these processes.

-- Examinations. Check the syllabus for mid-term date. Final examination date to be determined later in the term. Make-up exams: none.

-- Grading. Final grades are computed from three elements, as outlined below, which are the only ones that count toward your performance and grade. There are no extra-credit options.

---- Mid-term exam: You will write a total of two essays in class. You will respond with an essay to a single required question, accounting for 60% of the mid-term grade; you will write a second essay in response to your choice of one out of two additional questions, accounting for 40% of the mid-term grade. Weight: 25%.

---- Final exam: You will write an essay of approximately 2500 words in response to a single required question. Weight: 50%.

---- Discussion section activities: Discussion sections are vital to the quality of your performance in the course. They are venues for exploration, clarification, disputation, and essay-writing opportunities, all of which — and this is important — represent significant activities that feed into your grade. Discussion section activities are scheduled dynamic and thus do not appear on the syllabus. Weight: 25%.

Attendance. You have the age to vote, you have the age to serve in the military, you have the age to decide.

Academic misconduct.
-- Issues associated with student academic misconduct are governed by policies and procedures available at:
http://undergrad.fiu.edu/academic_misconduct/index.html

-- Definitions and procedures dealing with academic misconduct are available at:
http://academic.fiu.edu/AcademicBudget/misconductweb/Undergraduate_academic_misconduct_final.pdf

The distribution of this syllabus represents your responsibility for becoming acquainted with these definitions and processes; no claim of ignorance regarding them is possible.

Resources.
The Department of History’s web site contains an excellent resource for undergraduate students, “A Guide to Success in History Courses.” It is designed by experienced graduate assistants and faculty specifically and economically to optimize the quality of your thinking, organizing, studying and writing within the context of courses in History. It contains additional resources you will find useful. The document is available at:
http://casgroup.fiu.edu/pages/docs/1232/1267729856_A_Guide_to_Success_in_History_Courses.pdf

Course architecture.
Think of the course as a dynamic organism. The course sits atop three elements, each of which feeds into the whole, much in the way that threads interact with each other to form a weave: lectures, readings, discussion sections. There is overlap among them, but little redundancy. This means that success cannot be achieved by concentrating on one of the elements at the cost of the others. In fact, you will notice that there is no textbook and that the grading weights given to each of the required activities are designed to make you think very carefully about the costs of sacrificing any one of them.

-- Lectures are designed to provide organizational frameworks to help us understand a historical period and range of related phenomena. If you are among those who performs well memorizing facts, you will be facing some significant challenges. By contrast, those who use facts to organize them in meaningful fashion by way of conceptualizing them and forging relationships among them in order to explain the manner in which social, economic and political phenomena found reinforcing and conflicting patterns will be rewarded for the efforts.

-- Readings represent opportunities to illustrate concepts introduced in lectures; they are designed as gateways for the voices of historical actors to reach you.

-- Discussion sections represent the venues in which topics are deeply discussed, taken apart, and put together again. They are also the refuge where you can seek greater clarity than the limited amount of time the lecture period provides. And, finally, the discussion section is where you can find help in processing course material orally and in writing.

Reading.
Note: all required books listed below are available for purchase at Barnes & Noble on campus. The course does not use a survey textbook, but for those who would like to have general overviews of Latin America’s history, I recommend the following:

Burns, E. Bradford; Charlip, Julie. Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 2009.
Eakin, Marshall C. The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007

Required
Azuela, Mariano. The Underdogs
Burke, Janet and Humphrey, Ted (ed.). Nineteenth-Century Nation-Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition
Díaz, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain
Sarmiento, D. F. Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants
Martin, Cheryl; Wasserman, Mark (ed.). Readings on Latin American History and its People to 1830
Wood, James; Chasteen, John Charles (ed). Problems in Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations
Timerman, Jacobo. Prisoner without a Name: Cell without a Number

SEE A SAMPLING BELOW OF COLONIAL DOCUMENTS ON THE WEB; OTHERS MAY BE ADDED.

Course schedule and topics

Weeks and Themes
Assigned reading

Jan. 10-14: Introduction; Periodization; who are they?; the importance of time; medieval or Renaissance? Is anything new?

Jan. 17-21: On the eve of contact: Spain I (no class Jan. 17)
Díaz: pp. 7-106

Jan. 24-28: On the eve of contact: Spain II
Díaz: 107-215

Jan. 31 - Feb. 4: Indians in the 16th c.
Díaz: 216-307; Martin & Wasserman: Ch 2

Feb. 7-11: (NO CLASS FEB. 9) The Caribbean; The Mainland: Society and Economics (pt. 1)
Díaz: 308-413; Martin & Wasserman: Chs. 3, 8

Feb. 14-18: Society & Economics (pt. 2)
Martin & Wasserman: Chs. 4, 5, 6

Feb. 21-25: Eighteenth-century challenges
Martin & Wasserman: Ch. 11

Feb. 28 - Mar. 4: Atlantic empires challenged; Age of Revolutions (MID-TERM EXAM: MARCH 4)
Martin &Wasserman: Ch. 12; Burke &Humphrey: Bolívar; Mora; Wood & Chasteen: I: 1-3, 5; II: 3-5

Mar. 7-11: The Politics of Penury; Regionalism & Caudillismo
Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization or Barbarism

Mar. 14-18: Spring Break
Burke & Humphrey: Bello, Lastarria; Wood & Chasteen: III: 1-4

Mar. 21-25: Case Studies in the Liberal State
Burke & Humphrey: Bilbao, Echeverría, Alamán; Wood & Chasteen: IV, V: 1, 4-5

Mar. 28 - Apr. 1: Export-led Modernization
Burke & Humphrey: Hostos, Martí, Acosta de Samper,

Apr. 4-8: The Case for Revolution; The Case for Reform
Azuela; Burke & Humphrey: da Cunha, Matto de Turner, Bulnes; Wood & Chasteeen: VII: 4-6, X: 1, 3-5

Apr. 11-15: Populism; Nationalism
Wood & Chasteen: IX-1, 3, 5, 6; Timerman;

Apr. 18-22: Development from Within, Challenges from Without. Final exam is distributed April 22

Apr. 27: Final exam is returned in Díaz-Balart 1100 at 9:45 am

On the web:

COLONIAL-ERA DOCUMENTS

Catholic Kings. Privileges and Prerogatives Granted by Their Catholic Majesties to Christopher Columbus (1492): http://avalon.law.yale.edu/15th_century/colum.asp

Cieza de León, Pedro. Chronicles (1150): http://www.thenagain.info/Classes/Sources/deLeon.html

Columbus. Letter to Lord Raphael Sánchez, Treasurer to the Catholic Kings (1493): http://web.archive.org/web/19980116132616/pluto.clinch.edu/history/wciv1/civ1ref/colum.htm

Columbus. Letter to the King and Queen of Spain (1494): http://web.archive.org/web/19980116132627/pluto.clinch.edu/history/wciv1/civ1ref/colum2.html

Cortés, Hernán. Second Letter to Charles V (1520): http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1520cortes.html

Prescott, William H. History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843): http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/PreConq.html

Colonization and Print in the Americas. University of Pennsylvania: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/kislak/index/cultural.html

Las Casas, Bartolomé de. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542): http://web.archive.org/web/19980116133031/http://pluto.clinch.edu/history/wciv2/civ2ref/casas.htm

Anonymous. Two Documents Regarding the Reign of Philip II (1559) (quite critical; Black Legend): http://www.thenagain.info/Classes/Sources/PhilipII.html

Apparitions and the Miracle of the Virgin of Guadalupe (mid-16th c.): http://www.sancta.org/nican.html

Digital reconstruction of the map of Mexico, 1550, University of Helsinki: http://cipher.uiah.fi/mexico_new/

Mexico City, 1524: http://mexicochannel.net/maps/mexcity1524.gif