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Lecture Schedule; Required Reading; Further Reading

Lecture and Seminar Participation

  • Teaching consists of a weekly lecture and a seminar (all face-to-face) on a related topic. You are expected to attend the lectures before the seminars; undertake the readings and any pre-class exercises for your seminar; and attend your seminar weekly. Attendance is recorded through Tabula. Report any absence to your tutor via email.
  • You should supplement these activities by following the “story” week on week via ONE of the below 7 textbooks. Lectures and seminars will not make much sense if you don’t have this basic framework. Many are available to buy cheaply, or there are physical and some digital copies in the library:

Course books covering the period from c1492 to the recent past (the whole course):

  • Edwin Williamson, Penguin History of Latin America (any edition)
  • John Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (any edition)

OR, if you prefer, there are textbooks for specific periods:

Course books about the Colonial Period:

    • Mark Burkholder and Lyman Johnson, Colonial Latin America, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010.
    • Kris Lane and Matthew Restall. Latin America in Colonial Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. [E-book at Library]

Course books from Independence:

A very useful reference for recent summaries of historiography on a particular topic (particularly for essays/ presentations):

Bibliography for presentations and essays:

For essays and presentations, you'll need to read and research BEYOND the weekly seminar readings. Use the course bibliography and primary and digital sources suggested below.

See this useful video about archival resources for the study of Latin America available in the University of Warwick Library

Here is a link to Latin American databases available in the library.

See this useful powerpoint by subject librarian Andrew Calvert on Using the Library for Sources on Latin America

Useful websites for primary sources:

Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials

Latin American Network Information Centre (LANIC)

Websites about the Colonial Period (with timelines):

Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America 1520-1820. Fordham.

Early Americas Digital Archive, University of Maryland

Useful Primary sources in the Modern Records Centre:

The Modern Records Centre has an excellent resource tailored to the course including digitised sources.The Human Rights in Latin America resource is especially useful for the study of social rights and labour in the early to mid-twentieth century since those documents could be digitised as they are out of copyright. However, their collection holds a lot of useful resources about human rights in the region from the later twentieth-century and up to the present day so it may be well worth a visit. There is some information below about their catalogue of material related to Latin America including a digitised collection about solidarity with Chile.

The Modern Records Centre has an excellent guide to Sources for the Study of Latin America available in their collection. Here are the slides from the intro session in the Modern Records centre.

The Modern Records Centre has also produced the excellent Warwick Digital Archive of the Chile Solidarity Campaign.

Seminar groups:

Please see the main pageLink opens in a new window of the course website for the schedule. The topic of the weekly seminars follows the lecture schedule, below. Click on each week for the relevant readings and any other seminar tasks.

 

Week

Lecture Schedule

 

Term 1
 
1 [no class]
2 Introduction to Latin America Themes and ProblemsLink opens in a new window (CC)
3 Before 1492: Iberia, Africa and the Americas (RD)
4 Early Contact in the Caribbean and Brazil (RD)
5

The Conquest of the Mainland (RE)

6

Reading Week (no class)

7

Rulers, Workers, Traders: Political and Economic Structures of Colonial Life (CC)

8

Colonial Society (RE)

9

The Eighteenth Century (RE)

10

Independence in the Americas (RE)

Term 2  
1

Nation-building in the Nineteenth Century (RE)

2

Slavery and Emancipation (LV)

3

Popular Democracy, Conservative Liberalism:

The Practice of Politics in the Nineteenth Century (RD)

4

The US and Latin America (BS)

5 The Mexican Revolution and Latin America (LV)
6 Reading week: no class
7

Modernity in Latin America (BS)

8

“Populism”, Labour Movements, and Nationalism (LV)

9

Revolutionary Latin America (RD)

10 The Cold War and the Right In Latin America (BS)
Term 3  
1 Democratic Transitions and New Social Movements (CC)

2

Latin America Today (RD)

3

Conclusions (CC)

 

Lecturers

Dr. Camillia Cowling

Dr. Rosie Doyle

Professor Rebecca Earle

Professor Ben Smith

Dr. Liana Valerio