Caribbean and the Atlantic World
Faculty are broadly engaged in all aspects of the study of the Caribbean and Atlantic region and have produced scholarship that builds on the established theoretical and methodological frameworks of Atlantic history, namely that after sustained European contact, geographical areas that bordered the Atlantic Ocean, mainly the Americas, Africa, and Europe, came to represent a regional system where economic, political, intellectual, and cultural exchange were the norm. Faculty research projects and courses consider a number of themes, including the impact of European contact and conquest on indigenous populations, European settlement and colonization in Africa and the Americas, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the growth of plantation societies, as well as the history of commodities, the Age of Revolutions, religious movements, and the cross-cultural exchange of ideas and their impact on the economic, cultural, social, and political history of the region. Faculty who study the Caribbean examine how the legacies of European colonialism and the links between the decline of plantation societies and empire and the rise of American influence in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, shape the Caribbean to this day. Faculty encourages inquiries from students interested in any aspect of Atlantic World or Caribbean history.
Courses offered regularly in the department that support an Atlantic World and Caribbean cluster are as follows:
Undergraduate
HIST 320. History of the Atlantic World.
HIST 321. The Age of Revolution in the Atlantic World
HIST 326. History of the Caribbean to Emancipation.
HIST 322. History of the Iberian World.
HIST 341. Latin America to 1810.
HIST 344. History of Africa to 1800.
HIST 357. Out of Africa: The Black Diaspora and the Modern World.
HIST 365. History of Religion in America.
HIST 367. Colonization of North America.
HIST 368. The Birth of the Republic.
HIST 406. The Era of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1715–1815.
HIST 462. American Foreign Relations.
HIST 475. Empire and History.
HIST 105. History of the United States.
HIST 232. History of American Sea Power
HIST 234. European Military History
HIST 258. American Indian History.
HIST 304. Mexican-American Frontier to 1848.
HIST 308. History of American Indians in the U.S. South.
Graduate
HIST 678. Comparative Border Studies
HIST 679. Topics in Comparative Border Studies
HIST 691. Readings (taught as Atlantic World).
HIST 615. Colonial Latin America.
HIST 601. Colonial North America.
HIST 634. Maritime History and Sea Power.
Faculty
Glenn A. Chambers received his Ph. D. from Howard University in 2006 and joined the history department at Texas A&M the same year. Dr. Chambers teaches courses on the history of the Caribbean, Latin America and the African Diaspora. His most recent book Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940 (Louisiana State University Press, 2010) focuses on the migration of West Indians to Honduras at the turn of the twentieth century to work in the American-dominated banana industry. His second book project expands the issues of race, ethnicity, nationalism, and immigration into a study on twentieth century Honduran immigration, particularly those of West Indian and Bay Islands descent to New Orleans.
Brian Rouleau received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and joined the history department at Texas A&M the same year. Maritime communities and the sailors who inhabited them were instrumental to the traffic in people, goods, and ideas that grew up between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Brian Rouleau's research explores the connective linkages between dispersed locations that seafaring peoples established within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic World. In his teaching, there is a similar focus on presenting colonial North America and the early United States as firmly embedded in a larger Atlantic system of material and cultural exchange. HIST 105 and HIST 462, in particular, emphasize that American history is best understood within a much larger context.
April Hatfield received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1997 and began teaching at Texas A&M the following year. Her work examines how borders and migration shaped individuals and institutions in the early modern Atlantic world. Her publications include several book chapters and articles and the monograph Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (2004). Her current project “Creole Allegiances” follows a variety of individuals as they negotiated the borders of English and Spanish imperial spaces in the western Caribbean and southeastern North America in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Troy Bickham specializes in the history of Britain and its empire, particularly the Atlantic world, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His first book, Savages within the Empire (2005) explores how encounters and relations with American Indians affected British material, political, intellectual and religious culture in the eighteenth century. His recent book, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen Through the British Press (2008), explores British reactions to the American Revolution, as seen and expressed in the British press. He is currently completing a transatlantic study of the War of 1812: The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire and the War of 1812 (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2012).
Cynthia Bouton focuses on early modern and Revolutionary Europe and the Atlantic. She studies the ways that inequities in access to basic subsistence needs—often linked to status/class, gender, race/ethnicity, patronage/political relations, and location—have influenced responses to suffering (both the threat of it and strategies to alleviate it). Her first book studied responses to a subsistence crisis in 1775 France, several articles explored the history of the politics of provisioning in France from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and her second book analyzed 19th- and 20th-century cultural and political engagements with social violence over food security. Her next book, “Subsistence, Society, and Culture in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century and Age of Revolution,” studies staple food production, marketplace interaction, entangled Atlantic trade networks, and metropolitan and colonial government policies to understand adaptations to the “Atlanticization” of food regimes in the French, Spanish, and British Atlantic during the 18th century and revolutionary era.
Jason Parker specializes in the history of US-"Third World" relations, studying both the formal and informal "diplomacy" embedded in the interactions of empires, nations, and peoples. His research examines the ways in which state- and non-state actors in the United States engaged with their counterparts abroad within a complicated matrix of strategy, security, decolonization, and race during the long "American Century." His first book, Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbbean, 1937-1962 (Oxford University Press), looked at the actions of US-based actors- the American government, African Americans, and Caribbean immigrants-- in the push for independence in the British West Indies.
Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss earned her PhD at Duke University in 2003 and joined Texas A & M University the same year. She teaches courses in Atlantic World History, Modern France, and the Caribbean. Her first project, Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique, (2009), focuses on the relationship between Martinique and continental France and the construction of racial, class, gender and national identities during the first half of the nineteenth century. Her second project, France at the Edges: Life in France’s Atlantic Port Cities, 1760-1830, explores connections among French Atlantic port cities in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe during the so-called Age of Empire.
Larry W. Yarak is a historian of Africa. His first book investigated the precolonial political and social history of the Asante Kingdom, located in today's Ghana, using European (principally Dutch) archival sources and Asante oral traditions. He is currently completing a manuscript on the recruitment of soldiers by the Dutch in the 19th century West Africa, the intersection of this activity with indigenous forms of servitude, and the experiences of the African soldiers in the Dutch East Indies. His current research project concerns the 19th century social history on the peoples of the Gold Coast littoral, with a focus on the town of Elmina.
James C. Bradford focuses on maritime, naval, and Early American history and teaches courses in those fields, including HIST 368: Birth of the Republic, HIST 604: The Age of Jefferson, and HIST 643: Maritime History and Sea Power, that last of which pays significant attention to the rise and decline of maritime empires from the Athenian and Roman Empires of the ancient Mediterranean through the oceanic empires of the modern era.