Department of English

In this course we will consider how the place we now know as Philadelphia was colonized by white settler colonials, which is to say stolen from Native Americans and built by enslaved and indentured labor. We will learn how Native American and enslaved and indentured laborers played an active role in shaping Philadelphia, and so have been essential agents in the city's many developments. We will also encounter an 18th and 19th-century Philadelphia that became a key center of Latin American independence movements, as well as black, indigenous, and working class white social and political activism and thought. We will read literature, historical documents, and political treatises in this interdisciplinary course.