European Conquest of America explores many of the major issues relating to the creation and development of colonial North America. We will focus particularly on the extraordinary heterogeneous mixture of peoples who lived in North America and the Caribbean, and on the complexity and consequences of their interactions. Throughout the semester we will continually evaluate arguments among historians about whether or not it makes sense to understand the colonial period in terms of a conquest, or whether Native Americans retained enough power and resistance throughout the colonial period to make such an interpretation inaccurate.