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Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean set off a chain of violence that swept through the early modern Americas. In this course we will investigate how warfare shaped North America and the Caribbean in the period between Columbus’s fateful 1492 voyage and the establishment of an independent Haitian state. The interlinked patterns of colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery forced together people from three continents and made Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans in the Americas rethink what it meant to fight a war, and how to do it. We will consider how different cultures understood, deployed, and attempted to control violence, and then focus on specific wars, engaging with both contemporary scholarship and primary sources. Along the way, we will consider how the Americas, despite a long history before Columbus, became a “new world” through the warfare that followed after him. Throughout this semester we will read and discuss a variety of different forms of historical writing and consider the wide applicability of the history we are studying in the world around us today. Students will have the opportunity to explore different forms of historically informed writing in their own work.