HIST 1180

Last Updated

  • Schedule of Classes - January 19, 2016 6:14PM EST
  • Course Catalog - January 19, 2016 6:21PM EST

HIST 1180
FWS: Viking America

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

Five centuries before Columbus'​s fateful journey, Europeans in flimsy wooden ships were trekking westward across the Atlantic.​ This course examines the Norse discovery of America ca. 1000 AD, focusing on the so-called 'Vínland sagas.' We will study these sagas as medieval historians' attempts to write about their own past, contrasting their works with modern historians' takes on the same issues. We will also engage with Native American perspectives, with the contact zone between texts and material evidence, and with the afterlife of the Norse journeys in popular imagination. Students will write short essays reviewing and reassessing existing historiography, with the aim of refining our sense of the relationship between events and their textualisation, both now and in the past.

When Offered Fall.

Satisfies Requirement First-Year Writing Seminar.

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Syllabi: none

  •   FWS Session. 

  • 3 Credits Graded

  • 18299 HIST 1180   SEM 101

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  • For more information about First-year Writing Seminars, see the Knight Institute website at http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute