Indigenous worlds
Begin with diverse Indigenous political, economic and ecological systems rather than treating colonization as the historical starting point.
Side 170Side Studies / Research
Subject
North American History
Purpose
North American histories studied through Indigenous societies, settler colonialism, slavery, state formation, industrialization, migration and continental integration.
Structure
05 movesHistorical routeV0
Periodization → sources → causation → continuity → change
Study the continent before and beyond present borders.
A continental frame reveals Indigenous polities, empires, migration and economic systems that national histories often partition into separate stories.
Competing empires & settlement
Compare Spanish, French, British and other colonial systems alongside Indigenous diplomacy, adaptation and resistance.
Slavery, land & expansion
Connect coerced labor, dispossession and territorial growth to state formation and economic development.
Industrialization & migration
Trace continental markets, cities, rail, labor migration and border-making through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
States, rights & continental systems
Compare citizenship, welfare, civil-rights struggles, trade and security across Canada, the United States, Mexico and the wider continent.
Keep the boundaries visible.
These separations prevent nearby ideas from collapsing into one another before the subject is understood.
North America ≠ United States
frontier ≠ empty land
migration ≠ one-way assimilation
Questions that organize the Side.
Use these to test whether the model is becoming explanatory rather than merely familiar.
How does a continental frame change explanations built from national histories?
Which institutions linked territorial expansion to economic development?
How should Indigenous sovereignty alter conventional periodization?
What should carry weight here?
Combine Indigenous scholarship, archaeological and oral evidence, national archives, demographic data and cross-border comparison rather than relying on one state's documentary record.