When CU-Boulder Professor Patricia Limerick was asked to teach a comparative history course along with two of her colleagues she said it afforded her a "great opportunity to return to the receiving end of the educational business."
The capstone course offered to graduating CU-Boulder seniors is team-taught by two or three faculty members. Twice in recent years, Limerick, an American West historian, teamed up with Middle East historian James Jankowski and African historian Chidiebere Nwaubani to teach a class examining colonialism and imperialism in each of the three areas.
The experience was so stimulating that Limerick made it the focus of her presidential address last year to the Western History Association.
Examining how indigenous people in each of those regions underwent colonization -- a topic recently the subject of apologies by British and Spanish royalty, the U.S. government and the pope -- provided revelations concerning the conquest of American Indian and Mexican peoples in the American West, Limerick said.
The framework of comparative history illuminated issues including colonizers' anxieties directed at the educated native elite; colonial thinking toward uplifting indigenous women; the roles of diplomats and the military in expanding territory; the response of colonized people to the introduction of new religions; and the emergence of worldwide conservation efforts and their impact on native peoples.
"Teaching this course made me feel that the heat had been turned down on, to use one example, the otherwise very touchy issue of ethnic identity," Limerick said. "Lecturing on Egyptian, Islamic and Arabic identity, Jim Jankowski repeatedly said that 'Identity is contingent, multiple and contested,' a chant that I vowed to carry with me when I returned to Western history. Memorable articles in our course reading spelled out the idea that the hardened ethnic identities of today -- whether 'ethnic' or 'national' -- were themselves the products of the imperial process."
Another surprise was the similarity in the reaction of indigenous people to the introduction of a new religion. American Indian leader Black Elk, who is enshrined as the archetype of traditional Lakota belief in the writings of John G. Neihardt, converted to Catholicism and interpreted Catholicism as a logical extension of Lakota belief, Limerick noted.
"In the context of world history, this combining, quilting, weaving and knitting of traditions came to seem more the predictable norm of human behavior, rather than a puzzling and inexplicable contradiction or inconsistency," she said.
Making note of common patterns in global history can prevent historians from wrongly interpreting certain historical developments as being unique to a particular area, and can also provide wonderful opportunities to work with people from other disciplines, she said.
"I am now more than ever convinced that Western American history can play a key role in the recovery from specialization, an affliction that has come down on the academic profession with disproportionate force," Limerick said. "Western American history offers a literally world-class basis for alliances, for building bridges and pooling efforts with fellow investigators in many other areas of work."
The CU-Boulder history department offers several other capstone courses in comparative history for graduating seniors, all of which are team-taught by faculty members.
Limerick is chair of the board of CU-Boulder's interdisciplinary Center of the American West and has served as president of the Western History Association and the American Studies Association. She is the author of "Legacy of Conquest," "Something in the Soil" and "Desert Passages."
She has been a member of the CU-Boulder faculty since 1984 and teaches both undergraduate and graduate students. She is an associate director of CU-Boulder's Minority Arts and Sciences Program and in 1995 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the "genius grant."