Hey, I'm Shannon Rice, the podcast producer here at C-SPAN, and this week lectures in history explores colonial America and how it's remembered through historic sites and monuments.

University of Delaware professor Zara Anish Haslin argues that people's assumptions about colonial America are influenced by material and popular culture.

These include paintings depicting American history in the U.S. Capitol and statues of Columbus and

Pocahontas. This lecture was recorded in December of 2020. Class starts in a moment.

So welcome. This is History 318, the History of Colonial America, and I'm Professor Zara Innes Hanslan.

Now, at the beginning of this course, I asked each of you to tell me what you think of when you think of colonial American history.

Many of you, I'm sure, don't even remember what you put, but I'm going to give you a little synopsis today.

Many of you

focused on what historians would actually call the American Revolutionary Era rather than the

colonial era at large. People like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton,

issues like taxation without representation, other founders and historical highlights of the

imperial crisis in the war all popped up.

A few of you also mentioned places like historic Jamestown, Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts,

and Colonial Williamsburg.

And a few people mentioned the history of slavery.

And what I thought was really interesting was that it was notably because of either or the 1619 project in the summer's Black Lives Matter protests.

But what was interesting was that there were a few omissions.

No one mentioned individual women, I think, or any individual indigenous people by name.

And no one, if I'm recalling correctly, mentioned anything west of the Appalachian

Mountains, much less west of the Mississippi or the Rockies or the West Coast. Now, technically

speaking, this course runs from before contact of Europeans with indigenous people in the 15th century

to 1763, the end of the seven years or French and Indian War, and what is now the territory

...