The Spring Workshop of the Atlantic History Seminar will take place at Harvard University on April 12, 2003. The topic is "The Americas in the European Imagination."

This one-day Workshop will concentrate on visual and verbal representations by Europeans of the people, places, and possibilities of the Western Atlantic World—the West Indies and North and South America, 1500–1825. Travel accounts, scientific investigations, missionary reports, commercial correspondence, and government documents, as well as maps, drawings, and engravings will be examined by authorities in various fields for the light they throw on Europeans’ imaginings of the trans-oceanic west.

Attendance at the Workshop and participation in the discussion are open to the academic community. Historians at the beginning of their career, including Ph.D. candidates, are specially encouraged to attend. Travel and accommodation expenses will be the responsibility of attendees; the Workshop will provide lunch and local lodging information. Pre-registration, by April 4, is required.

Program
9:00-9:30 a.m.
Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
Introduction

9:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Beatriz Pastor, Dartmouth College
“Narrative, Knowledge, and Power: Spanish Accounts of Discovery and Conquest”

Neil Safier, Johns Hopkins University
“Ruined Pyramids, Forgotten Maps, and Trunkloads of Silent Plants: The Perils of Imagining South America as an Open Book for European Science”

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, State University of New York at Buffalo
“Knights and Demons: The Chivalric and the Crusading in Early Modern European Symbolic Landscapes of the New World”

2:00-5:00 p.m.
Peter Mancall, University of Southern California
“Ethnographic Reports: America’s Native Peoples in Sixteenth-Century Global Context”

David Buisseret, University of Texas at Arlington
“What Do Maps Tell Us about the European Presence in the New World?”

Paul Mapp, Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture
“European Geographic Ignorance and North American Imperial Rivalry: The Role of the Uncharted American West in International Affairs, 1713-1763”

A copy of the program, as well as registration information, can be found on our Web site.