LAH2020: Latin American History

Course Description

LAH2020, Latin American History, is the survey of Latin America from before European contact to the present. It covers Spanish America, Brazil and the Caribbean across roughly six centuries — the pre-Columbian societies, the three-hundred-year colonial period, the independence movements of the nineteenth century, and the revolutions, dictatorships and democratic transitions of the twentieth.

The University of West Florida's description sets out the span and the method: a "survey of the history of Latin America, including Spanish America, Brazil, and the Caribbean, from pre-Columbian times to the recent past," tackling "the last 600 years of Latin America's history, from before the 'discovery' of the New World, to the millions of people who reside within it today," addressing "Latin America's 300-year colonial period, the Independence movements of the nineteenth century, and the revolutions and 'dirty wars' of the twentieth century," with students engaging "a wide variety of primary sources" and completing "primary source analyses to better understand Latin America's history from different perspectives." Florida Gulf Coast University's entry is briefer but identical in scope.

The scare quotes UWF places around "discovery" are not incidental. This course is taught, at most Florida institutions, as a corrective to a narrative in which Latin American history begins in 1492. The pre-Columbian material is not a prologue — it is the first unit, and the conquest is examined as an encounter between existing societies rather than as the arrival of history.

LAH2020 is offered at approximately 12 Florida institutions, spanning state colleges and universities, and carries 3 credits with roughly 45 lecture contact hours. It is a 2000-level course with no prerequisite at most institutions, and it is widely used to satisfy general education requirements.

⚠ Four titles, and a general-education designation worth checking

The number travels under several names: Latin American History (the statewide title, and State College of Florida's), Introduction to Latin American History (UWF and UF), Intro Latin American History (FGCU), and Latin American Civilization (USF). These are the same course.

More useful than the titles are the general education attributes, which are unusually rich on this course and vary by institution. FGCU tags LAH2020 with three: GESO (General Education — Social Science), WCOM (General Education Written Communication Competency) and CLWS (College-Level English Language Writing Skills). The University of Florida likewise uses it to satisfy a Written Communication general education requirement. The practical implication is that at several Florida institutions this is a writing course as well as a history course, with a graded writing load to match — students choosing it as an easy social science elective are sometimes surprised. Whether it carries a writing designation at your institution is worth checking before you enrol.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Identify the major periods of Latin American history — pre-Columbian, conquest, colonial, independence, national consolidation, twentieth-century revolution and reaction, and the contemporary era — and place major events within them.
• Describe the principal pre-Columbian societies, including the Mexica (Aztec), Maya and Inca, and explain their political organisation, economy and religion on their own terms.
• Explain the causes, course and consequences of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests, including the role of disease, indigenous alliances, and military and technological factors.
• Analyse the structure of colonial society: the encomienda and repartimiento, the mita, the casta system, the role of the Catholic Church, and the extraction economies of silver and sugar.
• Explain African slavery in the Americas, its scale and regional variation, and its enduring demographic, cultural and economic consequences — particularly in Brazil and the Caribbean.
• Analyse the independence movements of the early nineteenth century and account for why the outcomes differed across Spanish America, Brazil and Haiti.
• Explain nineteenth-century state formation: caudillismo, liberal-conservative conflict, export-led growth, and the incorporation of Latin America into the world economy.
• Analyse twentieth-century revolutions and reform movements — Mexico, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Chile — and identify what each was responding to.
• Explain the Cold War in Latin America: United States intervention, military dictatorship, the "dirty wars," state terror, and the transitions to democracy.
• Analyse contemporary issues in historical perspective: inequality, migration, drug economies, indigenous movements, and the region's relationship with the United States.
• Analyse primary sources in historical context, identifying the author's position, purpose and audience, and distinguishing what a document evidences from what it asserts.
• Construct a written historical argument supported by evidence, in clear prose and with appropriate citation.
• Explain how race, class, gender and ethnicity have structured Latin American societies over time.

Optional Outcomes

• Analyse Latin American art, music, literature and religion as historical sources and as objects of study — emphasised at institutions that use the course for a humanities or cultural competency designation.
• Trace the history of a single country in depth through a research project.
• Analyse the history of Latin American migration to the United States and to Florida specifically.
• Examine liberation theology and the political role of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century.
• Analyse environmental history: the Columbian exchange, plantation ecology, extraction and deforestation.
• Compare historiographical interpretations of a contested episode — the conquest, the Cuban Revolution, the causes of underdevelopment.
• Analyse indigenous movements and struggles for land and recognition from the colonial period to the present.
• Use digital archives and Spanish- or Portuguese-language sources where students have the language.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Defining Latin America: geography, the limits of the term, and the problem of writing a single history for a region this varied
• Pre-Columbian America: Mesoamerican civilisations (Olmec, Maya, Mexica), the Andes (Moche, Wari, Inca), and the peoples of the Caribbean and lowland South America
• Iberia before 1492: the Reconquista, the Catholic monarchies, and the Atlantic exploration that preceded Columbus
• Contact and conquest: Columbus and the Caribbean, the fall of Tenochtitlan, the conquest of Peru; disease, alliance and the demographic catastrophe
• The Columbian exchange: crops, animals, pathogens and their global consequences
• Colonial institutions: viceroyalties and audiencias, encomienda, repartimiento and mita, the Church and the missions, the Inquisition
• Colonial economy: silver at Potosí and Zacatecas, sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean, the fleet system and Atlantic trade
• Colonial society: the casta system, indigenous communities, free and enslaved people of African descent, creole and peninsular tension, gender and family
• African slavery in the Americas: the scale of the trade, regional systems, resistance and maroon communities, and the specificity of Brazil
• The eighteenth century: Bourbon and Pombaline reforms, indigenous rebellion (Túpac Amaru II), and mounting creole grievance
• The Haitian Revolution and its reverberations across the Americas
• Spanish American independence: Bolívar, San Martín, Hidalgo and Morelos; why the outcome was fragmentation rather than union
• Brazilian independence: the monarchy, the transition to a republic, and abolition in 1888
• The nineteenth century: caudillos, liberal and conservative conflict, export economies, foreign capital, and the beginnings of United States intervention
• The Mexican Revolution: causes, factions, the 1917 constitution, and its long aftermath
• Populism and import-substitution industrialisation: Vargas, Perón, and the mid-century state
• The Cuban Revolution and its regional consequences
• The Cold War in Latin America: United States policy, coups, military dictatorship in the Southern Cone, state terror and the "dirty wars," Central America's civil wars
• Transitions to democracy, neoliberal reform, and the debt crisis
• Contemporary Latin America: inequality, migration, the drug trade and its violence, indigenous and social movements, and the region's global position

Optional Topics

• Latin American art, music and literature as historical evidence
• Religion beyond institutional Catholicism: syncretism, Afro-Caribbean traditions, liberation theology, evangelical growth
• Environmental history and the ecology of extraction
• Gender and women's history across the periods
• Migration to the United States, and the Cuban, Haitian, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Puerto Rican communities in Florida
• Sport, popular culture and national identity
• Historiography: dependency theory, the debate over colonial legacies, and why interpretations have shifted
• Single-country deep studies (Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, Guatemala) as research projects

Resources & Tools

• Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (John Charles Chasteen, W. W. Norton) is the most widely adopted single text for this course, in Florida and nationally — short, well written, and built around argument rather than chronology alone.
• A History of Latin America (Keen & Haynes) and Modern Latin America (Skidmore, Smith & Green) are the fuller alternatives; the latter is organised by country and is useful where the course does deep single-country work.
• Colonial Latin America (Burkholder & Johnson) is the standard for the colonial half where a course splits the material.
• Primary source readers: The Latin America Reader series (Duke University Press — separate Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Peru and Argentina volumes), Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History (Mills, Taylor & Graham), and Born in Blood and Fire: Latin American Voices, the companion sourcebook to Chasteen.
• Single-work assignments that recur across Florida syllabi: The Broken Spears (León-Portilla) for indigenous accounts of the conquest; Bartolomé de las Casas's Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies; I, Rigoberta Menchú; and Open Veins of Latin America (Galeano), the last usually taught as a document of its moment rather than as current scholarship.
• Digital archives: the Internet Modern History Sourcebook (Fordham) Latin America section, the Library of Congress Hispanic Reading Room collections, Digital Public Library of America, the National Security Archive at George Washington University (declassified United States documents on Cold War interventions — heavily used for the twentieth-century units), and Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC) at the University of Texas.
• Citation style: history uses Chicago/Turabian notes-and-bibliography, not APA or MLA.
• Professional and regional context: the Conference on Latin American History, the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and in Florida the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, both federally designated National Resource Centers.

Career Pathways

• Secondary Social Studies Teacher — SOC 25-2031. Latin American content appears in Florida's world history and geography standards, and on the FTCE Social Science 6-12 subject area examination.
• Foreign Service Officer, Intelligence Analyst and Diplomatic Staff — SOC 33-3021 variants and 13-1041. Regional and historical expertise combined with Spanish or Portuguese is directly employable; U.S. Southern Command, headquartered in Doral, has Latin America as its entire area of responsibility and is a substantial Florida employer.
• International Business and Trade Specialist — SOC 13-1041 (Compliance Officers) and 13-1081 (Logisticians). Miami functions as the commercial gateway between the United States and Latin America; a great many multinationals run their Latin American regional headquarters there.
• Immigration Paralegal and Immigration Attorney — SOC 23-2011 and 23-1011. Understanding the historical conditions producing migration from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Central America is professionally relevant, not merely contextual.
• Journalist and Foreign Correspondent — SOC 27-3023. Miami is a major hub for Spanish-language media, including Univision and Telemundo.
• Archivist, Curator and Museum Professional — SOC 25-4011 to 25-4013. HistoryMiami, the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami, and the Latin American collections at UF and FIU are Florida-specific settings.
• Non-profit and NGO Program Officer — SOC 11-9151 and 21-1099, in development, human rights and refugee resettlement organisations.
• Postsecondary History Teacher — SOC 25-1125, requiring graduate study; UF, FIU, FSU, USF and Tulane are the regional programmes.
• A realistic note. LAH2020 is a general education survey and does not by itself qualify anyone for an occupation. Its value compounds when paired with Spanish or Portuguese language study — that combination is genuinely marketable in Florida in a way the history survey alone is not, and students intending any of the pathways above should plan the language alongside.

Special Information

Position in the curriculum

LAH2020 is a first- or second-year general education course, normally with no prerequisite. For history, international studies, Latin American studies and Spanish majors it is the gateway to upper-division regional coursework — at UWF it precedes LAH4131 and related 4000-level offerings; at FGCU it precedes LAH3130 (Colonial Latin America) and LAH3200 (Modern Latin America), which split this survey's material across two deeper courses.

General education designation — check it, and check the writing load

This is the practical point for most students. LAH2020 commonly carries more than one general education attribute. At FGCU it satisfies Social Science, Written Communication Competency and College-Level English Language Writing Skills simultaneously; UF uses it for Written Communication. That efficiency is real — one course, several requirements — but it comes with a graded writing load, typically primary source analyses plus essay examinations or a paper. Students selecting it as a low-effort elective on the strength of "survey course" sometimes misjudge it. As always, SCNS guarantees the course transfers, not the general education category it fills at the receiving institution, so confirm the designation where you intend to graduate rather than where you take it.

Transfer and articulation

As a 2000-level SCNS course, LAH2020 carries the statewide equivalency guarantee among Florida public institutions and applies to the A.A. It is a safe course to take at a state college and transfer. The two ordinary cautions apply: general education category placement is decided by the receiving institution, and a history major will require upper-division LAH coursework regardless of the survey.

Course format

Three credits, approximately 45 lecture contact hours, no laboratory. Online and hybrid sections are common. Assessment usually pairs examinations with written primary source analyses; where the course carries a writing designation the written work is weighted heavily and is graded as writing. Some sections include a research paper on a single country or episode.

Prerequisites narrative

Most Florida institutions list no prerequisite. Where the course carries a writing competency designation, eligibility for or completion of ENC1101 is sometimes required or strongly recommended — and FGCU requires ENC1102 for the follow-on LAH3130, which indicates the direction the writing expectation runs. Dual-enrolment students are held to their institution's placement standards. No Spanish or Portuguese is required; the course is taught in English and sources are read in translation.

Course-code variations across Florida

The LAH prefix is Latin American history. LAH2020 is the survey; LAH3130 (colonial) and LAH3200 (modern) are the upper-division halves at institutions that split it; LAH4xxx numbers carry country and topic studies. Adjacent prefixes cover related but distinct ground: LAS is interdisciplinary Latin American studies, WOH is world history, AMH is American history, and SPN/POR are the languages. A student needing a Latin America requirement should check whether their programme names LAH2020 specifically or accepts any LAS-designated course, since these are administered differently.

A Florida-specific note

This course has an unusually direct local relevance. Florida's population includes very large communities originating across the region — Cuban, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Venezuelan, Colombian, Nicaraguan, Mexican and Brazilian among them — and the histories the course covers are, for many students in Florida classrooms, family history rather than distant material. Instructors frequently draw on that, and the twentieth-century units in particular (the Cuban Revolution, Central America's civil wars, the Venezuelan crisis) often land differently here than they would elsewhere. Students should expect the course to be taken seriously by their classmates for that reason.

AI Integration

A history survey is not a technical course, but the skill it exists to build — determining whether a source is what it claims to be — is exactly what generative AI erodes when used carelessly. That makes the topic worth addressing directly rather than leaving to a syllabus footnote.

Where AI helps. Language models are useful for orientation: building a timeline before reading, explaining an unfamiliar institution such as the encomienda or the audiencia, summarising the political situation of a country in a given decade, and generating practice questions. For students reading translated primary sources, a model can usefully paraphrase a difficult passage so that a first pass is possible.

Where AI fails, specifically here. Three failures matter. First, fabricated citations and quotations — models invent plausible authors, titles and journals, and they invent quotations attributed to real historical figures, which is harder to catch because the invented quotation usually sounds right. Second, flattening of historiographical disagreement: why historians argue about the causes of Latin American underdevelopment, or about the nature of the Cuban Revolution, is course content, and a model will typically deliver one confident synthesis instead. Third, and specific to this region, an English-language and North American bias in the training data. Latin American scholarship published in Spanish and Portuguese is under-represented relative to Anglophone work, and models consequently reproduce a particular vantage point on the conquest, on United States intervention, and on indigenous history — which is precisely the vantage point this course is designed to complicate.

The historian's responsibility. Every quotation must be traced to a source you have seen. Every citation must be located in the library catalog, JSTOR, or a named digital archive before it enters a bibliography. A claim you cannot source is a claim you do not make. That standard predates AI and is unchanged by it.

Academic integrity. Where this course carries a writing designation, the written work is the assessment, and the primary source analysis exists so that you practise reading a document. Outsourcing it defeats the purpose and forfeits the general education competency the assignment certifies. Policies vary by instructor; read the syllabus and ask if it is not explicit.