Karen Kupperman, professor of history and founder of NYU’s Atlantic history Program, is at the forefront of a field she helped shape, a new approach to history that looks at the interplay of Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and Africa as a flow of historical forces.

Essay
Historians have recently been adopting an Atlantic model for the history of the founding period of American history and this approach is transforming our understanding.  Colonization has always been an Atlantic subject, of course; it is by definition the transportation of European people and institutions westward across the ocean and the import of people, goods, and influences eastward into the Old World.  In older paradigms, this field was configured as imperial history, focusing on institutional relationships between capitals in Europe and settlers in America, or economic history that dealt with the production, procurement, and organization of trade and tradegoods across and around the Atlantic and beyond.  Sometimes culture was the formulating principle, looking at the flow of religious, political, artistic, and other ideas and influences.  More...

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