This course examines the history of North America through the lens of "discovering America," a prevalent expression in discussions of the region's landscape and people from 1400 to 2000. Using art, fiction, popular entertainments, travel writing as well as works by historians, the course focuses on early encounters between indigenous and European peoples, the importance of stories of discovery in politics and culture, and Americans' efforts to describe and assign value to the natural environment as the United States emerged as a nation and world power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Open only to first-year students and sophomores.