How to Teach an AHR Article

Rebecca Earle offers a lesson plan for teaching her own 2010 AHR article "'If You Eat Their Food …': Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America," which is among the journal's all-time most downloaded articles.Her module helps students use the history of food to address larger questions about the nature of early modern European colonialism and how an ordinary food like the potato came to shape and represent the modern world.Earle reflects on how she decided to write the article and the nature of her own research methodology into the history of food.She also provides a selection of primary documents from the fifteen through seventeenth centuries-among them a letter from Christopher Columbus, an image by an Indigenous artist, and an English manual on health improvement-along with a set of guiding questions that allow students to undertake a deep dive into the significance of food for early modern colonists in Spanish America and their understandings of bodily health.