TY - JOUR
AU - Wulf,, Karin
AB - In the last several decades, early American history has been one of the most dynamic and energetic fields in professional historical scholarship. Social history, cultural history, the new political and new imperial history, Native American history, analytical perspectives on class and gender, and studies of slavery and of race have produced a vitally expansive new understanding of the period. Thanks to this brisk outpouring, the early republic and the revolutionary era look quite different than they did thirty years ago, while the colonial period is entirely remapped terrain. Colonial America is now a culturally and geographically sprawling concept demanding a nearly global context. Such changes in the field have provoked new understandings on both the macro and the local levels. The move toward a more geographically inclusive colonial era has followed two primary paths: Atlantic history, and a continental, comparative imperial approach. Clearly the Atlantic World approach has been enormously influential, measured by the number of journal articles and books (including textbooks), conferences and even graduate fields of study defined as “Atlantic” (1). Tugging our attention eastward, the Atlantic World is a way of conceptualizing the connections that developed and deepened in the early modern period among the four continents that rim the Atlantic: Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. Each incremental contribution to the traffic in people, commodities, culture and ideas, as well as plant and animal life and pathogens expanded opportunities around this vast circuit. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Sugar was a key commodity in colonial transatlantic trade. These ruins of a sugar mill and plantation owner's house, in Christiansted, Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, date from the mid-1700s, when the Danish West India and Guinea Company, a royally-chartered slave trading monopoly, administered the island. Enslaved Africans performed back-breaking labor in the cane fields. (Courtesy of Library of Congress) Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Sugar was a key commodity in colonial transatlantic trade. These ruins of a sugar mill and plantation owner's house, in Christiansted, Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, date from the mid-1700s, when the Danish West India and Guinea Company, a royally-chartered slave trading monopoly, administered the island. Enslaved Africans performed back-breaking labor in the cane fields. (Courtesy of Library of Congress) Commodities Atlantic transit itself has become an important subject of study, as scholars have explored the voyages of critical commodities such as sugar, rice, and tobacco (2). The new economic structures, labor arrangements, social interactions, and cultural understandings wrought by these commodities highlight the profound impact of the Atlantic exchange. David Hancock and Marcy Norton, for example, have looked to show how the processes of transatlantic trade developed ever sturdier pathways of suppliers and customers, altering tastes and culture in the process. Hancock has shown, using the example of Madeira wine, how a relatively small number of producers on Madeira calibrated their production to best appeal to different fashions for wine around the Atlantic. By managing ingredients, mixing, storage, and transport, Madeira's wine producers could offer wines to the differing palates of Philadelphians and Jamaicans; by circulating knowledge about wine production, vintners on this little Atlantic island helped stimulate a material culture of wine glasses and decanters. Norton, working from west to east, shows how tobacco and chocolate were essential aspects of Mesoamerican culture, were adapted and commodified by the Spanish, and became essential to their global empire (3). She also argues that the commodification of tobacco and chocolate did not entirely secularize what had been objects of sacred ritual and meaning. The kinds of commodity case studies of which Hancock's and Norton's stand as exemplars have developed alongside macro studies of the rise of consumer culture. We now know much more about how, in the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, a broad swath of North Americans became implicated in the enhanced production and consumption of all sorts of new goods. Studies place European-produced consumer goods in Native American societies deep in the continent's interior, displacing traditional economic systems in response to the availability of and adaptive reliance of these materials (4). Detailed analyses show the transition toward a more materially dense life experience, as even the poorest of households began to incorporate more clothing and furnishings (5). And among the wealthiest European colonists, lavish lifestyles came to depend on the use and display of luxuries from abroad. Fashion meant London- or Paris-based styles of household goods, dress, and comportment. All of this was reliant on the emergent power of shipping: vessels and their workforce, merchants and wholesalers, retailers and shop space, and new financial mechanisms for making it all move, including credit and insurance markets. Readers and writers also made Atlantic commodities of literary culture and political expression and practice. Decades ago, scholars including Bernard Bailyn charted the circulation of English political tracts to the colonies in North America. Those tracts flowed along the same Atlantic currents as other literary commodities: histories and natural science, both classical and contemporary, novels, magazines, and scurrility. The hacks of Grub Street and the scholars of Oxbridge wrote for London audiences, but also for readers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. As scholars including David Shields and, most recently, Sarah Knott, have shown us, colonial elites and middling folk attended to intellectual modes and cultural tenor as carefully as they did to other fashions (6). They bought books and read magazines and imitated those forms of expression in their manuscript writing and in tea table conversation. The rise of belle letters and of sensibility, as mechanisms and styles of communicating, was as important as the rising interest in the political philosophies loosely associated with John Locke. Slavery and the Atlantic World The history of Atlantic slavery, the most consequential of Atlantic commodities, is both a matter of macro-perspective and human scale. The extraordinary efforts of the team led by David Eltis at Emory to create the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (<http://www.slavevoyages.org>) allow scholars and teachers to view the trade as a global phenomenon, to see whole communities of trade and exploitation, documented individual voyages representing 4/5ths of the entire trade, and even details including names, ages, and place of embarkation for over 67,000 of the twelve and a half million Africans who were enslaved and transported. The sheer enormity of the slave trade is communicated powerfully through the database itself, and interpreted through the scholarship of Eltis, David Richardson, and others who contributed to the project. Stephanie Smallwood's Saltwater Slavery takes a different approach, emphasizing the intimate cruelty and suffering of people wrenched violently from home. Recounting in detail the experiences of captivity, transportation, and sale, she places African people, not the economics of the slave trade, at the center of Atlantic slavery (7). Each approach, from the ground and from the sky, has contributed to a fully Atlantic appreciation of slavery. Colonial North America, a relatively modest participant in the slave trade but a place profoundly changed by and imbued with the ethos of the enslavement of African people, looks distinctive by comparison with Brazil and the Caribbean, both places numerically far more important to the slave trade, but also places where the law and culture of race developed very differently. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (<http://www.slavevoyages.org>) provides researchers with the names, ages, and places of embarkation for more than 67,000 of the over twelve million Africans who were enslaved and sent on the “middle passage” to the New World. Throughout the colonial era, Spanish, French, and British slave ships arrived at the port of New Orleans, where slaves were sold to the highest bidder. This early twentieth century photo shows an antebellum slave auction block on the front steps of the city's Saint Louis Hotel. (Courtesy of Library of Congress) Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (<http://www.slavevoyages.org>) provides researchers with the names, ages, and places of embarkation for more than 67,000 of the over twelve million Africans who were enslaved and sent on the “middle passage” to the New World. Throughout the colonial era, Spanish, French, and British slave ships arrived at the port of New Orleans, where slaves were sold to the highest bidder. This early twentieth century photo shows an antebellum slave auction block on the front steps of the city's Saint Louis Hotel. (Courtesy of Library of Congress) Atlantic-oriented studies help us to see in new and different ways, how people, things, and ideas circulated, and to appreciate the development, reach, and implications of that circulation. We understand colonized places in North America not as isolated outposts, but as intimately connected to the material goods, cultural and intellectual worlds, and imperial ambitions of other places around the Atlantic. A Continental Perspective As much as Atlantic history has expanded vistas, it has been sharply criticized for its limits. Even its most prominent practitioners have called for more attention to the southern hemisphere, to Africa, and to social histories. The English Atlantic has thus far dominated Atlantic history scholarship, as have studies of traditional subjects such as economy, politics, and empire. In this issue, Hodson and Rushforth point to the importance of the French Atlantic, and more scholarly attention has been paid to the Iberian Atlantic as well. As colonial American history has so often focused on the English eastern seaboard, now Atlantic history—even the Atlantic history not explicitly focused on the English—has moved the field even further east. While a continental perspective is on the march, it has been a long time coming. A reorientation of studies in British America, from New England toward the mid-Atlantic, was an important feature of the 1970s and 1980s—but those movements still kept attention on the eastern seaboard (8). In 1994 James Hijiya asked “Why the West is Lost,” reviewing the long history of attempts to incorporate the west into national narratives, and surveying the state of American History textbooks and syllabi. He observed that “Restoring the West and its peoples to American history won’t be quick or easy—paradigm shifts rarely are” (9). Fifteen years later, Claudio Saunt noted that as early as the mid-eighteenth century, “the continent” implied only the English possessions in North America. Scholarly work on territories to the west of the Appalachian mountains was clearly still in the minority (10). This pattern was more severe in earlier years, but since 1995, articles focused on the eastern seaboard still predominated in the William and Mary Quarterly. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Historian Claudio Saunt's map depicts geographic regions in proportion to the number of articles devoted to exploring these areas published from 1995 to 2008 in the William and Mary Quarterly. While the traditional bias in favor of the eastern seaboard persists, the map shows a sharp increase, compared to earlier years, in the percentage of North Atlantic– and African Atlantic–focused essays. (Courtesy of the William and Mary Quarterly) Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Historian Claudio Saunt's map depicts geographic regions in proportion to the number of articles devoted to exploring these areas published from 1995 to 2008 in the William and Mary Quarterly. While the traditional bias in favor of the eastern seaboard persists, the map shows a sharp increase, compared to earlier years, in the percentage of North Atlantic– and African Atlantic–focused essays. (Courtesy of the William and Mary Quarterly) A full court press from the early American field, and the globalizing, transnational trend in U.S. historical scholarship, though, may be helping to speed a change. As Thomas Bender and others calling for a globalized American history have noted, a more effective and powerfully informative history of the United States requires an accounting of American developments in the context of other cultures, peoples, and nations (11). For historians of colonial America, the continental vantage brings with it not only an opportunity for fuller, comparative imperial histories, and the fuller inclusion of Native Americans, but also for the incorporation of subjects that do not or perhaps should not be framed strictly by empire. This suggests the significance of not simply acknowledging that European nations other than England laid claim to North America in early modern era, or that the continent was already richly peopled with diverse Native American groups, but of seeing all of these occupants of the continent in contexts they mutually created. This is more than comparative history; it is holistic history. For those of us who struggle to teach the first half of the American history survey, a continental approach, too, offers some much-needed coherence. As Hilija, Saunt and others have observed, too often a narrative of United States and political history keeps us awkwardly tethered to the east. Rather than dipping into the Spanish colonies briefly with Cortés's arrival in Mexico, and returning to Texas with its annexation, or discovering the Pacific northwest only as fellow travelers with Lewis and Clark, our subject could remain the same from the beginnings of European colonization through the expansion of the United States. Critics have noted that here, too, the teleologies of the old colonial American history can lead toward privileging the continental territories of the future United States, but deeper comparative work across Spanish and French colonial America as well as in Native America may defend against that impulse (12). Continentally-inspired scholarship might include work firmly anchored on the west coast, such as Steven Hackel's study of the Native Americans in Alta California missions, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis (2005). John Elliott's and David Weber's masterful studies of the Spanish empire and the Spanish borderlands respectively illuminate the complex stories of natives and newcomers and their struggles. Paul Mapp's study of geographic ignorance in the multi-imperial quest for North American territorial dominance points out the global implications of the ways that England, France, and Spain imagined, and mis-imagined, the continent (13). Daniel Richter's Facing East From Indian Country (2001) asks us, like Juliana Barr's essay in this issue, to consider the problem of orientation. If a study is constructed or a course begins with a European toehold on the east coast, we miss entirely the vantage of the Spanish making landfall in Central America, or the vantage of the Native Americans who, from the continent's interior, were watching, waiting, and acting on imperial infiltration (14). Native American History Native American history has reshaped the early American field in any number of ways; one is through geographic re-orientation, although this has involved more than merely moving historical investigations into new space. Questions about where, how, on what grounds and to what ends Indians and colonists encountered one another produced new perspectives on authority, power, and the mechanisms of imperialism. In The Middle Ground (1991), Richard White posited the significance of the pays d’en haut, the vast “up country” of the Canadian interior, as an exceptional space where neither native people nor Europeans held the upper hand. Through self-consciously misconstruing the intent or interests of the other parties, a “process of expedient and creative misunderstanding,” Indians and colonists worked out, through trade and diplomacy, a “rough balance of power” in the upper Great Lakes and Ohio Valley (15). Other studies of Native Americans in the middle west, Daniel Usner's Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: the Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (1992) and Kathleen Duval's The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (2006), find similar complexity in places where imperial power was attenuated. Negotiated authority and a premium on trade created, if not a middle ground on White's model, a range of possibilities for natives and Europeans in search of mutually beneficial relations. These studies look different from the path-breaking scholarship of, for example, James Merrell on Indians in the Virginia-Carolina piedmont and in the Pennsylvania backcountry. Merrell's studies, The Indians New World (1991) and Into the American Woods (1999), both Bancroft Prize winners, described places where European power was much more direct and immediate. From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, the survivors of Virginia tribes decimated by disease and warfare straggled south to join other groups such as the Catawba of South Carolina. Their story depicts the brutal effects of colonization on native people, both the immediate impact of depopulation but also the longer-term consequences of disorientation and dislocation. The loss of crucial elements of a society, medicine men and the knowledge they possessed, or warriors and the lineages of leadership, or imbalanced sex ratios all crippled many groups’ ability to survive independently and brought them to seek unity as the Catawba. The Catawba's relegation to a reservation in 1763 was hardly the end of their story, or their troubles, but it did decisively change their relationship to the colonial (and subsequent state) government. The Catawba supported the revolutionaries during the war against England; by the mid-nineteenth century they had sold all but a single square mile of the reservation. The Catawba story Merrell tells is of geographic dispersal followed by consolidation. In his next book, he looks at familiar territory, Pennsylvania, but in such depth that the dark woods are revealed in fresh and painful detail. Merrell looked to the go-betweens who attempted to negotiate trade and politics among the colonists, their government, and Native Americans. The creative misunderstandings that White found greased the mechanisms of cooperation in Pennsylvania acted more like gravel in the gears. Negotiators could elide differences of political and economic interest for the sake of maintaining a fragile peace between colonists and Indians, but in increasingly tense circumstances, elision became evasion became distortion. For decades, go-betweens were able to move back and forth across cultural divisions, but those divisions became so dangerous in the wake of imperial warfare that there was no traversing them. Was it impossible for peoples of different backgrounds, cultures, and perhaps most importantly with strongly divergent interests, to live in peace and mutuality? If the religious and ethnic diversity of early Pennsylvania was once associated, however tenuously, with William Penn's vision of peaceful coexistence, Merrell's depiction of the dark American woods, along with Jane Merritt's At the Crossroads (2003) and Peter Silver's Our Savage Neighbors (2007) have put that vision to permanent rest (16). Their work has shown the increasing tension and violence that become inherent in interactions across cultures. Rather than increasing tolerance, as neighbors came up against the conflicting values and interests of neighbors, they came to anticipate and accept violent clashes. It was not only conflicts internal to Pennsylvania of course, but the larger territorial competitions and wars among European empires that increased the stakes and intensified every encounter between colonist and Indian, backcountry settler and Philadelphia politician, Presbyterian and Quaker. Historians of other colonial American regions are also asking questions about the inherent violence of colonialism. Old caricatures of British colonial America as a softer form of colonialism, where the destruction of the native population was a byproduct of European settlement via disease, must now be set aside (17). Some have wondered whether the postcolonial histories of Africa and Asia can offer any perspective on the history of colonial America. Were the circumstances of post-independence British America too different, for reasons ranging from the large European settler population to the destruction of the native people to the settler-led nature of the independence movement itself, for postcolonial theories and scholarly studies developed in very different contexts to be useful? One answer is yes, that postcolonial work can help elaborate the nature of imperial power and its operation in North America by the British, French, Spanish and others Europeans. And as histories of subaltern peoples in colonial Africa or India have suggested the reach but also the limits of imperial cultural and social power, histories of Native Americans and enslaved people in North America can offer the same (18). Local and Regional Studies Newly expansive approaches to the colonial era such as the Atlantic World approach have influenced not only the rise of macro-view studies, but also stretched the boundaries of localized topics. Local and regional studies of the English colonies were big business in the 1970s and 1980s. Social histories and community studies showed us in terrific detail how the lives of servants, families, and neighborhoods developed in the Chesapeake and New England, and introduced us to the diversity of the mid-Atlantic. In the 1990s and beyond, cultural histories deepened our appreciation for subjectivity: the identities that emerged, and were claimed by and assigned to different peoples in different moments, and the particularity of that process in the most local circumstances. Those localities are now being set in broader context. April Hatfield's Atlantic Virginia (2003), for example, takes advantage of the extensive secondary literature on the early Chesapeake and her own deep archival work to position that region within the developing trade and imperial networks of the Anglo-Atlantic (19). James Horn's essay in this issue is deeply grounded in the advancing scholarship on the interconnections of the English empire, even in its nascent form. Local and regional topics that have long entranced historians and popular audiences have taken new shape in the wake of the development toward broader geographical frameworks. Witchcraft, for example, the subject of the OAH Magazine of History for July 2003, seems perennially ripe for new interpretation. After the social histories of the 1970s, cultural and gender histories in the 1980s offered important new ways to think about the outbreak of witchcraft in Salem. Most recently, Mary Beth Norton argued that the broader context of Anglo-Indian warfare in northern New England should be accounted as a crucial factor in the events that unfolded in Salem; frontier violence and fears of Indian attacks came to haunt New Englanders in ways they associated with witchcraft. Alison Games has written a new book for classroom use that draws together a much broader array of comparative witchcraft beliefs and practices across North America (20). Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide The Salem witchcraft trials, explored in the July 2003 issue of the OAH Magazine of History, have long entranced both historians and the general public. New directions in colonial history have also influenced historians’ interpretations of this subject of local and regional history. A recent work by Mary Beth Norton places witchcraft fears in the context of ongoing Anglo-Indian warfare in colonial New England. (Courtesy of the OAH Magazine of History) Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide The Salem witchcraft trials, explored in the July 2003 issue of the OAH Magazine of History, have long entranced both historians and the general public. New directions in colonial history have also influenced historians’ interpretations of this subject of local and regional history. A recent work by Mary Beth Norton places witchcraft fears in the context of ongoing Anglo-Indian warfare in colonial New England. (Courtesy of the OAH Magazine of History) Studies of local polities, too, have reached to show the broad contexts and trans-imperial implications of political, constitutional, and legal developments. Studies of New York by Simon Middleton and Daniel Hulsebosch explore the transition from Dutch to English colonial rule and the transformation of English law in America. Middleton's book, From Privilege to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (2006), focuses on the city's artisans and their changing conception of political inclusion. The early influence of the Dutch inflected the ways that these men articulated their civic position of work-based privilege before an anglicized law and politics emerged to emphasize equality of rights. Daniel Hulsebosch's study of constitutionalism in the eighteenth century centers on the ways that New Yorkers both embraced the essence of the English constitution and also emphasized its ambivalence in order to root their revolutionary opposition in terms of loyalty to English legal principles (21). The transatlantic flow of ideas was important in both eras traced by Middleton and Hulsebosch, but was also the case that those ideas sprung from the determining influence of empire and the commercial (in New York's case) character it fostered. In other words, law and constitution were never abstracted from the context they served, and that context was decidedly an imperial one. Family, Race, and Sexuality Analyses of the most local site, the family and household, also reflect broader Atlantic, continental, and comparative contexts and a keen appreciation for the significance of colonization as a context and as an intentional process (22). Sarah Pearsall's Atlantic Families (2009) analyzes the connection English and American families maintained across Atlantic distances through their correspondence. Other studies of gender and family suggest how deeply race matters in the colonial context. Some of the most sensitive work on race observes the powerful regulation of intimacy—of sexuality, marriage, and legitimate birth. Kathleen Brown's prize-winning, oft-excerpted and oft-cited Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs details how Virginia laws increasingly regulated contact between whites and blacks and paid ever closer attention to prohibiting sexual relationships between white women and black men, while enslaving children born by black women from relationships with white men. Colonial adaptations of English law accommodated the interests of slave-owners, privileging in all respects white masculinity. At the same time, cultural constructions of elite white femininity owed much to English mores—again, adapted to an environment in which maintaining racial hierarchy was paramount. That same process was in evidence across the colonies, as Jennifer Spear has demonstrated for New Orleans, and others have traced in New England and in the south (23). These studies suggest, as scholars including Ann Laura Stoler have argued, the critical importance of such intimate regulation for the making and maintenance of empire (24). Looking to the continental interior, we find no less energetic attention to who was marrying, and having sex with, whom. The question of how Native Americans and Europeans might forge intimate alliances engaged English, French, and Spanish religious and secular authorities. In New England, officials expected Native American gender roles—and specifically marriage—to conform to European practices in terms of monogamy, support, and inheritance. In New France, marriages between fur traders and native women clearly advantaged the traders by offering them access to kin networks of trapping expertise and provisioning. However, French authorities began to fret about the implications of such cross cultural marriages (métissage). Some French missionaries argued that any marriage was better than no marriage, and that métissage was to be supported on those grounds. For native women, the calculation could be much more complex. As go-betweens, negotiating on behalf of their own families and across cultures, they were uniquely and challengingly positioned (25). Conclusion Scholarship on colonial America now emphasizes a more expansive American and Atlantic geography, and advances a more intensive focus on processes of colonization and the formation of empire. These developments are clearly twinned, as a heightened appreciation for the connectedness of developments in metropoles and peripheries has also pointed up the mutability of those locations. Colonial peripheries could be central sites for the ground operations of empire. Taking the bird's eye view, we can see a much broader map; taking the worm's perspective, on the ground things are looking different, too. 1 " Readers may find helpful the OAH Magazine of History 18 (April 2004) focused on The Atlantic World, guest edited by Alison Games, especially Games's Introductory essay, “Introduction, Definitions, and Historiography: What is Atlantic History?” See also Paul W. Mapp and Brett Rushforth, eds., Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (New York: Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2008). 2 " Among influential early modern commodity studies stressing the connection of Europe, Africa and the Americas, see especially Sindey Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). 3 " On the circuit of biological exchange, the classic study is Alfred Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (April 1976): 289–99. David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). 4 " Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 5 " For discussions of consumption patterns and their implications, see Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760–1820,” William and Mary Quarterly, 62 (October 2005): 577–624; and Lorena Walsh, “Urban Amenities and Rural Sufficiency: Living Standards and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1643–1777,” Journal of Economic History 43 (March 1983): 109–17. 6 " David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Patricia Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 7 " David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Slave Trade (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010); Eltis and Richardson, eds. Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (Yale UP, 2008); Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). See also John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 8 " For a key example of the growing emphasis on the Chesapeake, as opposed to New England, as a model of future American growth, see Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 9 " James A. Hijiya, “Why the West is Lost,” William and Mary Quarterly 51(April 1994): 292. 10 " Claudio Saunt, “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography” William and Mary Quarterly 65 (October 2008): 745–78. 11 " Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 12 " See the discussion of Allan Greer's concerns about the relationship of New France both to United States and Canadian histories in Hinderaker and Rebecca Horn, “Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (July 2010): 399–401. 13 " Allan Greer, “Comparisons: New France,” in A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 469–88, discusses the competing nationalisms which have shaped the study of New France for the last century and more. On connecting the continent and the Atlantic, see Paul Mapp, “Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (October 2006): 713–24. 14 " Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country. 15 " Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); White, “Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (January 2006): 9–10. 16 " Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Colonists on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2007). 17 " For other considerations of violence in early America, see Rachel Hope Cleves, “On Writing the History of Violence,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Winter 2004): 641–65. 18 " See the contributions to the roundtable on colonial and postcolonial history in the William and Mary Quarterly 64 (April 2007): 235–97, especially Greene, “Colonial History and National History” and Michael Zuckerman, “Exceptionalism After All: Or, the Perils of Postcolonialism.” 19 " April Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). See also the essays in Peter Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 20 " The outstanding social history of Salem is Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), and see also the forum, “Salem Repossessed,” William and Mary Quarterly 65 (July 2008): 391–534. For examples of the cultural and gender histories of New England witchcraft, see especially Carol Karlsen The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1987) and Richard Godbeer The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Knopf, 2002); Alison Games, Witchcraft in Early North America (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). 21 " Simon Middleton, From Privileges to Rights:Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Mary Sarah Bilder emphasized the transatlantic debates that shaped the relationship of colonial law to the English constitution and the eventual emergence of an American constitutionalism built on understandings from the colonial-imperial relationship. Her work is in some ways a prelude and important background for Hulsebosch. Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 22 " See the cluster of essays by Bianca Premo, Julie Hardwick, and Karin Wulf in History Compass 8 (March 2010): 223–57, on “Rethinking Gender, Family, and Sexuality in the Early Modern Atlantic World” from the perspective of Latin America, early modern Europe, and early North America. 23 " Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenche, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex and Social Order in Early New Orleans (JHU Press, 2008); John Pagan, Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Gary Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America” and Peter Bardaglio, “’Shamefull Matches’: The Regulation of Interracial Marriage in the South Before 1900,” in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 24 " Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (University of California Press, 2002). 25 " Kathleen Duval, “Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana,” William and Mary Quarterly 65 (April 2008): 268–304; Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - No Boundaries?: New Terrain in Colonial American History
JF - OAH Magazine of History
DO - 10.1093/oahmag/oaq008
DA - 2011-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/no-boundaries-new-terrain-in-colonial-american-history-PygZXsZHH3
SP - 7
VL - 25
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -