Historians of early America often talk about age, especially when measuring an individual’s maturity or defining a demographic group. But what does chronological age refer to in an environment where many people did not know their birth dates? When early Americans recorded age, was this an objective measure of years since birth, an individual’s self-understanding, or a status imposed by a public official? The answer to these questions can tell us much about how people employ abstract social categories—not just chronological age, but also race, gender, and nationality—to determine who has access to particular rights and opportunities as well as who does not.

At the time of the American Revolution, many Americans did not know their birthdays. They left school, started work, and got married at widely varying ages. Death struck young and old alike. The pious measured their days not by secular time but by progress toward eternal salvation. Chronological age, in short, had little significance in people’s daily lives. The law, however, demanded precise knowledge of age. From the beginning of European settlement, people had to meet age qualifications to testify in court, be held liable for a crime, sign a contract, will property, marry, and, if white and male, pay a poll tax, serve in the military, vote, and run for political office. Laws and regulations spoke in terms of precise ages—sixteen years to pay a poll tax, twenty-one years to vote, forty-five years to end militia service, for example. But what did those numbers mean in a culture where many people did not know their birthdays? What exactly were public officials measuring when they demanded proof of age?

Evidence from court cases, diaries, letters, and family records suggest that many people in early America did know their exact date of birth. These individuals often owned a family register they could use to prove age, thus turning age itself into a kind of property owned by some but unavailable to others. Those without a recorded birthday could sometimes offer an approximation based on family stories that associated their birth with a memorable event. Still others had no knowledge at all of when they were born. In these latter two cases, officials charged with administering age qualifications had to determine chronological age based on shared knowledge of historical events or physical signs of maturity. For these people, documents stating age record a negotiation between citizens and the state: individuals offered personal testimony and public officials imposed a precise age. These official assessments appear as chronological age in written records, but in fact have little to do with age in the modern sense of stating an exact birth date. Nor do they reflect people’s use of age as a measure of self-understanding. For some, age was a form of property secured by ownership of a family record. For others, it was a negotiation with the state. In either case, age functioned as a boundary to citizenship with which citizens had to contend.

Most people in early America recognized chronological age as an arbitrary boundary to citizenship rights. As John Adams mused in May 1776, “What Reason Should there be, for excluding a Man of Twenty years, Eleven Months and twenty-seven days old, from a Vote when you admit one, who is twenty one?” The reason was obvious to most people—age qualifications were necessary because young children lacked the capacity to exercise rights and perform duties. Believing that age restrictions were necessary, the nation’s founders retained age qualifications inherited from English common law and embedded new ones in American law. What they did not do was create a reliable system for registering births and documenting age. In the colonial period, some legislatures required ministers or town clerks to register births, recognizing that these records were essential for probate cases, but compliance and enforcement remained spotty at best. Massachusetts led the way over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in creating the first modern bureaucracy for recording vital statistics. By steadily raising fines on town clerks who failed to report births and deaths, and increasing fees paid to those who did, Massachusetts developed the most reliable birth registry in the new nation. Even there, however, infants born in rural areas and large cities often escaped the notice of any public official.

The most common technology for recording birth dates in early America was a private one: notations in the family Bible. This tradition, imported from England, was quite widespread because courts accepted birth records in family Bibles as evidence for probate. Historians Shane Landrum and Susan Pearson have found that some families with even small amounts of property kept such records, but many transient and impoverished people did not. As a result, having a family record was a mark of class privilege. The ability to document and prove age, like many other markers of identity such as whiteness or citizenship, was a sort of property, accrued by some, denied to others. Those able to purchase and maintain a private, family register could easily meet age qualifications in law. The poor, the transient, and the illiterate could not.

Indeed, by the early nineteenth century, publishers marketed increasingly ornate and costly Bibles and family records. As historians Georgia Brady Barnhill, Peter Benes, and François Weil have documented, many families aspiring to respectable, middle-class standing displayed illustrated genealogies in their homes. Girls attending female academies learned to paint or stitch handmade family records that could be displayed as markers of family unity and refinement. Engravers marketed family records illustrated with Republican and Christian symbols. Engraver Pater Maverick, for example, presented the allegorical figures of Charity with an infant and cornucopia, Hope holding an anchor and pointing to heaven, and a bird feeding its young beneath the sun’s rays. Most of these surviving records show evidence of having been framed for display. By the 1830s, lithographers such as Nathaniel Currier and James Baillie pictured idealized bourgeois families celebrating births, consummating marriages, and mourning deaths. These ostentatious prints, paintings, and embroideries increasingly linked family record keeping with financial success.

In a further display of prosperity, some families began celebrating children’s birthdays. In 1803, a Boston printer marketed the first American edition of British author Elizabeth Somerville’s small volume, A Birth Day Present, or, a New Year’s Gift . . . For the Use of Young Persons, from Ten to Fifteen Years of Age. At a time when children’s birthday celebrations were still a novelty, this book offered a sort of how-to guide for organizing an event that would balance “a little entertainment of cakes and fruit” with moral lessons on self improvement. By the 1830s, giving books to children on their birthdays was a common practice recorded in loving inscriptions such as “To my dear daughter Lucy Bacon, a birthday present for her sixth birthday.” Receiving birthday presents underlined age itself as a form of property to be treasured. For privileged children such as Lucy, counting birthdays became central to their self-understanding as American citizens. The historian Jon Grinspan found that many white, middle-class youth in antebellum America used their diaries and letters to track their yearly progress toward age twenty-one when they would become adults and, if white and male, cast their first vote.

Beyond age twenty-one, however, most people did not celebrate their birthdays, as historian Howard Chudacoff has found. The main exception was family gatherings when an elder relative reached the biblical milestone of three score and ten. A person living to 100 might receive a special sermon in church and notice in the local paper. Most middle-aged adults, however, did not celebrate their birthdays until late in the nineteenth century when manufacturers of commercial greeting cards began to promote the practice. Many did, however, quietly remark upon the date in diaries or letters. These people, generally from educated, propertied families, displayed a high degree of age consciousness. This did not mean, however, that they could reliably produce written proof of age.

Children’s birthday parties and ornate Bibles were effective displays of bourgeois respectability, but they were not reliable means of documenting age. Fires, floods, and carelessness could easily destroy family records along with other forms of property. Young adults who moved West might leave their birth records with parents many states away. As a result, even literate and propertied Americans often found themselves in middle or old age without any proof of their birthdays. To guard against such loss, some families purchased Bibles for each of their children, filling the family record pages and leaving space for the next generation. The American Tract Society, founded in 1825, released relatively inexpensive Bibles with printed family record pages. These mass-produced registers enabled more family members to retain copies, but private registers always remained vulnerable to loss. While it is impossible to quantify what percentage of American families maintained a Bible record or other private registry of births, enough of these documents survive that we can safely assume that many—though by no means all—propertied Americans from stable families possessed some written record of their age by the 1830s.

Detailed birth records also existed for those who were themselves property. Slave owners diligently wrote down the births and deaths of enslaved people because age was an important factor in establishing the monetary value of chattel property. Some slave owners employed Bibles for this purpose, as when Floyd County, Virginia, resident Gabe Wells recorded “Births of my Black Folks” in one section of a family record and his white relatives in another. Mary Ragland Stamps Rice, plantation mistress of The Oaks in Charlotte County, Virginia, used a recipe book to record the ages of enslaved people. She wrote precise birth years for most, but also noted when age was an approximation: “Old Sam about 68 . . . John aged 14 when purchased.” The last entry hints at the uncertainty of age in a market where slave traders had incentives to lie about chronological age in order to inflate prices. As historians Marie Jenkins Schwartz and Wilma King have documented, slaves received the highest valuations in their late teens and twenties. If John was a large child, a slave trader may have passed him off as older than he was. The ages recorded in plantation account books thus reflect the self-interest of those who sold and owned slaves, not the self-understanding of enslaved people themselves.

Indeed, slave owners generally kept the capacity to record age—both written records and literacy skills—from enslaved people. When representatives of the Works Progress Administration interviewed former slaves in the 1930s, many reported that they did not know their date of birth. Fugitive slave Frederick Douglass first raised this issue in his 1845 Narrative, asserting that slave owners desired slaves should “know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs.” Douglass explained that preventing this self-knowledge was part of a larger effort to dehumanize enslaved people. As a free man, Douglass chose February 14 as his birthday because his mother had called him her “valentine.” In 1888, when he was old and famous, admirers organized a gala celebration for his seventy-first birthday. He reminded them that, properly speaking, he “never had a birthday . . . Birthdays belong to free institutions.” With deep insight, Douglass pointed out that chronological age in nineteenth-century America functioned primarily as a measure of citizenship status, a qualification possessed by some but denied to others. By inventing a birthday, Douglass solidified his identity as a free man but learned nothing of his own birth.

In contrast to Douglass, some fugitive slaves knew their date of birth. Harriet Jacobs, for example, had access to literacy and a close-knit family, both of which facilitated knowledge of her age. She organized her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl around particular birthdays. After the Civil War, freed people dedicated themselves to reuniting family members and, as part of that effort, began to keep their own records of births and deaths. Printers capitalized on this new market by releasing family records with illustrations of black families. Like Douglass, the families who purchased these records laid claim to birth dates as a mark of freedom.

In sum, births were most likely to be written down if they occurred in families with property or in those owned as property. What of the large population of poor and working-class people in between? Historian James Schmidt has demonstrated that well into the early twentieth century, many poor, working-class, and rural Americans of all races and ethnicities did not know or could not prove how old they were. How then did people meet the numerous age qualifications they faced in law? Records of military service, marriages, and elections offer evidence that for people without birth records, chronological age was not so much a knowable fact as it was a matter of negotiation with authority. People testified to their ages, but public officials also assessed their appearance to determine if the testimony seemed credible. Those with no written proof of age remained particularly vulnerable to having an age assigned to them by someone else.

For those who did not own a record of their age, negotiating age with the state became an established tradition during the colonial period. Tax assessors, militia captains, court officials, and ministers marrying young couples, among other public officials, all had to determine a person’s age in order to carry out their responsibilities. In cases where a person did not know or could not prove age, public officials balanced personal testimony with their own judgment. In her carefully researched study of boy soldiers during the American Revolution, Caroline Cox documented that recruiters directed to enlist boys over sixteen often accepted “stout” lads of fourteen or fifteen. Size and capacity mattered more than proof of age. With regards to child marriage, Nicholas Syrett found that young people often traveled to counties where nobody knew them and successfully convinced a minister they were of age. Once a marriage was consummated, courts rarely invalidated the bond even if a parent or guardian produced proof that a child was underage. As part of his study of elections in early America, political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel demonstrated that young men provided sworn testimony as to their age but could be challenged by election officials and bystanders. In contested cases with no written proof of age, judges sought witnesses who could name well-known events that occurred around the time of a person’s birth. Officials also looked to physical evidence of maturity, most often the growth or lack of a beard. Based on scattered evidence, Bensel estimated that overall roughly ten percent of voters did not know their own age, though in some areas such as rural Kentucky far more lacked this knowledge.

What these histories reveal is that state and federal governments created age qualifications for citizenship long before all citizens knew or could prove their ages. As a result, public officials developed elaborate mechanisms for investigating and, if necessary, inventing ages. Individuals offered their own testimony, but the ultimate power to determine age remained with officials administering the rights and obligations of citizenship. As with gender, race, and other categories of citizenship, age was subject to visible scrutiny by the state. Personal claims could be either validated or delegitimated by those in power.

The administration of Revolutionary War pensions offers a particularly vivid illustration of how public officials scrambled to determine age before any standardized identity documents existed. In 1832, Congress granted pensions to all surviving veterans without regard to need or disability. The Pension Bureau in Washington directed local courts to process applications, printing a standard form with questions to be answered under oath by the applicant and two character witnesses. As part of a general effort to combat fraud, the pension bureau showed a remarkable interest in both determining applicants’ ages and whether or not they had written proof of age. Directing court officials that “the age of the claimant must invariably be mentioned,” the Bureau demanded that court officials ask “Where and in what year were you born?” and “Have you any record of your age? and, if so, where is it?” This curiosity about written records is remarkable, for it appears as an effort to test whether or not age claims could be documented and if so, how. The results showed that many people could state an age but had no written documentation to prove it.

Payment of a pension was based on service, not age, but these records nonetheless reveal in remarkable detail how people tracked their own ages in early America. Historian Caroline Cox productively used these records to document the youth of boy soldiers, but pension records open a much broader window on understandings of age. A statistical sampling of these records could reveal the extent of age consciousness for a large sample of older men in the 1830s. What interests me here is not quantification, but the ways in which individuals testified to their age and how they knew it. Interestingly, many admitted that they only knew what family members had told them. For example, Abraham Aarons, applying in Adair County, Kentucky, told the court that he was “born in Lancaster County state of Pennsylvania on the 17^th of March 1759 agreeable to the information of his parents which he believes to be true and correct[,] he never having heard speak of any other.” Other individuals came from towns in New England that had kept some record of births and pointed to this official document as proof of age. For example, Nathan Abbot told the Middlesex County Court he “supposes that his birth is recorded in the Town Records” of Andover.

People who knew the month and year of their birth often claimed to have gained that knowledge from the record in a family Bible, though in many cases the Bible itself had been lost. Thus, Paul Findley, testifying in Abbeville, South Carolina, reported that he was born in January 1762 and “has no doubt relative to it from the fact of his having seen the record of his age in his father’s family Bible at the age of sixteen or seventeen years, which Bible is now lost or otherwise destroyed.” His older brother, John Finley, also a veteran, provided a more detailed account of how the Bible had been lost. He told the same court that “he has not the original record of his age, that it was burned by the Tories during the Revolutionary War.” Also testifying in Abbeville, David Pressly reported that “he was born in the city of Glasgow in Scotland on the 13^th of January one thousand seven hundred sixty four and brought from there to America when he was an infant in the nurse’s arms.” Pressly clarified that “the record of his age was in a Bible belonging to his cousin David Pressly who is dead.” He did not know what had become of the Bible.

Anticipating that many veterans would have no written proof of age, the Pension Bureau designed a specific process through which those with public authority could certify the applicant’s claim as credible. Directions specified that the applicant supply “two respectable persons—one of whom should be the nearest clergyman, if one lives in the immediate vicinity of such applicant, who can testify, from their acquaintance with him, that they believe he is of the age he represents, and that he is reputed and believed in the neighborhood to have been a Revolutionary soldier.” The pre-printed form provided for this purpose read, “we believe him to be [blank] years of age.” The witnesses thus had to specify a chronological age. They could not simply say he was old, though some qualified their answer by saying they believed the applicant to be “about” his stated age. The clerk of the court also had to certify the applicant’s age. Three people thus had the authority to accept or reject a veteran’s personal testimony as to his age.

Relying on witnesses and court officials ensured that an applicant appeared to be roughly the age he claimed, but could not wipe out all fraud. What it did accomplish was to create a process for categorizing citizens by age before the development of birth registration. This system enabled people to testify as to their own self-understanding of age, but also empowered “respectable persons,” particularly clergy and court officials, to accept or reject that testimony and, if needed, assign a credible age to someone who did not provide one. In processing claims, the Pension Bureau generally accepted whatever age had been entered by the district court. These documents thus reveal in detail how age was a negotiation, a balancing of personal testimony with public authority.

Today, we assume that most Americans have a birth certificate stating their true age. We recognize that people might lie about their age or even obtain a fake identification card, but we suppose that beneath these falsehoods there exists a reliable record. It is worth remembering, however, that age-based qualifications for citizenship preceded and in no way depended upon documentation of age. This should give us pause when we think about the “truth” of other identity categories such as sex, nationality, or race. Just as people lacked written proof of age in early America, they also lacked proof of race or sex. Many people assumed these categories were obvious, easy to read on people’s bodies, and essential to daily life in ways that age was not. But we know some people chose to “pass” as something they were not, while others did not fit neatly into one race or sex category. These people might find a race or sex assigned to them in much the same way that officials assigned age. Age appeared to people in early America as the most arbitrary qualification for citizenship, but that very recognition reveals the arbitrariness behind other categories as well.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Anna Mae Duane and Nicholas Syrett for their insightful comments on this essay. I am also grateful to Jaclyn Penny at the American Antiquarian Society and the staff of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia for help locating exemplary copies of early family records.

Further Reading:

Peter Benes, “Decorated New England Family Registers, 1770-1850,” In The Art of the Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England, eds. D. Brenton Simons and Peter Benes (Boston, 2002): 15-59.

Georgia Brady Barnhill, “’Keep Sacred the Memory of Your Ancestors’: Family Registers and Memorial Prints,” in The Art of the Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England, eds. D. Brenton Simons and Peter Benes (Boston, 2002): 60-74.

Richard Franklin Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York, 2004).

Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1989).

Caroline Cox, Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).

Jon Grinspan, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).

Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106:8 (June 1993): 1710-91.

Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed (1995; Bloomington, Ind., 2011)

Shane Landrum, “From Family Bibles to Birth Certificates: Young People, Proof of Age, and American Political Cultures,” in Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present, edited by Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett (New York, 2015), 124-47.

Susan J. Pearson, “‘Age Ought to Be a Fact’: The Campaign Against Child Labor and the Rise of the Birth Certificate,” Journal of American History (March 2015): 1144-65.

James D. Schmidt, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (New York, 2010).

Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

Nicholas L. Syrett, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).

François Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2013).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

Corinne Field is an assistant professor in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America and co-editor with Nicholas Syrett of Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present.

More than two centuries into our national experiment, it is still a vexing question: What is popular sovereignty? Who are “the people” and how can they exercise their sovereign will? What recourse exists for those disenfranchised by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, property, or residence restrictions? What happens when the existing government does not fulfill the people’s will? Thomas Jefferson famously championed—and most states affirmed in their constitutions—the right of the people “to alter or abolish” government that fails to meet their needs. Do, then, the people yet retain the right of revolution?

Popular insurgencies in the early republic brought these questions to the fore. In the 1840s, they brought the people of Rhode Island to blows—literally and dramatically. That episode—the Dorr Rebellion—is a centerpiece of Rhode Island history, but strangely unacknowledged outside the region. It should be. And now a Website sponsored by Providence College and Digital Publishing Services, authored principally by Erik Chaput and Russell DeSimone, makes it possible to delve deeply into this extraordinary popular insurgency and plumb its national implications for the meaning of popular sovereignty.

First, the drama. Rhode Island’s pre-Revolutionary charter restricted suffrage to property owners. When the colony was agricultural and maritime, this requirement was not onerous; more than three quarters of white males were enfranchised freemen in 1775. But over the next fifty years, Rhode Island’s urban, commercial and early industrial growth boomed, creating a large population of landless working men—the majority of whom could not vote. By the 1820s, the politically impotent began to grumble; by the 1830s they had organized to seek suffrage reforms. But they made no headway: power lay in the hands of a landed minority of conservative rural freeholders who adamantly refused change. Reformers grew increasingly frustrated. Then the insurgent populism of the 1840 Log Cabin presidential campaign suggested a new tack.

Thomas Dorr, idealistic scion of a wealthy Providence merchant, took the helm of the Rhode Island Suffrage Association with a revolutionary proposal. In cases of tyranny, he claimed, the people themselves have the authority to form government—without the consent of the existing powers. Emulating the words and methods of the founders, Dorr and his followers issued a general call for an extra-legal “People’s Convention” to draft a new state constitution and institute a new government, overturning the existing authority.

Dorr’s populist rhetoric engaged the disenfranchised. His reasoned legalism drew supporters among some professional and commercial reformers. And his anti-Whig stance appealed to Democrats, whose party leadership he then assumed. By the spring of 1841, the campaign had grown to an immense popular movement of mechanics, immigrant laborers, and middle class professionals. That autumn, town representatives met in convention. They drafted a new constitution, which was then ratified by a majority of adult white males. Dorr was elected governor, and in April 1842, he and his supporters paraded into town to seize power from the sitting “Charter” government.

But the Charterites refused to yield. They claimed that once a government was constituted, sovereignty shifted from the people to the constitution; thereafter government could be changed only by the constituted governors. What followed was three months of violence and violent repression, martial law, ugly nativism, national political machinations, and ardent debates over constitutional interpretation. Ultimately Dorr suffered a crushing defeat of his populist government, culminating in the rout and exile of its supporters. While Dorr was sentenced to life in prison, the Charter government drafted a new constitution that met most of the People’s demands.

This dramatic and somewhat bizarre episode provides rich evidence and insights. It has not gone unnoticed by historians: Marvin Gettleman’s Dorr Rebellion (1973) told a tale of class struggle and radicalism. Regional scholars Peter Coleman, Patrick Conley, and George Dennison have mined the economic, political and constitutional aspects of Rhode Island’s struggle. The most recent treatment is Chaput’s biographical The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (2013). But the episode has mostly been relegated to brief notice in regional histories, in part because sources have been difficult to access.

Those barriers have been admirably felled by The Dorr Rebellion Website. The site provides a wealth of primary source documents, images, a well-conceived documentary film, interpretive essays, lesson plans, a bibliography, and links to additional materials. The centerpiece is a selection of sixty letters to, from, or about Dorr. These are provided as scanned images, and then as searchable transcriptions with encoded terms that activate pop-ups to identify persons, places, and organizations mentioned in the letters. This use of digital editing is particularly helpful, easing the sense—so common when reading letters or diaries—that we are entering a long-running soap opera clueless to cast or plot. The pop-ups tell us who’s who, what’s what, and provide Google maps to tell us where’s where. Chaput and DeSimone have organized the letters into two collections. One set presents the People’s Constitution agenda; the second argues for more gradual change and expresses fears of majoritarian tyranny or even mob rule. Together, the letters portray growth, development, and resistance to Dorr’s popular sovereignty movement. They also reveal the passion and drama of people who dared to risk their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for the cause.

Educators will appreciate rich supporting materials. Each set of letters is prefaced by a brief but insightful essay (“The Road to Rebellion” is particularly well crafted). A section contrasting the constitutions produced by the Dorrite and Charter factions allows students to compare the documents by article and topic. A twenty-minute documentary film provides an excellent classroom introduction to the controversy. A large gallery of supplemental images allows teachers and students to view portraits, historic sites, maps, newspapers, broadsides, and political cartoons. Five lesson plans designed for high school and college level students admirably expand the Dorr episode to consider how popular sovereignty was refracted through the lenses of gender and race. The role of abolitionism, popular partisan politics, and sectional tensions in influencing national—and federal—responses to the crisis are particularly well presented, as is the interplay of other reform movements. Links to articles by scholars enrich and expand the lessons, detailing how the Dorr crisis rippled across the nation and prompted responses from Missouri to Maine, from New York Loco Focos to terrified Southern Democrats, from Equal Rights women to ardent abolitionists.

This is a rich Website and good model for using digital editing to make primary sources accessible in the classroom. There are a few minor glitches such as inactive links or encoded terms. But the beauty of the digital resource is the ease of editing. The site could be further enriched by links to contemporary assessments such as the “The Nine Lawyers’ Opinion,” (1842), William Goodell’s “The Rights and Wrongs of Rhode Island,” (1842), Francis Bowen’s “The Recent Contest in Rhode Island” (1844), Frances H. Wright’s “Might and Right” (1844), and Burke’s Report (1844). But it is hard to fault a site as rich as this for not having more.

The Dorr Rebellion digital project provides compelling evidence that Rhode Island’s drama deserves a prominent place among case studies of popular sovereignty. Far from being a parochial matter of local history, it is a complex and nuanced instance of the struggle to advance equal rights, a story of national significance—and resonance—in today’s classroom.

This article originally appeared in Fall 2014.

Mary Babson Fuhrer is a public historian and independent scholar who specializes in the social history of colonial and early republic New England. Her book, Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town 1815-1848, was recently published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Reading William Hammerton’s “Map of the Southeastern Part of North America, 1721”

“What piece excites you?”

It was my first visit to the Yale Center for British Art. The breadth and scope of the collections were so daunting that I resorted to the oldest trick in the book. I asked the curator what she found interesting. Senior Curator Elizabeth Fairman spoke with infectious energy about the materials available, and when she mentioned William Hammerton’s 1721 manuscript map of South Carolina (fig. 1), I could hardly contain my own enthusiasm. My excitement stemmed not merely from the fact that there are so few maps depicting the “Southeastern Part of North America” before the mid-eighteenth century. This map—which details the southern frontier of North America (including the area from Cape Charles in Virginia to Cape Canaveral in Florida, and from the Atlantic coast westward to the Mississippi River)—appears to be the earliest of two known copies of a famous, but lost, map drawn by Colonel John Barnwell. Barnwell, also known as “Tuscarora Jack” for his involvement in the Tuscarora War of 1711, was a redoubtable Indian fighter and frontier settler who traveled extensively throughout the region. (The other period copy of the Barnwell map is housed in the Public Record Office in London).

The Barnwell map became the base for subsequent and well-known maps, such as Mark Catesby’s 1731 “A map of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands” and John Mitchell’s 1755 “A map of the British and French dominions in North America,” which was used during border negotiations after the American Revolution (1782-1783). Though little is known of William Hammerton, who worked as a sailor and was appointed as a naval officer by Sir Francis Nicholson, South Carolina’s governor, in the summer of 1721, his manuscript map offers a virtually unexamined copy of the Barnwell map. Except for a brief mention in William P. Cumming’s The Southeast in Early Maps (1958), the Hammerton map has received little attention.

I had originally ventured into the Center for British Art in the hopes of finding some exciting and eye-catching primary sources for the freshman seminar I was teaching on “War and Rebellion in Early America.” Though Ms. Fairman pulled many items—Benjamin West engravings, maps of Sir Francis Drake’s voyages, and even a military pocket atlas used in the American Revolution—I kept returning to the Hammerton map. My current research project, an examination of the spread and acquisition of information in Southeastern North America, raises questions about how news moved (and who moved it) in the pre-printing press colonial world. Maps are a fascinating source from which to consider both how English colonists negotiated colonial spaces and how those struggles were represented. What role did trade play in connecting South Carolina to the greater Southeast? How were these economic exchanges understood and depicted? What type of information did trade offer the English? How were those far-reaching networks regulated? The Hammerton map offered some answers to these questions.

Seduced by the curator’s passion, I found myself drawn by the striking crispness of the map. Crisscrossing trails connected Charles Town all the way to the Mississippi. The Indian groups along these paths were meticulously identified. The map also included battle sites, well-known trader’s routes, geographic commentary, imperial rivalries, and discussions of possible English ventures into the interior. English Charles Town, Spanish St. Augustine, French Mobile, Indian allies and hostile nations, forts, factories, “pleasant good lands,” as well as swamps were indicated. Every marking on the map made my head swirl. I decided to put my laptop away and stare. Just stare at this magnificent 54-by-31⅛ inch map. I followed each path across the “Southeastern Part of North America.” I read each annotation. I looked at all the small details and then stepped back and stared at the map as a whole. And then I repeated the whole process. It became clear to me that I was not simply reading a map; I was reading history. Hammerton had left us a snapshot of the Southeast in 1721.

The most information-heavy portion of the map extended along the coastline, from Charles Town to St. Augustine. Every inlet was labeled. Every river identified. But the focus of the map was not the Atlantic seaboard. The west was the heart of the Hammerton map. The map pointed to the lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, which though far away from English settlements, seemed well within English control. Indian trade and slaving routes connected Charles Town to that vast territory.

With the founding of Charles Town in 1670, the English had expanded relentlessly into the Southeastern interior (fig. 2). South Carolinians re-oriented the Indian trade away from Spanish Florida and English Virginia and, in the process, developed their own extensive and profitable trade connections. The trade routes were the arteries that gave South Carolina a pulse—a pulse that moved with individual traders. The fact that the roads on the map were labeled after the specific traders who journeyed on and through them revealed the extent to which South Carolina depended on key individuals to forge these distant connections (fig. 3).

These lines drew Charles Town closer to backcountry outposts, like Fort Moore and Indian towns in western Florida, and even offered the English access to the Mississippi. But more than simply paths connecting Charles Town to the interior, from point A to point B, these routes were “courses,” “journeys,” and histories of interaction. These trails served as a testament to the region’s long history of trade. They emphasized South Carolina’s persistence as well as the importance of the Indian nations that had facilitated (and those that had blocked) English access. The map showed how these commercial networks afforded the English a wide, albeit uneven, engagement in the region. In 1721, South Carolina was looking to make its presence in the interior more consistent, more powerful, and more felt. The trade routes in the Hammerton map revealed both English desire to expand west as well as the concrete steps South Carolina had taken to make this ambition a reality.

Waiting to foil this English drive into the interior were the French. Stationed all along the map’s western edge were French forts, missions, and outposts. By the 1720s, the French had positioned themselves as South Carolina’s most serious European rival in the region; they had established Fort Toulouse (near the present-day city of Wetumpka, Alabama) in 1717 and made repeated incursions along the Mississippi River. Though the French had a presence in the region dating back to the sixteenth century, these new outposts and trading posts placed them as a permanent and tangible threat.

After studying the map, it was clear to me that the English were expending a significant amount of energy and effort to push west. However, my own research, which focuses on Anglo-Spanish rivalries in the Southeast, forced my gaze away from the French, the west, and the map’s narrative of westward expansion. I looked south to Spanish Florida. How did South Carolinians depict this old neighbor and competitor?

With so much focus on the French and on the west, I was surprised to find that the Spanish figured so prominently in the Hammerton map. Unlike the sparse details denoting the French posts and trading excursions, the section on Spanish Florida was heavily annotated. The Hammerton map offered the location and histories of selected engagements between English South Carolina and Spanish Florida. For example, the map identified several battle sites, including the Battle of Ayubale (labeled Ayavally on the map) and other unnamed towns along the Apalachicola River “where 600 Spaniards and Indians were killed and taken by the Carolinians.” These attacks were part of the violent campaigns led by South Carolina’s former governor, James Moore, in 1704-1706. The English raids had decimated Spanish Indians and missions in Apalachee (western Florida) and removed the Spanish from the area for close to two decades. While the Hammerton map proudly included these English victories, it did not mention Moore’s disastrous invasion of St. Augustine in 1702, which led to the costly and unsuccessful siege of the Spanish presidio (fig. 4).

I realized that the conflicts inscribed on the map had a predictable pattern: total English success and complete Spanish defeat. This presentation transformed the Spanish into an anemic rival, still present in the Southeast but posing no real threat. Whereas Spanish towns and missions were nothing more than a relic of past tensions, French outposts and western territories were the future. Spanish feebleness seemed to tell a history of English strength as well as explain why the English had shifted their attention from the south to the west, from a Spanish to a French rivalry. The Hammerton map made it very clear that the key to the Southeast was in the west. But in 1721, no one knew for certain what direction that key would turn.

How far South Carolina had managed to trade, where and with whom they had established commercial exchanges, and when those relationships truly blossomed all depended on Indians. The amount of detail included on Indians and Indian affairs signaled how deeply South Carolina valued this type of information. Indians appeared in every nook of the map, but their presence was neither arbitrary nor decorative. On the contrary, information concerning Indians was highly specific and strategic. I was struck by how the Hammerton map chose to represent Indian peoples within its vision of English westward expansion. Not all Indian groups received equal treatment in the map; not all Indians groups were of equal concern. But each Indian group was recognized as distinct, autonomous, and yet somehow connected to both South Carolina and to other Indian nations.

Representations of the Cherokee and Creek provide a telling example. The map described Cherokees as “numerous” and Creeks as “warlike” (fig. 5). The Cherokees and their lands were depicted as having “extensive prospect,” while the Creeks were regarded with trepidation. At the root of this juxtaposition was the Yamasee War (1715-1717), a bloody and violent conflict that had reshaped the Southeast and forced South Carolina to restructure its Indian relations. The English world turned upside down as they waged war against Yamasees and Lower Creeks, Indians who had once been South Carolina’s closest allies. During the Yamasee War, it became a matter of survival for South Carolina to secure an alliance with the Cherokees or, at the very least, to prevent this large Indian nation from joining Yamasee-Creek forces. (The Cherokees ultimately did ally with South Carolina in 1715.)

By the time the map was made, the dust from the Yamasee War had somewhat settled. The Yamasees had been expelled from South Carolina. The Creeks had once again been embraced as friends of the English. And the Cherokees had grown into formidable trading partners. The Hammerton map exposed the war’s open and still bleeding battle wounds, portraying the Creek-English friendship as riddled with mistrust and danger, marred by the experience of the Yamasee War five years before. In contrast, fear and rivalry were nowhere to be found in depictions of Cherokee-English relations. The Cherokees had aided South Carolina during one of the colony’s darkest hours. The map hinted at this budding alliance by labeling Cherokee country as “very hilly,” but “very good land” that would enable both English trade and “English factor[ies].”

As I read the map’s text, I was reminded that the evolving relations among Creeks, Cherokees, English, Spanish, and French were all happening at the same time. The Hammerton map offered a striking visual record of English interactions not just with one group, but with all the diverse inhabitants of the Southeast together. The map showed South Carolina’s strained relations with the Creeks as it depicted its growing friendship with the Cherokee. The map offered no explanation for the ways in which Creek-English interactions affected Cherokee-English relations (and vice-versa), but it did describe Creeks and Cherokees in comparable, albeit different, terms—as if providing two possible alternatives to English-Indian relations. The Hammerton map reminded me of the importance of looking at the larger context when considering specific interactions.

Yet I kept feeling that something was missing. What was it? At first I did not see it. The Hammerton map seemed to draw a fairly inclusive picture of the Southeast region and its inhabitants. It was only as I began to compile a list of the Indian groups mentioned in the map that I noticed a glaring omission: there were no Yamasees and no references to the Yamasee War. How could this be? This massive Indian war had almost wiped the English off the map. At first I thought that South Carolinians merely wanted to erase this event and forget that any Indians had challenged English authority—maps are more often representations of desires than of realities. The map, however, included references to other Indian adversaries. Both Lower Creeks, who had been major players in the Yamasee War, and Tuscaroras, who had embroiled the Carolinas in the massive and costly Tuscarora War, were featured. Why were the Yamasee missing?

It seemed likely that the Yamasee War was nowhere in the map because, truly, it was everywhere. It was the context and subtext informing this map. It had taken me so long to notice that there were no explicit mentions of Yamasees and the Yamasee War because the scars of this failed alliance and conflict were all over the map. Creek Country seemed particularly affected by this unmentionable event. The map listed many Creek towns as abandoned and relocated in 1715 (fig. 6). The map did not explain that the Yamasee War was the cause of this displacement; it merely illustrated Indian mobility and change without offering any reason for these removals. In all fairness, reason probably had little to do with it. The years following the Yamasee War were a time of great anxiety for South Carolinians. The English were shaken not just by the bloody war that had just ended, but by the uncertainty of the future.

In 1721, South Carolina was caught in a difficult balancing act. The English had to weigh the danger and risks brought by the Yamasee War on one hand, and bet on the potential of an aggressive and expansive future on the other. This map showed South Carolina’s gamble. Both a product of the past and a producer of a future, the map was also an expression of a specific moment in South Carolina’s history. The Hammerton map provides a fleeting but vivid insight into the uncertainties and prospects connecting the Southeastern world in 1721.

Further Reading

For more details on maps of the colonial Southeast, see William Patterson Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps, with an Annotated Check List of Printed and Manuscript Regional and Local Maps of Southeastern North America During the Colonial Period (Princeton, N.J., 1958).

For South Carolina expansion, Indian relations and slaving, and the Yamasee War, see S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina, a Political History, 1663-1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966); Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670-1717 (New Haven, Conn., 2002); William L. Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln, Neb., 2008).

For Spanish activities in the region, see Paul E. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers (Bloomington, Ind., 2002); Jane Landers, Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (Gainesville, Fla., 2000); Jerald T. Milanich, Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians (Washington, 1999); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, Blacks in the New World (Urbana, Ill., 1999); John E. Worth, The Timucua Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida: Volume 2: Resistance and Destruction (Gainesville, Fla., 1998).

On French incursions in the region, see Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C., published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., 1990); Daniel Thomas, Fort Toulouse: The French Outpost at the Alabamas on the Coosa (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1989).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

Alejandra Dubcovsky is an assistant professor in history at Yale University. Her current book project is tentatively titled Colonial Communication: Networks of Information in the American South from Cahokia to the Stono Rebellion.

I’m not in the habit of reading my work once it appears in print. I figure: I wrote it, I finished it, and now, in a way, it’s over. I’d never really considered the dynamics of being a reader of your own finished work—or rather, of posing as a reader of it—until this past November, when I did indeed read my book in anticipation of the roundtable discussion at the American Studies Association conference. As I was reading, I found myself taking notes, because that’s what I do when I read. And as I was taking notes, I began to recognize, visually, in my own hand, short phrases that I remember writing years ago—in margins, on Post-its, in notebooks, on the backs of library call slips. Short strings that I hoped would throw a line out to something just out of reach. Or bursts of words that, once flung down, might just send something back from the big surrounding sound. They were the phrases that I jotted with a sense of discovery, underlined, circled a few times, and then filed away praying that they would somehow turn into more text. And here, years later, I found myself taking notes again in a hotel room in L.A., pulling these phrases out of the book that did finally emerge, and only belatedly, uncannily recognizing them as those very first strains as I was straining to hear.

On this reading, I kept thinking about closure.

I share this because these jottings on either side of the narrative made me think about how texts are assembled and disassembled, how inevitably and intimately we are involved in this messy practice of taking narratives apart and putting them together again, of dealing with pieces, consolidations, disarticulations, gleanings. I realized that practice was not simply inevitable, but that it actually became an important part of my method and my attempt in writing Seasons of Misery, especially in constructing the narratives I was writing—or what I perhaps awkwardly called the “narrative readings.” Trying to turn the textual evidence of early settlement into not only an analysis of, but also into a particular kind of narrative of early settlement, required this kind of piecing apart and piecing back together differently—not just repeating or translating the original narrative as a re-told thing; not just reading alongside the original narrative; not just summarizing, or streamlining, or stylizing—but really using an act of narration (my own) to hear more clearly what I kept on hearing: the enormous unsettlement at the heart of what we call colonial settlement.

On this reading, I kept thinking about closure. It’s done, after all. What does it add up to? How do its accounts close out? The question is legitimate. Nevertheless, I kept being thrown back on the realization that resisting closure was always a main element—not just in the process of reading for and writing the book, but in its very argument. I needed, as much as I could, to stay inside catastrophe rather than to recuperate it, to stay inside chaos without the relief of overview, to stay inside seasons of suffering and violence rather than to chart a chronology that resolved them. To me, resisting closure was a key point, because I thought doing so could bring us closer to the profound discontinuities that characterized these first “settlements.” The developmental narrative—this led to that, led to that, and ended thus—enforces or at least attempts to fix a continuity of meaning, a heuristic “making” that does not keep being unmade. This taken-for-granted demand to arrive at historical continuity, coherence, trajectory was associated, in my mind, with establishing a fixity of meaning that seemed to seriously mis-tell what settlement was, and how coloniality happened.

To resist closure, to dwell in discontinuity, required engaging different temporal frames—both within the texts that I was reading and within the text that I was writing. Most of all, it meant slowing way down. Recently, I heard Hayden White talk and he said at one point: “No one ever lived the historical past, only the experiential past.” By the historical past, he meant the knowledge that historians have mapped out for us. The experiential past was the unmapped. As a writer and scholar, I wanted to stay in and move slowly within that unfixed, unresolved past: that sense of a present, ongoing past which, because it was catastrophic, had lost its bearings in understanding its own relation to both past and future. Because I am a literary critic, I am of course aware of the fact that the texts I use as evidence are made things. They are not the experiential past, but more exactly attempts to map that past. Therefore, it was the unsettlement in the textual objects that drew me, or else the purported meaning that tried mightily to discipline that everywhere-unsettlement. Given that neither experience nor representation were transparent, it was left to me try to create a world in my own text that did not close easily, that did not level out, that did not, in Joseph Roach’s words, “invest the future with the fatality of the past.” I remember posting a big sign on my wall that said in capital letters: STAY WITH THE ACUTE. That was my effort.

In piecing texts apart and putting them back together, in catching strains and straining to catch, I was trying both to pay a much slower attention to things that we take for granted, and to extract and compose other stories that the texts were holding but not telling. To me, this set of terms—non-closure, slowness, discontinuity, staying with the acute—had everything to do with the misery and violence, with the catastrophe of colonial settlement. The last section of the Jamestown chapter is called “The Echoing Air.” Reading the book again, that was one of those old phrases that stayed with me anew. As Paspahegh warriors surrounded the Jamestown block house, they shouted their own name in triumph. George Percy writes: “The echo thereof made both the air and woods to ring.”

It was the echo I heard: the thing that both hangs and reverberates; that amplifies and extends; that repeats and reflects; that warbles, distorts; but that ultimately both remembers and haunts the sound that was made. Now I’m interested in thinking about this conversation, too, as a kind of an echo. I’m enormously grateful for the chance to hear this through other people’s ears, and to think of the book as not over, not closed, but rather open and perhaps even unresolved in a potentially generative way.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

The cast of characters in Robert Love’s Warnings is astonishing. William Collier, a British veteran of the Seven Years’ War, journeyed to Boston from as far as South Carolina and East Florida in hopes of obtaining passage back to England. Scipio Fayerweather, a former slave who owned two houses in Boston, sheltered blacks who passed through the bustling port. Elizabeth Simmons, a transatlantic traveler widowed upon her arrival in Boston, made ends meet by marketing her expertise in London fashion and lodging boarders in the spare rooms of the house she rented. Joseph LeBlanc, an Acadian exiled from Nova Scotia during the Seven Years’ War, awaited passage to Quebec in cramped quarters on the outskirts of town after the war’s end. Nell Puce and Peggy Carpenter, wives of British soldiers who evacuated the port in the early 1770s, kept themselves from starvation by gathering wild dandelions on Boston’s Fort Hill to sell to their neighbors. Michael Hogan, a peddler circulating New England, arrived in Boston with a box of goods he intended to “Sell upon a WheleBarrow” and managed to establish a shop in town before his untimely death from heatstroke after a string of sweltering summer days (120).

Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger tell the stories of hundreds of marginal and ordinary people in their ambitious book, relying heavily on the records produced by a little-known clerk in pre-Revolutionary Boston named Robert Love. Love emigrated from Ireland to New England as a young man, ultimately settling in Boston. There, like many lower-middling urban dwellers, he pieced together a living to support his growing family, working alternately as a tailor, a small-scale trader, and a retailer in liquor. At the age of sixty-eight, Love added a new post to his patchwork of occupations: he began to walk the streets of Boston in search of strangers to “warn” from the town. For nine years he perambulated the port, telling some 4,000 men, women, and children “in His Majestys Name to depart the town of Boston in 14 days” (57).

Love’s words sound harsh to modern ears. And, indeed, they have been interpreted that way by many a chronicler of New England’s history. Historians have perceived warning, which was distinctive to New England, as an expression of the region’s distaste for outsiders and stinginess with relief for the poor. Some scholars have interpreted the concept literally—as physical banishment of those who did not have legal habitancy in the towns from which they were being warned. Other scholars have recognized that warning did not require eviction, but they have nonetheless misunderstood its purpose, presuming that declarations like Love’s were intended to inform sojourners that they were not legal inhabitants of the town and therefore could not receive poor relief. Dayton and Salinger, however, expose the limits of these conventional interpretations of warning. New Englanders were no xenophobic penny-pinchers, they argue; on the contrary, the region’s warning system was integral to what was arguably the most generous welfare system in the British Empire.

Centering their analysis on Massachusetts—”the province that originated the warning system used throughout New England”—Dayton and Salinger call attention to a largely overlooked feature of the Bay Colony’s relief system: the province account (4). Taxpayers across the colony contributed to this account, which provided aid to needy persons who did not have legal habitancy in Massachusetts. Thus, when Love tracked strangers on Boston’s wharves and in its alleys, his job was to determine their place of legal settlement: if in Boston, they would be entitled to local poor relief should they fall on hard times; if elsewhere in the colony, the town to which they belonged would be legally responsible for their support; if anywhere outside of Massachusetts, the province account would pick up the tab. Love’s warnings, then, were not intended to evict itinerants from the port (though removal warrants did follow warnings on rare occasion). Nor were they used to exclude outsiders from poor relief. Rather, they were meant for “fiscal accounting”: they “establish[ed] the line between a town’s budgetary responsibilities and the province poor account” (20). Better understood as a bureaucratic mechanism than an exclusionary measure, the warning system in no way hampered people from crossing town or colony borders, as some historians have supposed. In contrast, this system actually promoted movement by allowing Bostonians to hire, house, feed, and befriend sojourners without worrying that they were exposing the town to undue financial risks; should newcomers encounter hardship, the burden of their care would be shouldered by taxpayers across the province.

Robert Love’s Warnings is composed of nine chapters. The first sets the stage for the story of Love and his strangers by examining how the warning system functioned in Massachusetts. Here Dayton and Salinger explore the regional particularities of warning in the colony and trace its evolution from the late seventeenth century to the 1760s, when rates of warning in New England peaked and Love undertook the daunting task of distinguishing newcomers from settled inhabitants on the streets of Boston. The first chapter also lays out the various paths to attaining legal settlement status in the Bay Colony, which largely revolved around one’s place of birth or the legal settlement of one’s household head. Those who wished to change their place of settlement could do so in two ways: by petitioning the town selectmen (an approach that yielded success only to wealthy or highly skilled sojourners) or by residing in the town for a year without being warned (a route to settlement that Dayton and Salinger term the “backdoor method”). One of the reasons Boston’s selectmen hired Love to scan the town’s streets and frequent its inns was to keep sojourners from gaining habitancy via that backdoor method. If Boston’s many newcomers—particularly its economically marginal ones—became eligible for local rather than provincial aid, the port’s relief system would be swamped.

The second chapter tells Love’s story, illuminating why he would have desired the warning post and why he succeeded so brilliantly in it. Chapter three traces the origins of New England’s warning system to seventeenth-century English settlement law, and it explains the genesis of the province account—a New England innovation that emerged in the late seventeenth century when the province maintained white settlers throughout the colony whose homes had been burned in King Phillip’s and King William’s wars. The chapter also reveals the liberality of New England’s poor relief practices by situating them in the context of welfare regimes in England, Continental Europe, and Britain’s American colonies; “Nowhere else in the West” were taxpayers “willing to pay what was in effect two poor rates,” Dayton and Salinger argue (54). The fourth chapter describes the daily realities of Love’s job on the streets of Boston: where the man found strangers to warn; what his encounters were like; and how he managed to obtain information when he came upon defiant or deceptive visitors.

The first four chapters serve as a prelude of sorts to the following five, which in many ways comprise the heart of the study. Here Dayton and Salinger transition from examining the history, purpose, and practice of warning to investigating the warned themselves: Who were they? Why had they come to Boston? How did their sojourns fit into their broader life trajectories? In answering these questions, Dayton and Salinger reveal gendered patterns of movement and poverty as well as expose the influence of race on geographic circulation in the region. And they correct the longstanding assumption that the warned were destitute, or nearly so; over four-fifths of those Love warned were economically stable migrants who moved for work or training. Dayton and Salinger also shed light on the ways in which disruptions wrought by imperial policies influenced individuals’ lives, examining in depth the plights of three groups of people dislodged by imperial crises in the Anglo Atlantic: British veterans of the Seven Years’ War stranded in the mainland colonies; exiled Acadians seeking passage to French communities; and women and children deserted by the British soldiers who occupied Boston in the early 1770s.

Chapters five through nine provide remarkable insight into who was moving and why during the turbulent period between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. But these chapters are most striking for the stories they tell. Dayton and Salinger have contextualized Love’s detailed warning records with a wide array of contemporary historical sources, producing hundreds of biographies of people who left only the faintest of tracks in the historical record. The stories of these individuals appear on nearly every page of the book’s latter half. Thanks to the fruitful collaboration of two meticulous historians and the diligent efforts of an obscure town official in pre-Revolutionary Boston, Robert Love’s Warnings peoples the streets of an eighteenth-century city as few studies have.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Gloria McCahon Whiting is a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard University completing a dissertation on race, slavery, gender, and family in early New England.

Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. 240 pp., $60.

Exploring the materiality of early American paintings and prints, Jennifer Roberts’ excellent new book spans the 1760s to the 1850s in three fascinating case studies, each involving the complex transport of art. Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America examines the ways that art and artists anticipated and responded to movement, first in the trans-Atlantic passage of paintings by John Singleton Copley, then shifting to the production and distribution of John James Audubon’s huge Birds of America, and finally examining the links between Asher B. Durand’s varied careers as an engraver of banknotes and fine art and as a landscape painter in the telegraphic age. As Roberts writes, “pictures in early America … were marked by their passage through space—not only by crushed corners, craquelure, and other indexical injuries that they may have sustained along the way, but also by their formal preprocessing of the distances they were designed to span” (1-2).

With few existing art historical tools to analyze the transportation of art in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, Roberts culls concepts from a range of disciplines, including semiotics, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and science studies. This theoretical diversity is one of the book’s many strengths. Another is the author’s integration of ideas in modern art, which inform her approach to motion and transit in early American pictures. The topic of the transportation of and in art provides a focus that is at once rather narrow and yet broadly ambitious, offering Roberts a means to bridge theoretical gaps between disciplines. While art history focuses on illusionism, representation, and iconography, often overlooking materiality, material culture frequently attends to “thingness” at the expense of representation. The transport of pictures opens up a sort of sweet spot between the two disciplines, examining how movement activates and materializes images in ways that scholars have not considered. Utilizing the term “phatic” from semiotics, meaning those aspects of language that refer to channels of communication rather than the primary message, Roberts seeks the phatic aspects of pictures. As eighteenth-century letters, for example, often expressed uncertainty about when and if the recipient would actually receive them, so too did paintings register artists’ fears of delay and damage in transit. Transporting Visions “develops an approach to the phatic richness of pictures, arguing for the centrality of the phatic” in modernity (7). Examining the events and passages of time in between production and consumption—those delays and interstices that art historians have generally ignored—Roberts finds a great deal of meaning.

Chapter one explores John Singleton Copley’s efforts to participate in London’s academic exhibitions remotely from Boston, laboriously packing and sending paintings on long overseas voyages, then receiving belated news of his work’s reception, all in all a process fraught with delay, tension, and the possibility of loss and damage on the high seas. Copley registered the challenges of this spatial and chronological distance in the paintings themselves, Roberts argues. They can be seen in Copley’s stylistic eccentricities and in his aesthetic of transmission derived from models of Atlantic exchange and transport. Roberts’ keen analysis of Copley’s pivotal 1765 A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, painted for submission to the Society of Artists’ exhibition in London, was published in part in the American Art Journal (Summer 2007). Roberts incorporates considerable new material in the book chapter by examining a wider range of Copley’s work. Her reading of Watson and the Shark as a direct response to the events and the political upheaval of the Boston Tea Party is particularly fruitful. In contrast to Copley’s earlier tabletop portraits, which Roberts reads as agents of sensory synthesis and transmission, Watson and the Shark offers a vision of misalignment, its precious cargo overboard and in grave danger, indicative of a larger breakdown in Anglo-American material relations.

Chapter two analyzes John James Audubon’s ambitious Birds of America project of the 1820s and 1830s. Audubon was determined to publish it with life-sized images of American birds, despite the enormous costs and logistical challenges of doing so. Emphasizing the materiality of Audubon’s pictures and the physical problems associated with producing and distributing them, Roberts notes that the images ironically navigated the landscape with much greater difficulty than the birds they depicted. Audubon’s insistence on real-life scale derived in part from his desire for accuracy and pictorial preservation in the transatlantic realm of natural history. His emphasis on indexical accuracy is also seen as a reaction to the instability of credit and currency in the early republic. Roberts connects the Birds of America project to Audubon’s previous career as a western merchant, emphasizing the traumatic effects of the bank panic of 1819, when Audubon lost everything and was forced to declare bankruptcy.

The third chapter addresses art in the telegraphic age. While words and images had previously traveled at the same rate, with letters, newspapers, and objects journeying together as cargo on boats and wagons, the telegraph conveyed coded words at lightning speed, leaving pictures behind. Roberts posits that Asher B. Durand’s plein air landscape studies of the 1840s and 1850s articulated this difference and celebrated the qualities of slowness that images had newly acquired. Durand’s early career as an engraver—of banknotes and then fine art—left him particularly attuned to issues of reproduction and transmission and to tensions between surface and depth in an era of collapsing differentiations in time and space. Linking Durand’s engraving of John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne with his later up-close studies of mossy rocks and trees, Roberts finds visual and thematic connections to materiality, to the labyrinth, and to surface attention that resisted the dematerializing tendencies of telegraphy.

An extraordinarily useful and influential contribution to art historical scholarship, Transporting Visions will shift how Copley, Audubon, and Durand are studied. More important is the book’s demonstration and assertion of the significance of the communication and transportation revolutions in early American art. These new and provocative interpretations leave the reader wanting more—wishing for a fourth chapter that might have investigated Samuel F. B. Morse’s fascinating career as an artist, academician, and inventor, for example, addressing his career shift from painting to inventing the electromagnetic telegraph. Despite this omission, Jennifer Roberts’ nimble prose and keen insight offer the first sharply focused consideration of the impact of transport on and in early American art.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

In Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt, Catherine Cangany explores what might best be called the “soft economics” of Detroit’s integration into the Atlantic world. She contends that Detroit was “poised at the intersection of East and West, empire and frontier, core and periphery, and imperialism and localism” (3). This tension between the city’s imperial significance and its remote location, Cangany stresses, “hastened Detroit’s economic and cultural incorporation into the broader Atlantic world,” even as it generated the idiosyncrasies that set early Detroit apart from many other settlements in the North American interior (3). For Cangany, Detroit was neither an imperial city within a frontier region, nor a peripheral outpost servicing a core. It embodied both, and she hopes to draw historians toward an “awareness of the full interdependencies, interrelatedness, and mutual constitutiveness of West and East” (5).

Cangany’s book contributes to two not wholly distinct bodies of work: scholarship on the Great Lakes borders and borderlands, and on imperial consumerism. Although initiated by scholars interested in the interaction between indigenous peoples and Europeans, in the past decade historians such as Alan Taylor have extended the borderlands concept into the nineteenth century and onto disparate white populations. Meanwhile, others, illustrated by T.H. Breen, have moved consumerism to the center of the experience of empire. Cangany seeks to bring these two strands of scholarship into conversation by tracing the development of Detroit’s role as a market for commonplace consumer items and the critical role of the fluctuating borders in the Great Lakes region in determining its character.

In order to present this “Janus-faced” view of Detroit, Cangany has assembled sources remarkable for both their number and variety: letters and ledger books from the city’s early merchants; probate and criminal court records; papers of the French, British, and American military commanders stationed at the city; travel narratives; newspapers from as far away as South Carolina; Congressional statutes; and images and material goods (168). These allow her to study the material culture of Detroit’s residents and their attitude toward the claims of sovereignty asserted by constantly changing imperial powers over their affairs. Likewise, they provide her evidence of Detroiters’ simultaneously cosmopolitan and provincial status.

Frontier Seaport can be divided into two parts. Chapters one through three examine Detroit’s incorporation into the Atlantic economy. Cangany eschews another treatment of the fur trade for a detailed analysis of the commerce in such items as textiles, dining ware, moccasins, and books. Despite being the better part of a thousand miles from the Atlantic coast, she finds that the city’s merchants carried a remarkable array of goods including chocolate, nutmeg, olives, and hair powder. While these may seem oddly out of place on the frontier, they serve as evidence for Cangany’s argument that early Detroit was “profoundly tied to Atlantic commercial culture, saturated with the same transnational goods and the accompanying fashions that were popular in urban spaces” (43). Moreover, the city’s merchants’ ability to draw on credit from overseas and sell on credit locally facilitated the residents’ conspicuous consumption that further bound them to the Atlantic economy.

Having made a convincing case for Detroit’s cosmopolitanism, Cangany devotes chapters four through six to describing the city’s localisms and the conditions that allowed them to flourish through the early nineteenth century. Here her evidence is more subtle, and her extrapolations bolder. She contends that even as their business dealings bound Detroit more tightly to the Atlantic economy, the city’s merchants resisted the accompanying loss of economic and political autonomy. They mastered the art of petitioning as they first defeated efforts by the French, British, and Americans to impose non-local judiciary oversight, and then confounded the endeavors of American officials to rebuild the settlement in a grandiose but alien manner after the fire of 1805.

Her most potent evidence, however, comes from the widespread, casual smuggling of common goods—blankets, whiskey, and apples among them—by local residents across the Detroit River. However much they desired the reliability that came with imperial order in their transnational commerce, locals expected autonomy when trading with neighbors who just happened to live on the other side of an international border. After all, residents had exchanged goods back and forth across the Detroit River, Cangany notes, for nearly 100 years before the river had been transformed into a border. She sees their illicit trade as “a measured local response to deleterious federal interference” (171). Apathetic customs officers and incongruous customs laws designed for the Atlantic seaboard rather than the Great Lakes aided their cause. For Cangany, smuggling “offer[s] further evidence of Detroiters’ resistance to full incorporation into the American regime and the Atlantic world” (172).

Cangany writes in a precise and economical manner reflecting the diligence of her research. Yet she clearly enjoys crafting her analysis, as can be seen in the wordplay in which she engages. The subtitle of chapter three, “the fashioning of moccasins,” for instance, refers to both the manufacturing and popularity of this footwear.

Given the emphasis on the tension between localism and cosmopolitanism, one may wonder at the selection of the work’s subtitle, “Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt.” This subtitle undersells the scope of the project and perhaps misses a chance to draw the attention of scholars interested in empire, capitalism, and borderlands. Even as Frontier Seaport makes noteworthy contributions to two of the analytical frameworks in which it positions itself, it also raises important questions regarding their utility. Detroiters certainly seemed eager to tie themselves to the Atlantic world, but just what that means is unclear. Was the Atlantic world simply a set of rules and practices for economic exchange, or a collection of common consumer goods? By 1796, when the United States took formal possession of Detroit, the networks of exchange and communication that contemporary scholars refer to as constituting the “Atlantic world” had been in existence for 300 years. Surely it too developed, changed, and took on new meaning.

Detroit’s days as a cultural borderland are far behind it, but its position adjacent to Canada still makes it a geographical borderland, and as Cangany notes, that location provides ample opportunity for illicit trade. Is this still localism at work? Does this mean the casual smuggling in which the city’s population engages today is evidence of their continued resistance to incorporation into the Atlantic, or now, the global economy? More to the point, do borderlands foster the development of one variety of a localism that manifests in every locality? And if every place has its localisms, are borderlands truly significant? Frontier Seaport is a stimulating work with a thought-provoking thesis that is undergirded by a solid body of research. It is a valuable addition to anyone interested in commerce and empire, borderlands, or Great Lakes history.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Daniel P. Glenn is an assistant professor of history at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. His article “‘Savage Barbarities and Petty Depredations’: Supply Shortages and Military-Civilian Conflicts in the Niagara Theater, 1812-14” appeared in the Summer/Fall volume of New York History.

Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 260 pp., $42.

Kathleen Donegan’s Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America is a powerful retelling of initial English incursions at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados. Donegan re-reads the works of several English writers who sought to account for their struggle to find sure footing in the Americas. These writers include Ralph Lane, George Percy, Phineas Pratt, William Bradford, and Richard Ligon, among others. The argument Donegan makes for studying the life and works of this ensemble is convincing: the many catastrophes they experienced shaped not only colonial identity but colonial cultural expression as well. Their trials and failures were not anomalies to be ignored or treated with chagrin by historians and literary scholars. Their bewilderment, starvation, and violence were integral to becoming colonists, and seeped into the “language through which new settlers revealed how the social links that tied them to England, and to their own sense of Englishness, were breaking down” (5).

Donegan’s approach is interdisciplinary in the best sense of the word. She alternates between micro history and literary analysis to create what she calls narrative readings. Trauma theory tinctures her narrative readings. Like trauma theorists, she focuses on the horrifying ordeals that people experience and on their effort to comprehend themselves and their world in the wake of such ordeals. However, she seeks to explain the violence her writers inflicted on others as well as the hardships they endured. In her effort to be mindful of their aggression and misery, Donegan uses post-colonial and race-oriented reading strategies while revising concepts to reflect her materials. For instance, she reads travel writing in relation to projected imperial authority, as Mary Louise Pratt does, yet Donegan describes English settlers as living in a chaos zone, not a contact zone, Pratt’s term for spaces of cross-cultural interaction.

Donegan begins by approaching Roanoke’s mysteries through a reading of Ralph Lane’s incursion account. Lane, the colony’s governor in 1585, limns disasters and conflicts with Roanoke Indians, an account, as Donegan points out, at odds with the Virginia Eden depicted in Elizabeth I’s charter and Arthur Barlowe’s narrative. Style matters here too for Donegan. She illustrates how, unlike the prose of official record, Lane’s scattered thought exemplifies a unique “idiom for colonial incursion” (32). Here Donegan might have included a reading of John White’s watercolors in order to show how Lane’s style compares with early modern visual representations of Virginia. Even without this reading, the chapter makes a compelling point while also introducing readers to an early American who is so often overlooked or misunderstood because of the messiness of his writings.

Donegan’s second narrative reading is oriented around the figure of George Percy, Jamestown’s president between 1609-1610. She shows how the settlement’s first planning documents serve as remedies for Roanoke’s failures. Ultimately, she argues that reading these documents and John Smith’s writings alone skew our perspective on Jamestown. As part of her revision of the settlement, she makes the case that Percy, not Smith, be considered the primary spokesman for life in the early colonies. It is Percy who discloses “how Virginia’s New World romance turned into a graveyard of meaning” (80). Smith conceives of Virginia history as an opportunity for autobiography; in his account of a self-made man surviving in the wilderness, Percy, more accurately, thinks of this early English incursion history as a period of abjection. Donegan’s apt use of Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection—being “Not me. Not that. But not nothing either”—helps illuminate her reading of Percy’s work (87). Her sobering retelling of the Starving Time, Percy’s thwarted departure, his murder of Powhatan women and children, and the Powhatan revenge campaign illustrates the importance of this Englishman’s life and work to any narrative of Jamestown.

Intrigued by William Bradford’s observation “the living were scarce able to bury the dead,” Donegan investigates the literal “problem of remains” in Plymouth in her third chapter (118). She examines writings by Phineas Pratt, Thomas Morton, and Edward Winslow to uncover the death and depravity that Bradford sublimates in his triumphalist history. Haunting highlights from this chapter include settlers coming upon the grave of blond corpses with Indian beads and goods, a startling difference between Pratt’s and Increase Mather’s account of the sick, and the disturbing reactions to the displayed head of Witawamut. Donegan ends her narrative reading with a stirring thought: “perhaps, the dead were the most important crop the people at Plymouth planted” (154).

Donegan also shows how West Indian incursion follows botched North American settlement efforts. She focuses on Barbados. In Barbadian accounts by John Nicholls and Henry Colt she finds a colonial tropic: a “discursive framework of extremity and extravagance through which West Indian colonials described lives that could not be imagined in England” (156). Within this framework, they expressed their fears of every indulgence that they desired and fulfilled. Donegan uses Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657) to pinpoint the style of this colonial tropic at a period when the English sought to start a plantation settlement. Ligon’s peril-filled, eroticized descriptions of black women, pineapples, and sugar-making reflect the catastrophes created by this endeavor while also illustrating the crucial role that the islands played in fomenting English interest in colonization.

Donegan’s narrative readings are so engaging that I concluded her fourth chapter ready to read one more—perhaps a short descriptive reading of another southern incursion, in Savannah, for instance. Such a reading might have shown how colonial identity and writing evolved in eighteenth-century Georgia, which had a similar climate to Barbados, but a radically different settlement plan and outcome. Instead of providing this type of conclusion, Donegan ends with an afterword that explains why she wrote the book primarily from the vantage point of the English. This explanation ties the book together nicely by returning to the author’s first impulses and critical questions. But it also suggests that her study needs additional defenses. It does not. Seasons of Misery reveals the tenuous hold that English settlers had on Native American lands and on their sense of self during fatal forays that bore little resemblance to imperial plans. Thanks to Donegan, these settlers’ writings are no longer embarrassing preludes. They are crucial to understand in their contexts, as well as for understanding the cultures that develop after them.

Like any important scholarly work, Seasons of Misery does raise questions, which might spur new projects. For example, her book made me wonder about the ways that non-English writers expressed their assortment of miseries in the Americas. Donegan’s approach as well as her historical and literary conclusions, I concluded, might be used to help re-read earlier works such as Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación (1542) and to reconsider representations of bewilderment and aggression in Native American, African American, and Euro-American colonial-era writings. Additionally, moments in the book where weather becomes a relevant subject lead me to reflect on how a sense of the natural world and climate change influenced representations of failed settlement. Introducing more of an ecological focus—perhaps by working concepts from environmental history into conversation with Donegan’s selected readings—might further illuminate patterns of settler anomie and aggression. This focus may help us see how early moderns might have read accounts of these bereft European settlers and, moreover, might clarify how those of us who confront environmental disasters today can learn from them. Such queries are a sign of the strength of Seasons of Misery; its distinctive approach to the writings and incursions of distraught and disoriented Englishmen reminds us that there is much we still do not grasp about early American settlement.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Matt Duquès is assistant professor of English at the University of North Alabama. He works on eighteenth-century American Indian and settler relations as well as early U.S. literature.

Notetaking and Sermon Culture in Puritan New England

Common-place talks to Meredith Neuman, author of Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England, about sermon culture among Puritans, the physical processes they undertook to take notes, and the resonances of that culture in modern research practices.

Your argument hinges on the idea that seventeenth-century Puritans lived in a “sermon culture.” Can you elaborate on what that encompassed and how it worked?

I use the term “sermon culture” to indicate not just the sermon texts themselves but also the practices and phenomena involved in the production and reception of those texts. I knew that people sometimes took notes on the preaching they heard, and I thought this might be a better way to explore the aural experience of the sermon, even though I wasn’t sure I could even find such notebooks. The first auditor sermon notebooks I found were at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the first one I encountered transformed how I thought about the larger experience of the sermon. One page was filled with barely legible scrawl and dotted with what might have been shorthand symbols. All I could make out was repetitive variations of a single verse of scripture that the minister had taken as his text. It seemed to me as if the notetaker was happy to dwell in the purely aural experience of the minister’s voice and the echoing scriptural passage. Elsewhere in the notebook, other sermons were recorded in just a few succinct, numbered points. It was all very orderly, and the handwriting was careful and ornamental, like a penmanship exercise. (To this day I cannot decide if the two notetaking styles came from one person or more.) From that unusual notebook came the double revelation that auditors could experience sermons in quite divergent ways and that those ways were not always predictable based on what we know from print sermons and preaching manuals.

Essentially, I went to the archive to be a fly on the wall and to eavesdrop (as it were) on the minister speaking, but I soon became more interested in the auditor listening. Contemplating the sermon via the auditor’s experience forced me to think about the complicated ways that sermon texts circulated in the community and abroad. This is part of what I mean by sermon culture. Sermon distribution was truly multimedia. Delivery was oral, of course, usually based on an outline that the minister had by memory or in outline form. In turn, the individual auditor might retain preaching by memory or take notes (often at home, but sometimes in the meetinghouse). The ministers and the laity sometimes wrote their notes up more fully. Ministers complained about unauthorized publication of their sermons based on auditor notes, but they were sometimes beholden to those very sources when developing their preaching for the press. Notes, memory, and print also formed the basis of formal and informal conversations that occurred within families, throughout the community, and abroad. When we think of what it meant to “publish” a sermon in this period, we must think of overlapping modes of print, manuscript, and oral circulation. Ultimately, the complex material circumstances of sermon publication cause us to question what we mean by authorship. In Jeremiah’s Scribes I posit a model of “disseminated authorship,” where the sermon is not the product of individual ministers but of entire communities.

Another part of what I mean by “sermon culture” has to do with how sermons affected thinking and self-expression beyond the meetinghouse. As a literary scholar, I am interested in how the sermons permeated other genres as well. Dan Shea muses inSpiritual Autobiography in Early America that “ours has been a notably sermon-ridden literature from the beginning.” I love that quote so much that I used it to open the introduction to Jeremiah’s Scribes. Harry Stout estimates that an individual might have listened to 15,000 hours of preaching over his or her lifetime. How could our literature not be “sermon-ridden”? The effect of this prolonged exposure is easy to find in conversion narratives, such as the so-called Cambridge confessions recorded by Thomas Shepard, which are peppered with scriptural citation as well as references to specific sermon encounters. (“I heard Mr. So-and-so on X verse on Y occasion, and I thought Z.”) We can also see ready evidence of sermon culture in Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. Every time I teach that text, some savvy student inevitably observes that a little sermon breaks out when Rowlandson gives that numbered list of “a few remarkable passages of providence.” Moving beyond the structural level, we get the impression that Rowlandson cannot not interpret biographical incidents like scripture, with clear doctrines to be opened and applied. Anne Bradstreet makes a similar move in her poem “Upon the Burning of Our House.” New England “plain style” preaching emphasized its own exegetical and rhetorical maneuvers. As a result, the influence of sermon on other genres is not merely topical but interpretive and methodological.

The book examines the seventeenth century essentially as a long moment for Puritan sermon culture, but can you discuss some of the ways in which that culture changed during the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth?

I allowed myself to remain quite narrowly focused for this book because I was ultimately less interested in tracing the evolution of sermons than I was in framing a few very specific questions about language for a particular people during a prolonged historical moment. Despite my narrow focus, however, I hope that I have managed to open up new avenues for scholarship on the sermon in early America. There is so much I did not address in terms of the diversity of sermon traditions in the seventeenth century and particularly in relation to Native engagement with Puritan sermon culture. The scene only gets more diverse as you move into the eighteenth century, of course. That’s why I am so excited by a collaborative project headed up by Zach Hutchins with Rachel Cope and Chris Phillips called TEAMS (Transcribing Early American Manuscript Sermons), a searchable database of original transcriptions of pre-1800 American manuscript sermons. They will be launching the prototype in 2015 with a base of 50 sermons from South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts by Episcopalian, Baptist, Catholic, and Congregational preachers. Projects like this one are crucial to an understanding of the full spectrum of early American sermon cultures.

And, yes, I am deflecting the original question just a bit, but I will make a few points about how the sermon culture that I examined in Jeremiah’s Scribes fits into a longer trajectory (at least in terms of non-conformist Anglo-American preaching). By the late sixteenth century, you have a situation in England where the demand for good, original, vernacular, non-conformist preaching has outpaced the number of ministers who are trained and securely established in pulpits. Into the seventeenth century, writers of spiritual autobiography frequently relate the need to travel long distances on a Sunday or even to migrate in order to be closer to “godly” preaching. This demand helps to fuel what we call the Great Migration to New England in the 1630s. What’s always fascinated me, though, is the lag time between the increased availability of such preaching (say, in New England where the per capita rate of godly preaching is extremely high, but even in certain corners of England at an earlier date) and a critical mass of printing based on that lively oral culture.

It is actually quite hard to find print versions of “ordinary” preaching from mid-seventeenth-century New England. In The New-England Soul, Stout calls attention to a preference for publishing occasional preaching (fast days, funerals, etc.), a phenomenon that causes a distorted view of sermon themes and tones. If you look only at print sermons based on a single delivery, there appears to be a lot more brimstone in New England than I think there really was. For me, the flip side of that coin is the disproportion of unwieldy, polemical “sermon cycles” that come from the first generation of New England preachers. Thomas Shepard’s preaching on the Parable of the Ten Virgins is a good example. His multi-year sequence of preaching on a single parable from Matthew comes out of the aftermath of the Antinomian Controversy, but on a weekly basis, I think those sermons would have sounded like “ordinary” pastoral exhortation. The frequency with which members of Shepard’s church cite the Parable of the Ten Virgins suggests ordinary, pastoral preaching, yet the posthumous 1660 publication emphasizes topical concerns—this time millennialist eschatology rather than a local Antinomian threat.

In New England, the scene changes when the first generation of preachers begins to die off, I suspect. Suddenly you have posthumous collections, like John Norton’s Three Choice and Profitable Sermons, that include occasional as well as ordinary preaching. Increasingly in the last part of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, you have straightforward pastoral preaching making its way into print more frequently, I think, as part of a general acceleration of print as consumer commodity across the board. (This point is driven home for me in Sewall’s Diary where he sometimes brings print sermons as a gift and other times sugared almonds when he comes a-wooing.) Part of the issue also seems to be a shift in supply and demand relative to the status of print vs. oral transmission. Anxiety over the scarcity of “godly” preaching in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England was tied up in the perceived primacy of hearing the Word. I’ve not worked it out completely for myself, but I suspect that the traditional Protestant preference for hearing sermons becomes less of an issue as both print sermons and good preaching become increasingly available (not to mention increased denominational diversity). There is more of a marketplace feel to New England sermon culture by century’s end.

In chapter 2, you discuss some of the challenges of looking for notetaking practices in archival collections, including varying description procedures, uncertain provenances, and unnamed notetakers. What strategies did you develop as a researcher to overcome these obstacles?

Honestly? My strategy was to embrace the messiness and idiosyncrasy of the process. I developed a dragnet of keyword combinations, often with wildcards and simple Boolean syntax (e.g. sermon? OR preach* AND note* NOT print* NOT pub*). I would run variations upon variations of advanced searches and e-mail hundreds of results to myself. Later I would comb through the records, discarding what was clearly not what I wanted and calling up anything that seemed remotely plausible. I looked at a lot of material that was not what I wanted but that nevertheless helped me to define the larger project. For example, the “wrong” material allowed me to figure out key differences between notes for delivery and true auditor notes. Or that a minister’s own auditing notes could have more in common with lay notes than with his own notes for delivery. Or that many individuals made manuscript copies of sermons for preservation and distribution, based both on manuscript and print sources. In short, the great inefficiency of the system paid off. Ironically, if the searchable metadata had been more consistent and reliable, I would not have stumbled across so many important ancillary documents. For me, it will always be important to flail about in the archive, to allow one’s self to be surprised and confused by it. As I tell my students, you can go to the archive with what you think your questions are, but, if you are very lucky, the archive will tell you what your questions really are.

Interaction with library staff and curators is absolutely crucial to this sort of research. They are the ones who know the collections and who can tell you about material that sometimes isn’t even catalogued. Importantly, they are also the keepers of Institutional Knowledge. Every library’s collections are described and organized according to criteria that are often particular to the institution. To search for sermon notes at the Houghton Library, then, is in some sense to search Harvard’s sense of its own history. At the Massachusetts Historical Society, notebooks are attached to individuals in a way that highlights local histories. The American Antiquarian Society emphasizes print and family collections, and at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, of course, it’s always about ancestry. (A staffer there once asked me if I’d ever found the grave of an auditor whose notes I’d been trying to decipher. I’ll admit that such a marvelous notion had never occurred to me before.) Bumping up against diverse collecting agenda and disciplinary practices will shake you out of a lot of methodological complacency, if you let it.

I expect that auditor notes will continue to be discovered and identified after generations of obscurity. We don’t always know what we have. Literally. This summer I identified at the Boston Public Library what I believe to be a misattributed leaf of a sermon notebook supposedly kept by Samuel Sewall. My search for evidence of misattribution led me to discover that there were in fact two sets of notes taken by two different auditors (the other, in fact, was Sewall’s) at the same sermon delivery. To me, that’s a much more valuable discovery than a single manuscript fragment associated with the famous judge. For me, however, the most exciting discoveries these days are in deciphering shorthand. Common-Place readers may already know about the team of undergraduates and scholars at Brown University (including Linford Fisher) that cracked Roger William’s shorthand code. Fewer likely know about David M. Powers’s work transcribing shorthand sermon notebooks kept by John Pynchon on the preaching of George Moxon in the 1640s. I hope to see the entirety of this important work in print, but in the meantime we will have to satisfy ourselves with sample pages from the Springfield notebook, available online via the Congregational Library. An image of Pynchon’s youthful notebook is on the cover of Jeremiah’s Scribes, and so I was grateful when David was able to translate previously undeciphered symbols for me. More importantly, though, Powers’s work is an exciting contribution to our understanding of notetaking generally and the use of shorthand in particular.

As you discuss in Jeremiah’s Scribes, notetaking is a deeply embodied practice; it is, literally, a physical process. Yet historians and literary scholars now encounter many of our sources online. How did you navigate those differences, and what challenges did you face in trying to understand a seventeenth-century practice with twenty-first-century technology?

In graduate school in California, my research was both enabled and limited by access first to microfilm and then to digital images of print sermons. Once I moved to Massachusetts, I suddenly had access to manuscripts but—ironically—less digital access (especially to early English imprints). Such flukes of access can define our scholarship, of course; these particular flukes also caused me to reflect on issues of access for seventeenth-century readers. Notetaking was pious practice, but it was also just a practical method of text-getting. Like making manuscript copies of print books, compiling sermon notes was a way of expanding one’s library. There is a different sense of intimacy and authorship with texts you create by hand with pen and paper rather than by mouse and keyboard. Early on in my research, I started keeping a notebook of my own in order to get a better sense of that experiential process. In particular, I was fascinated by the phenomenon of flipping the notebook upside down in order to record different information from the “back” of the book forward. John Hull, for example, recorded public occurrences in one direction and private reflections in the opposite direction, a practical method that nevertheless evokes other kinds of public-private overlap. I found it convenient to record reading and transcription notes in one direction and my own reflections and compositions in the other. That juxtaposition preserves an interesting record of the evolution of my arguments.

What began as a somewhat whimsical experiment in recording by hand in order to get a better sense of the physical process of notetaking has since become a bare necessity. One morning, just around the time I was completing the final draft of the book manuscript, I woke up to discover that I could barely lift my arms; intense bouts of writing on my laptop had triggered underlying chronic back and shoulder issues. I was under a tight deadline with no time to heal, so I had to get creative in order to finish the book. My department found money to pay four wonderful students for assistance in finalizing the manuscript. I marked up drafts by hand and then dictated edits (once, memorably, correcting a transcription of a seventeenth-century sermon with a student in Washington state via Skype and Google Docs). I spoke the final passages aloud while one of my amanuenses took everything down. It was a remarkable and rather moving experience that drove home—in a very personal way—my larger argument about communal textual production.

Textual production is now indeed very embodied for me. I draft by hand mostly, restrict myself to a special keyboard and mouse setup, and use a standing desk at all times. This is a challenge in reading rooms, of course, because I can’t use my laptop, which means that all my research is now done by hand in notebooks. And so I continue to think about the way handwritten notes are different from typed, electronic notes. I muse frequently on Ann Blair’s investigations of information management, and I consider organization itself to be an expressive form. You can’t alter the experiential chronology of the notebook. For example, notetakers often follow a sermon series on a single verse. Sometimes the sermon continua is interrupted by preaching on other topics, especially by occasional preaching, but sometimes the notetaker records those interrupting sermons in another book or in another direction, and sometimes there seems to be a mix of organizational strategies. There are accidents, too, that determine which notebook is on hand for any given circumstance, and so you see all kinds of odd texts intrude (pen trials, drafts of letter, lists of books, mathematical calculations). Similar phenomena appear in my own notebooks, which helps me to theorize what odd ordering and juxtapositions mean and, just as importantly, don’t mean.

Manuscript notebooks preserve errancy of all kinds. If I write something foolish in a Word document or put that document in the wrong place on a computer, I can change it. The computer’s default settings leave no trace of the original wording or organization. With notebooks, however, those features that speak to experiential process leave traces everywhere. Unfortunately, cramped handwriting toward the end of a line, truncated ideas toward the end of a page, the heavy correction of a word, and indecisive spaces left in a sentence are all hard to convey via transcription. I tried to cultivate a transcription style that preserved these idiosyncrasies, but so much gets normalized when put through a word processor. I used to work in desktop publishing, and so I know good tricks for making word processed text approximate the oddities of the manuscript page (much to the chagrin of copy editors and production managers). Trying to render manuscripts typographically is an exercise in diminishing returns, however. One solution was to create a Sermon Notebooks Online resource on my personal website, but even that feels like a poor substitute for having the thing itself in front of you.

In many cases, technology made it harder to do things with text that are easy to do by hand. When I used to transcribe by laptop, for example, I created simple keyboard shortcuts (or “macros”) for common abbreviations that incorporated superscript (y^e for “the,” for example, or w^t for “with” or “what”). When the university upgraded my laptop, the newer version of Word interpreted those macros as viruses, and so I had to ask IT to reinstall the old version just so I could keep transcribing. Copyediting and typesetting was a struggle, too. Bolded letters indicating darker ink in the original or extra spacing in the middle of a line were easy enough to reproduce, but other textual effects proved much trickier. In a few cases, I had to indicate text that the original notetaker had marked off with a border. I easily created a rule around the text in Word, but the production department—with its much more sophisticated software—could not replicate the effect. UPenn Press was wonderful to work with on these odd problems. We went back and forth, and I simplified what I could, but in the end there were three places where they had to create tiny pieces of art incorporating text and border. In two cases the little piece of art stood on its own as a block quote, which I think was easier for them to work with. In one case, however, the little piece of art was inserted and had to flow with the regular characters. Tricky. I haven’t seen the ebook version of Jeremiah’s Scribes yet, but they warned me that these little pieces of embedded art wouldn’t all resize along with the rest of the text. I actually thought that was a lucky quirk of digital publishing—an additional way to call attention to the “thingyness” of this and of all texts. Digital textuality may not be embodied, strictly speaking, but it is filled with wonderful idiosyncrasies that we are only beginning to understand how to identify and contemplate.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Meredith Neuman is associate professor of early and antebellum American literature at Clark University. In her current book project, “Coming to Terms with Early American Poetry,” she turns to the problem of “mediocre” verse, examining the ways that critical categories often fail to make sense of the voracious demand for such poetry in the pre-Romantic era.

Reading Suggestions for Teachers of Colonial North America

When the English, Dutch, French, and other Northern Europeans ventured to North America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they knew that Spanish colonization of the Americas was already well underway. What they understood about Spanish colonization, however, is less clear. Spain’s imperial example served northern Europeans as both inspiration and bogeyman, but often in relatively vague ways.

As a specialist in early American—that is, North American—history, I have sometimes felt myself to be in the same fix. I know that colonial Latin America is a booming field of historical inquiry, and I feel responsible for knowing at least a little about it, but where to begin? Several years ago, spurred by the need to develop the Latin American dimension of an Atlantic World course, I finally jumped in, following publishers’ catalogs and other people’s syllabi wherever they led that looked interesting. Here I offer a short, eclectic, English-language reading list for North Americanists who want an entrée into Spanish colonial America. The list does not offer a comprehensive overview of the field, but instead emphasizes themes and modes of inquiry that will resonate with those steeped in early (North) American history.

J.H. Elliott’s magnificent synthesis, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (2006), is a natural entry point to the subject. Elliott offers a sweeping comparison of the New World’s two largest and most enduringly influential empires, ranging from imaginative dimensions of colonization such as symbolic methods of claiming space to the long-term development of political institutions and economic and social life. Elliott takes note both of the ways in which these two empires differed from one another and of the ways in which they were similar. On balance—though perhaps this impression is shaped by past historians’ tendency to emphasize how different Spanish and British America were—Elliott’s work seems to emphasize the deep similarity of the Spanish and British colonial enterprises, especially when viewed from the imperial perspective.

Fans of the new social history should not miss James Lockhart’s two complementary classics, Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A Social History (1968) and The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru (1972). Based on the same corpus of research, these books draw a detailed portrait of the social and economic lives of the first generation of Spanish settlers in Peru. Spanish Peru focuses on the development of Spanish colonial society in the generation after conquest, while The Men of Cajamarca focuses more narrowly on the 168 free Spaniards who participated in the capture of Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, at Cajamarca in 1532, offering capsule biographies of every member of the expedition. In class, it might be fruitful to juxtapose the list of treasure awarded—lavishly but unequally—to the men of Cajamarca with, say, an early seventeenth-century New England town compact, and contrast these sharply different models for the beginning of a European settler society.

Camilla Townsend examines the process of conquest in a very different style, influenced by narrative history and growing interest in Native women as cultural go-betweens, in Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (2006). Malintzin, also called La Malinche, was one of twenty young women whom the Maya gave to Cortes’s expedition to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Of Nahua ethnicity, apparently born into a subordinate status (possibly as a concubine’s child) in a nobleman’s household and later enslaved by the Maya, Malintzin was an accomplished linguist who became a translator, cultural guide, and power broker for Cortés. Her life story gives Townsend occasion to explore crucial dimensions of early sixteenth-century Mexico, such as the complex linguistic and political situation on the fringes of the Aztec Empire and indigenous artisans’ learning about Spanish materials and technology by, for example, repairing Spanish ships. While Malintzin’s life was in many respects exceptional, Townsend maintains that there were “many potential Malinches”—and her story may help us imagine the less amply documented experiences of a host of Native women who served as cultural guides and translators in colonial North America.

For a picture of mature Spanish colonial society, try Charles F. Walker’s Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (2008). A strong earthquake struck the city of Lima—population about 50,000—on the night of October 28, 1746, followed by a tsunami that sank nineteen ships and drowned most of the population of Lima’s port, Callao. While survivors agreed that these disasters were a sign of God’s wrath, they did not all agree about why God was angry, and the project of rebuilding Peru’s capital sparked intense discussions of enlightened colonialism, the role of the Catholic Church in Peruvian society, and what constituted public order. It also spurred the creation of a cascade of documents, which Walker mined for this study. The timing of the crisis makes it convenient to compare the city of Lima, and the issues it was facing in the 1740s and 1750s, with colonial North American cities—all of which were smaller than Lima—just before the Seven Years’ War.

Another picture of mature Spanish colonial society can be gleaned from Ward Stavig’s The World of Tupac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru (1999), a “‘ground up’ ethnohistory” that has proven very popular as a teaching text. Stavig examines the lives of Andean Indians, ranging from diet and marriage customs to labor classifications, taxation, and the administration of justice, in the eighteenth century. This was a world in which Spanish policy was delicately interwoven with preexisting Andean law and custom; Andean culture was strained but hardly vanquished under Spanish rule. Stavig depicts the Tupac Amaru Uprising of 1780 as emerging not from a reactionary community but from a vibrant one struggling to cope with a population resurgence that strained available farmland and an imperial reorganization that disrupted established trade networks. The creative reorganization of Andean society that Stavig depicts echoes—with some different nuances, and on a larger scale—the emergence of new ethnic identities and political strategies among North American Indians depicted by James Merrell and Daniel Richter, among others.

There is a rich corpus of scholarship on women—white, black, and Indian—in Spanish colonial America. A good starting point is Susan Migden Socolow’s brisk overview, The Women of Colonial Latin America (2000). What jumped out at me, the first time I read this book, was how varied the life trajectories of Latin American women were. This was due in part to the widespread presence of convents, which the Spanish began to establish within a generation of conquest. Convents provided not a single way of life, but several: a relatively leisured and studious retirement for elite creole women; respectable employment for poorer or mestiza “nuns of the white veil,” who performed much of the physical labor; schooling for well-to-do white and mestiza girls; refuge for illegitimate, often mixed-race, children whose parents shunted them into convents. For a fuller picture of the role that convents played in colonial Latin American society, see Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (1999). Burns emphasizes the crucial role that convents played in the Andean economy as lenders and landlords; collectively, nuns exercised economic as well as spiritual power. As there were no comparable female-run institutions in British or Dutch North America, it might be interesting for a class to consider what the absence of convents—and indeed, of any lifestyle not based on family life or servitude—implied for women’s social roles in the Protestant colonies.

It was not only by embracing the religious life, however, that Latin American women charted their own paths. Spanish colonial cities, in which women generally predominated among every non-white social group, were places where poor and middling women labored in diverse ways, as slaves, servants, street vendors, shopkeepers, and textile workers in the obrajes (factories) that were established from the late sixteenth century onward. Urban, mixed-race women, middling or poor, often eschewed legal marriage, perhaps in an effort to preserve their economic independence. Patricia Seed’s To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 (1988) burst my preconception that propertied Latin American women tended to have little say in whom they married. Seed argues that, on the contrary, the church emphasized the value of free will and individual consent, occasionally even compelling families to accept interracial marriages—although economic interest and parental preference gained ground in the eighteenth century. The panorama of women’s lives in colonial Spanish America makes an intriguing counterpoint to colonial North America, where women’s lives—especially those of free white women—seem to have been more emphatically constrained by household work, marriage, and motherhood.

Another book that challenged my preconceptions about Spanish America is Kathryn Burns’s Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (2010), which highlights the central role of literacy and written texts in Spanish colonial society. Somehow, I had never envisioned Spanish colonial America as a highly literate society. But Lockhart notes in Men of Cajamarca that nearly 10 percent of Pizarro’s expedition members were notaries, and Burns examines at length the work of these officials, men who were not only literate but trained in formulating documents in legally binding language, and who gave “an official ‘voice'” to others’ instructions and testimony. Into the Archiveilluminates the formality and legalism of Spanish colonial society while also underlining the breadth of participation in that culture. Notaries helped Spanish colonists, even those of modest means or of Native American ancestry, to manipulate the presentation of information in the documentary record. Reading Into the Archive led me to wonder how studied or unstudied were the productions of the more widely literate population of British North America. Could a modestly literate New England farmer who drafted his own will dictate the disposition of his estate as effectively as an illiterate Peruvian colonist who hired a notary to draft his will for him?

An excellent introduction to economic and environmental issues is Shawn William Miller’s An Environmental History of Latin America (2007), which spans the colonial and modern periods. This is a useful book to read if one wants to get a bird’s-eye view of the ebb and flow of human society in Latin America over centuries in a couple hundred pages. Miller begins with pre-Columbian Native American civilizations and vividly depicts the expansion of “nature”—and the rise of what he calls the Pristine Myth—as Latin America’s population and agriculture collapsed in response to the incursion of Old World microbes. The story he tells is essentially similar to the story of North America’s population collapse, but it is even starker and easier to envision because Mesoamerica and South America had larger, denser pre-Columbian populations and more extensive agricultural societies.

As I started to read more colonial Latin American history, I was struck by how differently slavery fits into the historiography of colonial Spanish America as compared to colonial North America. Spanish colonizers used African slaves; in the late eighteenth century, there were more than 100,000 African and African-American slaves in Spanish America, diffused throughout the empire but concentrated in Venezuela and Peru. In most regions of Spanish America, however, African slavery existed as an adjunct to encomienda, mita, and other Native American labor systems, and historians of colonial Spanish America tend most often to discuss slavery within the broader context of regional economies or urban life. For an introduction to the topic, see Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World or one of the textbooks mentioned below. The point one might wish to make in teaching is that different New World empires, with equally ready access to African slaves, used them to different degrees and in different ways. Spain’s extensive legal tradition regarding slavery seems to have offered some degree of protection to slaves in the Spanish Empire, but the different social and economic context in which slavery existed in the Spanish Empire probably also led Spanish colonists to perceive slavery differently from British colonists—and this difference in outlook has carried over into modern historical writing about slavery in Spanish America.

Casta paintings are an invaluable visual source to use in teaching about racial attitudes in the Spanish Empire. Produced mainly though not exclusively in eighteenth-century Mexico, and marketed to affluent Spaniards to display in their homes or take back to Spain as souvenirs of their colonial service, casta paintings are formulaic depictions of the racial taxonomy of the mature Spanish Empire. What would a person who was one quarter Spanish, one quarter African, and one half Native American look like? Casta paintings depicted such mixed-race persons, often in plausibly American landscapes with culturally appropriate clothing and occupations, and spark lively class discussions of contrasting attitudes toward racial mixing in Spanish and British America.

Readers may notice the distinct regional tilt of this list: the books that focus on specific places all focus on Mexico or Peru, the Native American population centers and the initial centers of Spanish settlement. Rio de La Plata, New Granada, the southern half of Central America, and the Spanish Caribbean do not appear. There is a wider literature on these regions in Spanish, but book-length works in English are few; if you are exploring the history of colonial Latin America in English, you will encounter the peripheries of Spanish settlement mainly in survey works and national histories. The textbooks cited below model some helpful ways of integrating the Caribbean and the later-settled mainland regions into the story. The point one might wish to make in teaching is that two core settlements—the seats of the two sixteenth-century viceroyalties—dominated the development of Spanish colonial America, not only politically and economically but also imaginatively, much more fully than any one or two settlements dominated the development of colonial North America. The centralization of Spain’s colonial empire highlights the decentralization of Britain’s.

Two short trips to Latin America taught me two lessons about the region that I had not fully gleaned from textbooks: one about the formality of Spain’s carefully planned cities, with their geometric layout, public gathering places, and visual evocation of clerical and secular authority; the other about the agricultural orientation of Latin America—which survives to this day, even though South America is the world’s second most highly urbanized continent—and the intense connection of the people to the land. The former of these, at least, may be conveyed to students by showing them a selection of city maps and plans as well as photographs of some of the splendid colonial plazas that still dominate Latin American cities.

This is an eclectic list—a collation of personal favorites—and another teacher of history might come up with a list quite different and equally rich. Whether you follow these paths or other ones into the subject, though, I urge you to try teaching early American history in a manner that does not only look backward, to the heritage of medieval and Tudor England, nor forward, to the independent United States, but also sideways, to the huge colonial enterprise that was unfolding to the south as the European colonies in North America took shape.

Further reading:

While the monographs mentioned above are some of the most engaging entry points into the subject of colonial Latin America, it can be handy to have a comprehensive textbook on the bookshelf, too. The most widely assigned textbook is Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson’s Colonial Latin America, 8th ed. (Oxford, 2012). Alternately, Jonathan C. Brown’s Latin America: A Social History of the Colonial Period (Belmont, Calif., 2005) is strong on social conflicts and the background to independence movements. An older textbook, James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz’s Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge, 1983), offers an integrated treatment of Spanish and Portuguese regions, with helpful diagrams of the economic, social, and spatial dynamics of encomiendas, towns, and mining regions.

A classic document reader, containing hundreds of very short selections, is Robert Buffington and Lila Caimari, eds., Keen’s Latin American Civilization: History and Society, 1492 to the Present, 9th ed. (Boulder, Colo., 2009). Duke University Press has an excellent series of readers, including both primary sources and selections from scholarly works, on several Latin American nations—for example, Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, eds., The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, 2002) and Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo, eds., The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, 2002). These readers emphasize the post-independence era, but they contain some excellent resources on the colonial period as well.

There is a rich body of scholarship on colonial Brazil, quite distinct from the literature on colonial Spanish America. While that is beyond the purview of this essay, a good starting point would be any of the textbooks mentioned above plus Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna’s Slavery in Brazil (Cambridge, 2009).

For casta paintings, see Susan Deans-Smith’s article “Casta Paintings.” Good images for use in class discussion can be found on Peter Bakewell’s “Colonial Latin America” page. The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University has a wealth of curricular materials on “Settlements and Colonial Cities in the Andean Region,” assembled by M. Karen Jogan.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Darcy R. Fryer, the editor of the Common School column, teaches history at the Brearley School in New York.