In a sense, within an imperial context, humanitarian assistance inadvertently provided some Acadian women refugees with a platform unlike they had ever had before. 

More importantly, our misappropriation of “puritan” has allowed scholars to ignore and the public to misunderstand religion.

Marine insurance itself was a business that flourished during periods of war and uncertainty. It had a complex relationship with the British state.

Rather than seeking to extinguish the humanity of its victims, slavery rather invests in, and relies upon, their human capacity for suffering.

Within the narrow rhetoric of antislavery politics that shape Prince’s narrative, however, steady articulation of money markets, repeated reference to financial transactions, and descriptions of resource accrual stand out in a declared autobiography, a distinctly literary production.

The power base for revolution was with the great mass of slaves who became the nouveau libres. Toussaint in all his rhetoric identified himself with that group, to which he did not in fact belong.

Why are early Americanists so obsessed with region—with geography, in short—rather than with chronology?

There was something refreshing about reading a book like this, which I came to completely unburdened by expectations. There was no need to ponder, as I read, whether The Wonderful World of Disney had handled the material well.

Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe’s Traite des Nègres (ca. 1825)

For the better part of a century, social historians have wrestled with the problem of the one and the many—that is […]

The enthusiasm some sailors showed for reproducing American racial spectacle overseas suggests not only their own warm embrace of the era’s popular theatre, but also their aspiration to familiarize foreign societies with the nation’s cultural landscape.

Crèvecoeur, William Bartram, Jefferson, and Audubon appropriate the “ideological assumptions, discursive conventions, and representational techniques” of earlier Caribbean natural histories to debate the implications of plantation slavery for a nation ostensibly committed to equality.

At a slim forty-seven pages and mere twenty centimeters high, the weightiest thing about the 1770 book, Directions for the […]

Keys are border-phenomenon that split the world into a within and a without and, in the seventeenth century, record a surprisingly tight fit between subject and object.

To understand why credit was more important than cash in the activities of any eighteenth-century trader, we have to recapture what it was to buy and sell goods at the time.

Although Puritans designed their service in direct opposition to the Catholic mass, its practitioners’ version of the Lord’s Supper had more in common with the mass than they wanted to admit.

Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation Busts are odd things. Heads free of their bodies, severed at the shoulders, often at […]

No saga of personal hardship and aristocratic skullduggery so captivated the British public in the eighteenth century as Annesley’s turbulent life.

The ephemerality of this document contrasts with the indelible event it announced: Spain’s final closure of the port of New Orleans to Americans.

Rice revolutionized life in Carolina, making the colony the richest in British North America. South Carolina also became home to the American mainland’s most brutal slave regime.

There was only one source of value in coin, Locke was saying, and that was its silver content.

Some new evidence on an old controversy

After spending the summer of 1890 in Venice, the American painter Thomas Moran boarded a steamship with a seemingly odd (and cumbersome) souvenir.

In Rezek’s view, the national literatures of the U.S., Ireland, and Scotland look less like the pure reflections of their respective cultures or peoples than, collectively, like a set of provincial riffs off a metropolitan literary standard.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even in more recent times, international trade by sea simultaneously created conditions of intense isolation and exhilarating social interaction.

In September of 1776, the Continental Navy became the first American military branch to designate an official uniform. In March […]

Did fugitive slaves find haven on naval ships? And […] could I trace the lives of some of the colored mariners I had identified from other sources?

Impulsive and volatile, brave and rapacious, the pirates who came to life on the pages of Bucaniers of America served up an alternative model of manliness.

Vikings—Scandinavian adventurers who expanded, as far east as the Ukraine and as far west as Greenland and coastal Newfoundland, between the eighth and eleventh centuries C.E.—deserve a more prominent place in early American history than they have yet garnered.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Descriptive and analytical, the sea eye serves also as a metaphor and a theory of representation.

What started out as just wanting to make a few paintings of whales ultimately became an eight-year project, with still no end in sight.

In Bermuda’s new maritime economy it was labor, not land, that was key.

While O’Shaughnessy is always willing to criticize the men he profiles and to highlight the ways in which their personalities shaped their choices for better and worse, his treatments are consistently generous.

It turns out that historians’ inconsistent chronology had not actually been “wrong”; it was incomplete.

John Dixon’s welcome study of Cadwallader Colden is the most comprehensive of the few biographies we have of this important North Briton colonial.

The labor theory of settlement contains some conflicts with the standard liberal account.

If newspaper producers had aspirations to grandeur in their self-presentation, readers took a somewhat dimmer view.

In the antebellum era, well after the fall of the international slave trade, American abolitionists consistently turned to the domestic auction block for propaganda

My primary goal was to understand how impressment worked, not to settle once and for all the question of “how bad was it?”

Benevolence purchased a respectability that could transcend religious denominations.

In his new, excellent book on Puritanism, Baird Tipson emphasizes that this life of faith accrued assurance of salvation over the long haul. Conversion was not a moment; it was more like momentum.

Few topics in Atlantic history elicit more debate or stronger feelings than the transatlantic slave trade.

Because of their insistence on pacifism, Quakers historically have been treated as suspicious, at best, or traitors, at worst.

Historians have long used metaphors drawn from geology and archaeology to describe their work; they are always “digging into archives,” […]

To speak of the imperfection and incompleteness of numerical data is, for Piketty, a way of speaking about the work of the economist.

The birth of a nation is not only or always a national story.

Craving a taste of home—something to break the monotony of bland diets masters sometimes planned for them—African slaves applied knowledge that they possessed to grow some of their own food.

War in Europe set the stage for political crisis, revolution, civil war, and the fragmentation of Spanish America.

After the provisions trade with Cape Breton had been reduced to a trickle following its prohibition by the New York General Assembly, the French enemy was supplied by way of the neutral Dutch and Danish islands in the West Indies.

For whites, death was perpetually connected to property and commercial exchange—yet another feature of a worldview centered upon economic transactions. For blacks, death became a way to create a culture that actually celebrated life by recognizing the interrelationship between the living and the dead.

When did the United States become a global force? A digital history project creates a space for answering this question.

Considering figures as diverse as Bach, Jefferson, Beethoven, and Frederick Douglass, Catherine Jones explores the interaction of two major art forms over the course of a century.

Sarah Nehama’s catalogue In Death Lamented was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that she curated […]

In the afterword to The Potter’s Hand, its author, A. N. Wilson, identifies the novel as a work of historical […]

In the 1847 Grammar of the Mpongwe Language, principally authored by John Leighton Wilson, the American missionary to Gabon marveled […]

“This study presents the kind of creative synthesis and thoughtful working-out of big ideas that will make it required reading. . . “

The continental versus Atlantic debate is more about historiography than history.

Caleb Smith, The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 288 pp., $35.

Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 350 pp., $29.99.

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.

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.

How would we, the voyagers, find quiet moments for reflection on this remarkable voyage? How would we behave among strangers?

Schultz paints a picture of an increasingly divided church in the United States, with miracles being only one of the issues on which the camps disagreed.

The Greeks were the cradle of the West. No others need apply.

The satire’s narrator is a louse who has lived on a series of heads in and around Paris and been witness to the political maneuverings happening behind the scenes of the American Revolution.

Published as part of the Special Edition: “First Person: The 38th Voyage”

I took from time with the Morgan an energized and reconceived sense of how to stage participatory projects, both within the academy and under the aegis of other cultural institutions.

There is a rich tradition of writing in Spanish on colonial catastrophe, illness, and violence.

You don’t show up in a predominantly Muslim country during Ramadan and just start asking questions.

The American Revolution was disruptive and challenging for plantation societies. Its most significant long-term effect was an artificial separation of […]

How should the course move forward, and what should the storyline be?

How Durben in Glasgow Became Dearborn in Quebec I discovered a Revolutionary-era journal written by a Captain Durben—from an unexpected […]

In truth, I run with the Atlanticist crowd for a selfish reason: because Atlantic history allows me to be in two places at once. And by “be,” I mean “be,” as in “exist or live,” or better yet, “belong.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Sparks’s Ledyard is thus the supreme romantic hero. His adventures are not inhibited by worldly concerns or fear of physical suffering; like the ancient Stoics or the great saints of Christendom, he freely sacrificed himself for some greater cause.

Who were these intrepid, incestuous, robust pioneers of whom Bemiss spoke? They were Americans, of course, whose, “extraordinary activity and energy” were “due to the composite nature of their blood.”

Davis traces the roots of racism in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions that used the biblical “Curse on Ham” story to justify the enslavement of Africans and equated blackness with sin, slavery, and pollution.

Why do people perpetuate, by continuing to live within, societies in which violence, both threatened and actual, is a constant of life?

Hakluyt’s life’s work, to the extent that it is captured in his publications, takes center stage in this history.

Menard is not alone in arguing for a reevaluation of the sugar revolution. But what he, as one of the most esteemed historians of the Atlantic economy, offers is a lucid and at times devastatingly simple case that makes it unmistakably clear that sugar alone did not revolutionize Barbados in the seventeenth century.

Economic history still has something to tell us.

Published as part of the Special Edition “First Person: The 38th Voyage”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Taken together, Paris and Amsterdam throw into bold relief the radical nature of the nineteenth-century city.”

Pestana argues convincingly that the policies pursued by each English settlement were based in a pragmatic appraisal of local circumstances and interests.

History conveniently divided by nation-state boundaries and imperial rule to conform to academic specialization has neglected how fluid these commercial, cultural, political, and social boundaries have been since the fifteenth century.

“Taylor’s text ends not, as almost all colonial American histories do, with a chapter on the coming of the Revolution, but with one that examines the expansion of various European empires to the West Coast of North America and to the islands of the Pacific Ocean.”

the Seven Years’ War was actually a war for several different empires–each shaped as much by provincial conditions as by metropolitan goals–with the one that culminated in the independence of the United States being only the most conspicuous.

Time and again between the earliest period of colonization and the Civil War, North American people waged ferocious war over […]

I found out my pirate name: Calico Bess Kidd. I installed a Multi-Lingual Pirate Insult Generator on my laptop, you poxy bilge rat. […]

“Whites were free, blacks were slaves. Yet there was constant interaction.”

“[The Journal of Henri Joutel] doesn’t fit into Anglo-American heroic origins, like Lewis and Clark’s journals, and it hasn’t enjoyed a revival as Chicano literature the way Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios has. Yet as exploration narrative it’s much better than the former and every bit as good as the latter.”

“All of these books provide extended meditations on the ambiguities of power. Empire itself is an endlessly variant term, always imprecisely invoked and vaguely understood.”

Crucible of War begins with hints toward the possibility of a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent (to steal a phrase from Kant), but ends firmly within the paradigm of American history.

At the very least Linebaugh and Rediker break the tradition of treating mixed-race love as purely exploitative and herein lift such a union into a brave act of defiance.

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The card catalog in the Amsterdam Municipal Archive is a thing of legend among Dutch historians . . .