Once highly valuable, salt affords a new look at life, environment, and sovereignty in the southwest borderlands.

The dispossession of Native lands for the purposes of organizing English tobacco plantations was a deepening and broadening of merchant capitalism in Virginia.

The Dawn of Everything provides a framework that engages with “big history” or “deep history” while avoiding explanations that flirt with biological, demographic, environmental, or technological determinism.

“Most students recognize the value of having a textbook to provide an overview but see textbooks as boring, predigested, and avoiding all controversy.”

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

“For most of the twentieth century, the actual year of the founding of Santa Fe was a matter of historical speculation, and the name of its founder, Juan Martinez de Montoya, has only recently been accepted by scholars.”

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

“Tenochtitlan’s precarious, dynamic order was held together by a passionate devotion to religion and the discharging of the Aztecs’ special and ever-expanding obligation to the gods.”

The racial agenda preserved in nineteenth-century print culture resonates with contemporary U.S.-Mexico relations.

In the years that followed the annexation, plans for the next North American grab (or purchase) of Mexican lands became a regular topic of debate on the pages of U.S. newspapers.

Looking at this peaceful, productive view, you would never imagine that Barbados had recently been hit by a devastating hurricane that reduced the machinery of the booming sugar industry to smithereens and threatened to overturn the island’s slaveholding society.

Calling the exercise a Caribbean “game” begs the question of who, in the end, won the Caribbean.

For all its virtues, something was lost in translation.

The ways that maps and boundaries failed to match actual landforms often had momentous historical consequences

The Puritan freemen may have the loudest voices in the archive; but theirs are not the only narratives being told.

Among the library’s less heralded holdings are scores of volumes of community and parish records–including the revealing London list of burials mentioned above–major and minor manuscript collections (on paper or microfilm), and a substantial number of prints, paintings, maps, and other visual records, especially from the Renaissance but also before and after that era.

A more extravagant disregard for instructions on his second expedition would lead him deep into California—still a part of Mexico—and would win him not censure, but fame.

Through its mythic participation in Penn’s Treaty, the wood of the Treaty Elm became saturated with associated moral values and lessons.

In 1791, Ottawa war leader Egushawa remarked that he would rather fight an American army than be prisoner to their […]

How Philip came to figure in the Grand March involves a story of music’s complex intertwining with memory in colonial contexts.

Is Columbus truly the moral equivalent of Hitler, as some of his critics argue? Was the ‘first Thanksgiving’ merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?

These texts show how Anglo-Americans learned to love their walls and fences.

The gap between academic and popular understandings of early American topics is an enduring challenge for early Americanists. In the case of Thanksgiving, that gap is widening.

Newell’s harrowing evidence effectively demonstrates the ruthlessness by which English settlers engineered expropriation of Indian bodies, forcing them into servitude and slavery.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the history of New France seemed to drift from French historical consciousness.

“Did Moncacht-apé really make this transcontinental journey nearly a century before Lewis and Clark?

When read closely, the 1670 deed challenges our tendency to see deeds as merely evidence of Indians’ capitulation to colonial rule.

In a world where not everyone could read or even speak a common language, everyone could make music, and did.

In the 2013-2014 academic year, over 350 historians collaborated to produce The American Yawp, a free online, collaboratively built American history textbook.

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.

The importance of clarity—of, as a white writer, being crystal clear about what I was saying, particularly in regard to indigenous languages and history—led me toward prose.

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

While Protestantism might have informed migrants’ decisions to move, the availability of relatively cheap and fertile land determined where and when they went.

The machinery that hastened the middle ground’s destruction continued to run through the mid-nineteenth century, concurrently eroding “frontier” politics and culture and inflicting and enforcing northeastern forms.

By 1776, backcountry Indian-hating had become a patriotic virtue as quintessentially American as independence, self-sacrifice, and egalitarianism.

Capitalism and the state were not (and are not) separate and autonomous operations, and “free trade” was sometimes combined with military aggression.

In the early years both Native Americans and Europeans were proud, suspicious, and ill-informed.

Native oral traditions tell us not only about Native histories but also about global imperial conquest and can be interpreted as literal accounts of colonial interaction.

I first came across Thomas Harriot’s strange and wonderful account, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), in the large, sepia-toned Dover edition—”The Complete 1590 Theodor de Bry Edition”—on the shelves of the university bookstore.

Statement of Poetic Research My first real awakening to the poetic pursuit that has filled the last ten years of […]

Europeans embraced tobacco’s healing properties, just as the Aztec did, and the consumption of chocolate in European culture “simultaneously served to fortify social bonds and underscore, or even confer, distinction”

One impressive and very useful feature of the site lies in its function as a central clearinghouse for information about the state. In an effort to be comprehensive, the site’s creators are engaged in “assisting institutions across the state in digitizing their records and placing them online for easy access.”

The sovereign vacuum created by the inability of any power to serve the needs of backcountry settlers politicized the early national West.

The books under review here all concern power, its loss and its consolidation.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

The landscape was often unforgiving, making exploration difficult, and when the Spanish attempted to get help from the many Native groups in the region they were often met with silence or hostility.

I do not see the nation unfolding in a linear progression away from “Britishness” and towards cultural independence. Instead, what my research shows is that in the years following the Revolution […] Americans vacillated between emulation and repudiation of the mother country.

The presence of educated Native young men who pursued legal action in American courts, addressed American legislative bodies, and created written constitutions did not confirm the success of American acculturation efforts; rather, it threatened American efforts to seize Native land.

What Farrell lays out is a fascinating spectacle, a colonial practice of counting bodies that is perpetually collapsing and producing odd, indeterminate results, even as it consolidates its conceptual hold as a way of thinking about human communities.

Sometimes un-knowing our learned assumptions . . . “requires both the associative and the imaginative flexibilities of intellectual and speculative history, respectively.”

Carla Mulford’s new book examines Benjamin Franklin’s approach to empire.

While the Puritans feared the encroachment of the wilderness on their borders, the greater, paradoxical fear was of the perversion of the natural order lurking within human nature itself.

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

On July 4, 1054, Chinese astronomers noted a “guest star” in the constellation Taurus. They had actually witnessed a supernova, […]

If Jortner’s point is to regain the contingency, and peel away the sense of inevitability of American expansion, he leaves the reader with no real explanation for the course of events.

Artists painted these Indian men and women for a variety of reasons, but they began with diplomatic intentions.

Putting the French in their rightful place in American history, Gitlin insists, requires “put[ting] Parkman behind us.”

For much of the seventeenth century, when regions outside of the Delaware Valley erupted in violence, the valley itself, home […]

“How to establish a French province in America without immigration? A solution presented itself in the transformation of Indians into Frenchmen.”

Sometimes we find new ways of seeing by facing the wrong direction.

History on Trial is the product of collaborations among graduate students, Lehigh faculty, librarians, technical staff, students, high school teachers, and early Americanists nationally.

Indigenous and Atlantic Histories Common-place sits down with Brett H. Rushforth to discuss his 2012 book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous […]

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

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

La felice victoria: Bartolomé de Flores’s A Newly Composed Work, Which Recounts the Happy Victory That God, in His Infinite […]

I’m not in the habit of reading my work once it appears in print.

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.

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.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Standing alongside the heroic and saintly Serras of the Capitol and the Catholic Church is a villainous Serra with the worst features of Christopher Columbus, a man whose own life story is overshadowed by everything he has come to embody and symbolize to his detractors.

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

“The sense of purpose that guided settlers, that covered the distance from old to new, created a most bourgeois environment of great expectations, of possibilities, even entitlement.”

Misery is the new black.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Even before the confirmation of the gold discoveries—or simultaneously with the confirmation—the French began to think about the significance of California as an American possession.

The book extrapolates from overwhelmingly catastrophic, unsettling details to examine larger questions.

The advent of narrative history in the popular press makes engaging history students seem like a simple task. However, as […]

“[S]ilver was the magnet, the engine, the driving passion, the dazzling reward.”

At first glance the map may not seem like the work of one of the best-informed Frenchmen in colonial Louisiana…

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

Donegan allows us to see the settlers as a mentally and physically marked population.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The mission of the expedition begun for imperial adventure, expansion, and wealth for Russia in the North Pacific was both an ambitious and an ambiguous one.

How do we think about early American legacies today? And should we be thinking about them at all?

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

His intellectual powers were fully equal to the challenges of helping his father gather plant specimens and linguistic vocabularies. The emotional stress of the voyage was another matter.

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

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

“It was very hot and damp six months a year, it was one of the least-favored ports in the New World, and huge swarms of insects appeared seasonally with terrifying predictability.”

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

[I]n the days when wind and sail provided the fastest means of travel, when continental and global circumnavigations lay far in the future, there was no obvious way to test whether widely separated seas, such as those that lay off the Arabian Peninsula and those of the Mediterranean, were in any way contiguous.

How could any scholar claim to have seriously interpreted the history of the
Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

American state, without foregrounding the experience of those peoples who were first, most frequently, and most punishingly targeted by government policy in the United States?

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.

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

“This was the great idea that, out of the wreckage of Spanish imperialism to which the Catholic Church had attached itself, came from the variously sanctified and base mixings of the Americas: the stunning idea that people were not one thing or the other, nor even some cross between two civilizations, but some new mestizaje, some new way of being altogether.”

The colony established a model for success that all subsequent English colonies would follow.

Ephrata monks experienced an intentional and dramatic physical transformation.

I am now intrigued, as a textbook coauthor, by how readily many of my peers still dismiss the enterprise of textbook writing.

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 are the tropics so appealing to reality-TV producers and viewers?

It is hard for Kelso to shake off a heritage that seems at once so romantic and so compellingly patriotic.

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

Brown, like Melville, gives the reader the impression that he is playing with masks. You are not sure which mask is hiding his true intention, or whether he has any true intentions at all.

Did the tragic consequences of colonialism spring from the original intent of Europeans or were they largely unexpected?

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Not only did it seem possible that species were radically different in the New World, but some early observers reported evidence that the boundaries between the plant and animal kingdoms were crossed in some cases.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The Russians soon recognized that they would gain greater profits if they could convince skilled native men to do the work for them.

Because of the importance of the region for so many diverse polities, DuVal is able to make her case more strongly that the Arkansas Valley was itself the center of North America for its Indian and European actors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The archive does not have an online or printed catalogue, which is probably why its visitors’ sign-in book has so few entries. More the pity, since it is one of those rare places with a collection broad enough to cater to a wealth of interests, and yet manageable enough to really work through.

“Richter shows that the effort to transform the traditional narrative of American history from one of the westward expansion of white settlement to one that looks eastward from Indian country is not only possible, but essential for understanding this nation’s past in all its complexity.”

[T]he arrival of European explorers such as Champlain and even ostensibly peaceful settlers such as Penn set off a violent chain reaction among native peoples, creating a culture of warfare, which ensnared almost everyone.

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

“The social center of Havana was in its harbor. Something interesting happened there almost every day.”

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The hostilities that triggered the American portion of the Seven Years’ War began in the Ohio Valley, and the war was fought in part for imperial possession of the region. But was the war really about the Ohio Valley itself?

Presented as part of the Special Issue: “Pacific Routes”

For those of us interested in the early history of the United States, these Pacific communities may not be as well known or as influential as their Atlantic counterparts, but their stories still have much to teach us.

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

Professor Birgit Brander Rasmussen’s comments from this panel will appear

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

They steered southward towards New Zealand, to try to determine if it was the northern tip of a great southern continent.

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

“[O]ur authors have consciously adopted an untraditional approach to urban history, illustrating the social, legal, and political workings of these young urban societies by writing about a particular incident, a place, an encounter, a person, or a group of urban people.”

“In the course of this densely packed narrative, readers will find fresh insights into topics ranging from the political relations among Indian confederacies to the biographies of the English men who sponsored this sinister business.”

“Plantation slavery was in decline in Louisiana when it was purchased. Thereafter, Arkansas and Missouri only came into the Union as slave states by bare majorities. Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Cause, a republic of free and independent yeoman farmers, was lost in a series of insufficiently contested choices.”

To materiality Anderson therefore joins intertextuality: every page of his analysis is marked by an acute sense of how Bradford as reader and writer draws on and responds to an extensive archive of printed books and manuscripts.

Calloway introduces the reader to the most up-to-date findings and interpretations in archaeology, but orients his own analysis around the theme of movement.

“What the journals provide, then, is access to any number of subjects–gender, race, exploration, the self, humans and nature–for which they have been only lightly used.”

“Kukla situates the purchase in the context of a fragile American union, impetuous western settlers, and calculating New England politicians.”

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

“Daily life in the city often was an adventure on its own.”

The problem–and the opportunity–as I saw it, was my students’ inclination to focus on these societies’ differences. My job was to get them to understand their similarities.

Common-place asks Victoria Freeman, author of Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America (South Royalton, Vt., forthcoming November 2002), what kinds of responsibility do descendants of dispossessors have to history and to native peoples today?

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

“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.”

“The ‘trust’ relationship between the tribes and the federal government is at best a double-edged sword.”

As rendered by Morgan, English-style freedom was naive, arrogant, and ethnocentric, qualities that readers in the post-Vietnam United States might have recognized with shame.

The scholarly enterprise, particularly the need to pursue a single-minded thesis, does not allow for much exploration of the contradictions and ambiguities that Kupperman shows were constant features of English-Indian relations.

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