Who was that traveler? And what did she signify to the poet?

Especially in the early years, with no grammar books or dictionaries of spoken languages, missionaries relied heavily on their cultural know-how and linguistic expertise and came to learn about the nuances of Armenian culture through them.

Ultimately, books are static, material things. As historians and writers, we’re always changing, and so is the field of history.

Beneath and between its profoundly conservative and aristocratic institutions, Paine’s Britain was a rude, irreverent place where power was fragmented and liberty celebrated.

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

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.

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.

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

For Roylance, nineteenth-century imperial eclipse narratives did not serve as purely cautionary tales nor as negative examples.

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.

“Convinced of their superior might, the British decided they could do as they pleased. After all, with the French gone, they were now the only game in town. It was time for the Indians to bend to their rules.”

Nearly since the ink was drying on the Declaration of Independence, nationalistic Americans have opined that American nationhood was inevitable, […]

Tennenhouse urges us to look beyond the political schism of the Revolution toward a generic English culture that was reproduced and adapted in colonial North America and that ironically became even more English after the colonists won political independence.

Nelson’s driving argument is that the “fear of legislative tyranny” that animated royalists in the 1640s and 1650s also shaped the constitutional thought of an influential group he labels “patriot royalists.”

Living as I do in Williamsburg, Virginia, I am surrounded by the American Revolution. Here are the buildings where the […]

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.

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.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The value of silver for individual Europeans was obvious and longstanding: it meant wealth. For governments, it meant not just wealth, but also power.

The archive is small but so is the country, and because of that it remains manageable.

Indians looked on landless and drifting sailors, existing outside of the kin relations that defined Illahee, with suspicion. Yet through prostitution, intermarriage, working together, and trade, the fragments of a colonial society were formed that did not privilege the American vision of Oregon.

Lorenzo Dow Dreams of Empire in the Era of Good Feelings Before they left for a preaching tour of England […]

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

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

[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.”

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

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