For those in later years, the bell’s value lay not in its powerful sound, but in its visual representation.

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

Brockmann’s research and her insightful arguments taught me not only that plenty of knowledge production occurred in Central America before the 1820s but also that this “practical” information was designed to serve locals rather than foreigners.

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.

Insights by four early-career scholars who work at the intersection of early American studies and the digital humanities.

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.”

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.

In this era of click-bait headlines and little time to settle in with a complicated and nuanced book (not to mention pressures to publish), categories offer a quick way to make sense of complex phenomena. 

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

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History illuminates the early republic’s “unknown known”—its political unconscious—with incredible precision.

In recovering the vibrant presence of Saint Domingue/Haiti in these American moments, both books exemplify the power and promise of adopting an Atlantic lens in telling a national story…each offers a new view onto the familiar landscape of American political development between the Revolution and Reconstruction.

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.

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

Harmony was essential to the business of piracy; pirates who got along with one another stood a better chance of success in their ventures.

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”

At first glance, both books seem to share an interest in philology.

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.

Gretchen J. Woertendyke unsettles and unmoors our geographic conceptions, whether arranged by nation, region, continent, or hemisphere.

We talkwith Julia Gaffield about Haiti’s foreign relations in its early years of independence, the place of the Haitian Revolution, and the impact of the Haitian Declaration of Independence.

Many of the essays in Dillon’s and Drexler’s book focus on incidents of “obscured interdependence,” moments when the United States’s very attempts to distance itself from Haiti reveal the presence of a deep and abiding, if disavowed, relationship between the revolutionary neighbors.

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

If Piketty had turned to literary writing before Austen, he would have found a world teeming with the world-creating energies of overseas trade that economic historians take very seriously.

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

The American Mediterranean had aspects that white Southerners regarded as foreboding.

In this erudite, thoughtful, and at times sparkling study, Simon Newman—author of noteworthy earlier books on festive culture in the […]

When I was a teenager in Catholic school developing a sense of political consciousness, I fixated on the Apostle Jude, […]

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

I sensed the spark of time travel, but even the most vaporous spirits seemed unable to slip between the apertures of the past and this particular May evening.

From the moment we arrived, I could tell I was going to have a hard time making peace with resort culture.

The inked letters are in Sewall’s hand, dated March 24, 1698/9, and they read, “Nunnacôquis signifies an Indian Earthen Pot as Hannah Hahatan’s Squaw tells me.”

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

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.

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.

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.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Little money fluctuates widely in value, has lots of zeroes, is carried between the breasts of market women, and smells of overripe fruit, diesel smoke, sweat, and flesh.

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.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

[T]he Manila Galleon, rather than being a curio or sideshow, represented one of the turning points in history, for with its establishment we find for the first time “substantial and continuous trade across the Pacific Ocean.”

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

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.

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

In the 1970s a number of excellent books, using the same kinds of sources and responding to the same social movements in contemporary American society, began to open up the study of slave life in the British West Indies. The new literature on slave life in the thirteen mainland British colonies and in the antebellum South was even larger and livelier. Did I really have anything fresh to contribute?

Instantly there is a strong spark and stroke, and the whole line of gold, which completes the communication, between the top and bottom of the bottle, [appears] a vivid flame, like the sharpest lightning

For historians, perhaps the bottom line is whether one learns well or badly from a novel. Is Harrigan’s The Gates of the Alamo a good teacher about Texas in the mid-1830s?

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