Sinha also greatly enlarges the temporal boundaries students are accustomed to (1865 to 1877), by covering the end of the nineteenth century—including labor reform movements, the subjugation of Native American tribes in the West, and the rise of American imperialism—into the Progressive era with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment.

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow, despite the weighty authority of astronomical science, will be no better. 

This is why you need a plan: to read attentively but efficiently, and sustainably, without surrendering your book-life balance.

Even before the miniaturization of mokuks as souvenir items, these folded birchbark baskets served as trade items that also facilitated diplomacy between Native and colonial nations.

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

Women’s economic labor was essential to state function.

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

The outlines of “salvation antiquarianism”—with the emphasis on “saving” both in terms of preservation and Christian redemption—appears particularly clearly in the AAS’s inaugural 1813 address.

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.

While we strive to approach our discipline objectively—to maintain distance—we also want to bridge the gap between ourselves and the past. We want to understand it, to feel it, and distance makes that empathy difficult.

Indeed, early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years. This deeper history of salt shaped space, relations, and power dynamics during the eighteenth century in ways both explicit and obscure.

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama?

I had a longtime fascination with both the Latter-Day Saints and the Inca Empire. To find this point of contact across centuries and hemispheres gave me something of the confused pleasure one feels on learning that two good friends know each other independently from oneself.

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.”

For all its virtues, something was lost in translation.

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

Like the agents and reagents of a chemical demonstration, Winthrop’s specimens illustrated a fundamental transformation as they were unpacked from their crates: not a transformation in their material state, per se, but rather an alteration of the New World environment and the political economy of colonial New England according to Winthrop’s careful designs.

“Few places in American history have been so much to so many: a house for parents and children; a workplace for slaves and servants; and, for the Indians who journeyed there from as far as Nova Scotia and South Carolina, an embassy, a store, and a clearinghouse for news.”

Celilo Falls was the economic and spiritual center of the Indian world in the Pacific Northwest.

Indians and English people shared a measure of common ground in their understanding of animals.

Ultimately, what seems to distinguish sacred violence from other acts of aggression is not its form but its intensity.

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

An unlikely alliance in antebellum America

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

Down and dirty in eighteenth-century London and Boston

Newspapers have included a letter to the editor section as a public forum for debate for as long as they have circulated, yet we remain divided on how to read them.

I have visited tribal casinos in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, but none of them compare to the Mohegan Sun . . .

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.

It might have been old age that dimmed his memory and robbed him of a garrulousness that likely tired his grandchildren. It might have been the diffidence of a habitual loser unaccustomed to telling officialdom something good about himself. It might have been a posttraumatic reluctance to delve too deeply into old memories of terror and pain.

British flogging of impressed American sailors was particularly resented because of its association with the treatment of slaves in the southern states.

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

Recent scholarship reminds us how eighteenth-century letters were produced and consumed very differently than we might imagine, certainly in the Native communities of New England.

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

The book’s contribution is not that it places Native Americans at center stage … but that it highlights inter-Indian diplomacy and other forms of interaction between Native peoples.

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.

To plan for the observation of the events central to the history of seventeenth-century New England, a partnership of organizations and individuals was formed as New England Beginnings in 2015.

Material culture interfered with the seemingly inexorable rise of racialism in Louisiana, creating its own chronology, and highlighting the uneven development and fractured character of the process of racialization in North America.

Evocations of Survivance: Native Storiers in Word and Image in Remembrance of Sand Creek

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.

has had great power, and not just for colonial domination, yet one doesn’t want to reduce all minority communications history to the same story.

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.

In the inability of the Mexican government to halt the raids and force Indians into submission, many Americans saw further proof of Mexican inferiority and yet another indication of American destiny to take Mexican territory as its own.

Krech is concerned with the many spiritual meanings Indians assigned birds, whether as dark omens of sickness and death, symbols of personal power and physical prowess, sources of luck, expressions of love, or embodiments of beauty.

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.

  Read Statement on Poetic Research for Two Pieces   Cape Cod 1837 [found document: obituary] Jan 19, 1837, Barnstable County […]

all source material is from the 17th century and appears in single quotes

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.

As with the Indian treaties portal, the intended audience for this site is not altogether clear. Perhaps the goal is simply to create a platform for further investigation by anyone who wants to learn more about the Omahas.

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 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.

… when you visit Digital Paxton—which you can do from your desktop or your smartphone—you’ll automatically enter the introductory path.

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.”

The new United States was born of a violent and sudden revolution. For decades after that revolution, the states, far from united, were an uncertain amalgam of diverse peoples, religions, and languages.

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.

These projects represent different approaches to the larger project of decolonizing archives, ranging from digital repatriation to deeper reflections on the colonial nature of the archive itself.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation. The Indigenous objects that once resided in early American collections present powerful opportunities for institutions to reflect on their own entanglements with centuries-long patterns of dispossession and settler colonialism.

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

When editorial work is done well, it prods you toward a new way of thinking about a text or set of texts without closing down other interpretive possibilities.

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.

At the heart of Commerce by a Frozen Sea is the beaver hat, which by the seventeenth century had become an essential […]

Looking for connections between various reform movements, rather than examining them as distinct entities, can reveal surprising convergences.

Assassin’s Creed 3 presents players with a large number of both historic and fictional non-player characters, but unfortunately the majority of these come across as little more than plot elements.

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

In these galleries, the museum’s curators have been able to unite many of its familiar objects with less familiar ones that had formerly been relegated to storage, more than doubling what had been on view before.

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.”

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

On Finding the Earliest Known Poem by John Rollin Ridge, the First Native American Novelist I sometimes think that I […]

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

Prologue I had begun so many times.With snow, with leaves, with wind and rain,with a white initial A of sail,with […]

Creating a literary genealogy linking Occom and Wheatley could change conceptions of early American Indian and African American writing and missionary work

“If you would learn the earth as it really is, learn it through its sacred places.”

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?

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.

Scalping survivors were visual evidence for the narratives the nation wanted to tell itself.

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.”

Oldest Windmill on Cape Cod

Misery is the new black.

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

While many aspects of early American life were bound by geography, many others transcended it.

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

The SPGNA, American Indians, and the Turn to Foreign Missions in the Early Republic Hazelnuts. That’s what the girl at […]

Hendrick Aupaumut has had many collaborators, but it wouldn’t be entirely correct to say that he has worked with many of them.

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.

Matters related to the history, production, and evolution of a text as a text did not have to be prompted by the professor but figured seamlessly into class discussion and student papers.

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

“When he first met them, Hesselius found Indians repulsive.”

Seeing Lewis’s image I was immediately reminded of the importance of the visual—both for present-day scholars of African American life and culture and for those nineteenth-century freedom fighters who knew the visual field was a key site of struggle for representing the race.

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?

By the turn of the twentieth century, thinking about American Indians had become integral to German culture.

Remembering Sand Creek, Rethinking the Civil War The runners were exhausted. Mostly young people from the Northern and Southern Cheyenne […]

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 Literature Issue

Natives were eager consumers of the kinds of print ephemera that circulated throughout New England.

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.

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.

The abstract goal of thinking about history is made wonderfully concrete by the documentary’s organizing structure.

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 anti-Indian sublime was as much about lambasting particular non-Indians as dividing whites from Indians.

The growth of the English-Indian slave trade after 1659 laid the groundwork for a series of deadly epidemics at the end of the seventeenth century.

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.”

Whalers yearned for family members, wished for love and sex, drank and caroused in ports, and longed to prosper from any great catch.

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

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?

Experience, personal and otherwise, has shown me that it is not just white Americans who need to grasp the full scope of Native history. Native people can also benefit from a more just and accurate depiction of their past.

Here’s why I was holding back my experiences at the NYC tea party from earlier this week: The night turned […]

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

For three thousand years, these peoples made a homeland of the sea enclosed by Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. Hava’iki, they called it. They sailed the circuit of the sea with confidence. They traded. They raided. They adventured.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

“Last Night some time in the Middle watch a very extraordinary affair happend to Mr Orton my Clerk, he having been drinking in the Evening, some Malicious person or persons in the Ship took the advantage of his being drunk and cut off all the cloaths from off his back, not being satisfied with this they some time after went into his Cabbin and cut off a part of both his Ears as he lay asleep in his bed.”

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.

Every museum has—must have—some unstated rules of inclusion, organization, and interpretation. But the musée du quai Branly’s rules seemed designed to undermine its own premises.

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.

“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.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Many thought Moors a sharp trader, and at times people suspected that he was crooked. This was hardly unusual during these years in Samoa. More than once Moors or one of his traders was accused of using doctored weights when measuring coconuts for purchase, and at least once this endangered the life of one of his traders. Even Robert Louis Stevenson, who relied heavily on Moors in his early years, worried that he might be a huckster.

Mr. Owsley: If we have skeletons that are that ancient that come out of the ground and there’s no opportunity for us to look at them, no opportunity to learn, then we will never have questions–we’ll never answer these questions of the past.
Ms. Stahl: We’re talking about our history?
Mr. Owsley: We’re talking about American history, yes.
–60 Minutes, October 25, 1998

“Alongside horses and sheep, captives moved throughout the borderlands economies.”

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 […]

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.

Taking Native culture seriously requires that we abandon the attempt to put Native wine into European bottles.

Three poems In God’s Altar: The Word and Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley, 1978), the literary critic Richard Daly writes that, for […]

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.

In late December 2001, my husband Mark, kids Lily, Max, and Sam, and I were at the end of a […]

Sweet provides rich evidence of slaves running away and thus directing their resistance towards individual masters rather than the slave system itself, but he broadens this view by arguing that the general threat of slave revolt was partly directed at a complicit public that failed to recognize the rights of slaves.

“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.”

“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 […]

Ghosts, [Richardson] argues, typically emerge from episodes of violence or oppression whose facts are historically hazy. In turn, the ghostly residues of these events are themselves unstable (or shifty) and can be easily made to serve a variety of political uses.

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.

August 29, 2008 Vice Grip . . . on the media’s imagination, blogosphere included. Finally, we come to the sense-shattering […]

“Would-be conquerors might hold up animal brain cases as signs of their authority, but other observers interpreted the disembodied icons according to their own assumptions about power.”

“If, as Jennings argued, Parkman offers bad history, then why plow through thousands of pages of the stuff?”

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?

Crucible of War has nearly as much to teach about form and style as it does about the Seven Years’ War.

“Who was Mercy Lewis, and why did she hate George Burroughs?”

“Wyss contends that scholars of early American literature have let their notions of what constitutes an “‘authentic’ Native voice” deafen them to the many writings by Christian Indians before . . . the early nineteenth century.”

“I’m not sure how I made it this far without realizing that I would find Wilder’s books on the fiction shelf.”

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

For all their decadent, Italianate, Miltonic overtones, the serial-killer books by Thomas Harris resurrect the gritty frontier narratives of the Wild West and Indian fighting that are the literary precursors to later American gothic and horror fiction.

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.

Women like Pocahontas essentially became, like Pygmalion, characters eventually submissive to certain English manners and mores, made devoid of all cultural threat by their nearly complete assimilation into dominant, white society.

This issue Common-place holds a round table discussion of Fred Anderson’s new history of the Seven Years’ War, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. This forum expands on an earlier round table discussion of Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War featuring the authors and moderator Pauline Maier, hosted by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.

One concept sure to provoke debate among scholars is the notion that a tribal understanding of the past may incorporate ways of knowing that are different from western epistemologies, yet more sophisticated than mere wishful thinking.

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