Books by Peter C Mancall
A Cultural History of Color in the Renaissance covers the period 1400 to 1650, a time of change, ... more A Cultural History of Color in the Renaissance covers the period 1400 to 1650, a time of change, conflict, and transformation. Innovations in color production transformed the material world of the Renaissance, especially in ceramics, cloth, and paint. Collectors across Europe prized colorful objects such as feathers and gemstones as material illustrations of foreign lands. The advances in technology and the increasing global circulation of colors led to new color enriching terms.
Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts.
Contributors:
Introduction (Amy Buono and Sven Dupré)
Chapter 1. Philosophy and Science (Tawrin Baker)
Chapter 2. Technology and Trade (Jo Kirby)
Chapter 3. Power and Identity (Peter C. Mancall)
Chapter 4. Religion and Ritual (Lisa Pon)
Chapter 5. Body and Clothing (Carole Frick)
Chapter 6. Language and Psychology (Doris Oltrogge)
Chapter 7. Literature and the Performing Arts (Bruce R. Smith)
Chapter 8. Art (Marcia Hall)
Chapter 9. Architecture and Interiors (Cammy Brothers)
Chapter 10. Artifacts (Leah R. Clark)
Published in the series Regional Perspectives on Early America, this brief synthesis analyzes the... more Published in the series Regional Perspectives on Early America, this brief synthesis analyzes the origins and development of the early North American backcountry from the late sixteenth century until the era of the American Revolution.
In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. M... more In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys. And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes—personal, imperial, missionary, or trade—and moved not only across space but also across cultures.
Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or "cabinets of curiosities." But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another.
The fourteen essays in Collecting Across Cultures represent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge—some factual, some fictional—about distant peoples in an increasingly connected world.
Papers by Peter C Mancall
Winterthur Portfolio, 2018
<p>Before 1619, the English failed time and again in their efforts to establish colonies in... more <p>Before 1619, the English failed time and again in their efforts to establish colonies in the Western Hemisphere. But, despite the disappointments and loss of capital and human life, a group of Elizabethan promoters, led by the younger Richard Hakluyt, kept the goal of establishing American settlements alive. Yet even Hakluyt eventually grew weary of the problems that the English faced, including in Virginia. Still, efforts to maintain the nascent colony in the face of its many problems continued long enough for the colonists to recognize the value of tobacco. That economic possibility proved sufficient to sustain investment in Virginia despite the terrible relations that the newcomers had with the Pasapeghs, the local Algonquians led by Wahunsonacock, known as Powhatan to the English. The colony survived to 1619, but its existence remained precarious unless the English could identify a reliable source of labor to produce and export tobacco.</p>
By the time English travellers set foot on North America, the Ninnimissinouk, who inhabited the s... more By the time English travellers set foot on North America, the Ninnimissinouk, who inhabited the southern area of what would later become New England, had developed a sophisticated knowledge of the region, creating in those lands a sustainable economy. Archaeological excavations have yielded practices such as the use of fish as fertiliser, or the singular habit of keeping canoes underwater to protect them from the winter frost. In his work A Key to the Language of America (1643) the linguist Roger Williams argued that, before the arrival of the English, the locals referred to themselves as 'Nínnuock, Ninnimissinnûwock, Eniskee-tompaūwog, which signifies Men, Folke, or People' (232). The Ninnimissinouk, who spoke a form of Algonquian dialect, had devised topographic maps of the region. These were not cartographic representations on paper according to European fashion, but toponyms related to the geological features of a given place. Thus, Connecticut indicated 'on the long tidal river,' while Massachusetts meant 'at the big hill.' The gods worshipped by the natives were thirty-seven in total, as Williams himself reported, though the Algonquians did not claim any religious monopoly: they very well knew that other deities existed. For the Ninnimissinouk, nature was the result of the interaction between several forces and energies, human and nonhuman. Likewise, it would prove far too easy for the English to see in native deities no less than the devil. So did Edward Winslow, one of New Plymouth's first settlers, towards Hobbamock, the deity who appeared to the natives as they slept and knew how to heal diseases and wounds.
The William and Mary Quarterly, 2017
Many of the best recent works in early American history investigate the lives of specific people ... more Many of the best recent works in early American history investigate the lives of specific people in particular places, reconstructing the past "on the ground" and connecting this local analysis with larger geographic or conceptual spaces. These are neither macrohistories that descend to the ground only for illustrative anecdotes nor microhistories that merely make big gestures to give their small stories broader relevance. The four exemplary world-and-ground essays in this Forum take us to the native Southwest in the centuries before and after European arrival; watch the English, Spanish, and French as they mark the North American landscape for Christ; look over the shoulder of a merchant in eighteenth-century Philadelphia; and follow enslaved Africans as they endure the passage from the slave ship's hull through the port of Charleston, South Carolina. The authors ask us to rethink Indian "prehistory," European Christianization, Atlantic commerce, and the slave trade. The essays move between world and ground—between the Atlantic world, the continent, or the hemisphere and the lives of particular early American people and places—to interrogate the connections, and the disconnections, between these different levels of historical experience and change.
Northeastern Naturalist, 2017
Abstract This article considers a clash of 2 historic ways of understanding human relations with ... more Abstract This article considers a clash of 2 historic ways of understanding human relations with the environment in James Bay, Canada, which stretches from 52° to 55° north latitude: Cree traditional knowledge and the writings of early 17th-century English explorers. The observations and practices of both Natives and newcomers reflected the enduring power of cold and the particular systems of information that emerged in a region where winter posed myriad threats. These different kinds of historical knowledge survive in different media, one oral and the other written. By considering them together, it becomes clear that the most radical environmental shift in the region occurred not with the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975, but instead over 300 years earlier. This conclusion suggests reconsideration of the environmental historian Alfred Crosby's notion of “ecological imperialism”, a process understood as the result of the movement of biota, with quick and far-reaching results across temperate zones in the Western Hemisphere (and in select other parts of the Earth). In and around James Bay, the arrival of Europeans—and their recognition that they could survive and extract resources from the region despite the dangers of its winters—initiated long-term environmental changes well before the transference of biota.
J Brit Stud, 2008
We're sorry, but you do not have access to this article. However, we recognize your workstation a... more We're sorry, but you do not have access to this article. However, we recognize your workstation as being from a subscribed institution with access to some journals in Project MUSE; please contact your library for more information.
An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America, 2007
An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America, 2007
An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America, 2007
A Companion to American Cultural History
... capture) the emperor Atahualpa, neither one of them knew how to read (Ortega 2003: 25 ... Gam... more ... capture) the emperor Atahualpa, neither one of them knew how to read (Ortega 2003: 25 ... Games,Alison: Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard ... Herndon, Ruth Wallis & Sekatau, Ella: The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and ...
An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America, 2007
Journal of World History, 2013
Antiquity embodied a horizon of thought that obsessed European curiosity from the Renaissance thr... more Antiquity embodied a horizon of thought that obsessed European curiosity from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. The Greeks, the Romans, and even the Egyptians were omnipresent in the discourses of philologists, in the scholarly research of antiquarians, and in the obsession of men of state and even sovereigns. We owe the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompei to Bernardo Tanucci and his king, Charles of Naples, Charles III of Spain. For the king and his first minister, the buried cities of the area around Vesuvius were not just a simple field of ruins, an open mine of the antique; they were the means of revealing to the men of the Enlightenment an antiquity consisting of entire towns waiting to be uncovered. The scale of research into the life of ancient times changed with the excavation of Vesuvius's buried cities. After the uncovering of Herculaneum and Pompeii in1738 and 1748, such research could no longer consist merely of collecting rare objects or excavating a few prestigious monuments: Herculaneum and Pompeii revealed groups of objects, ways of life-in short, a past that that could be observed in a nearly intact state. Of course, to see the past in this fashion required excavation, restoration, and conservation on an industrial rather than an artisanal scale. The most dogged, most inquisitive, and most learned of Europe's thinkers criticized the excavation techniques employed at Herculaneum and Pompeii, such as the galleries dug by the military engineer Roque Joachim de Alcubierre.
The American Historical Review, 1993
... with impe-rial powers, the movement&amp;amp;amp;#x27;s militants-na-tivists-sought native... more ... with impe-rial powers, the movement&amp;amp;amp;#x27;s militants-na-tivists-sought native-directed solutions to problems and “self-consciously proclaimed that selected traditions and new (sometimes even imported) modes of behavior held keys to earthly ... CRAIG R. AUGE Kent State University ...
American Antiquity, 2005
Focusing on three proto-historic mid-sixteenth-century Mohawk village sites situated along Garoga... more Focusing on three proto-historic mid-sixteenth-century Mohawk village sites situated along Garoga Creek in eastern New York, this is a good dirt archaeology study, but it is much more than that. It is exhaustively descriptive of settlement patterns and artifacts, site by site, then followed by detailed analysis and discussion in Chapter 5. Here the relationship of the three sites to each other and to earlier pre-contact and later contact Mohawk sites is investigated. It turns out to be a very tricky analysis as the three sites are very close to each other chronologically. The conclusion is that Garoga was earliest, followed by Klock and Smith-Pagerie, all occupied between A.D. 1525 and A.D. 1585 (p. 133) based on the ceramic analysis and the presence of European trade goods. Funk and Kuhn explore all possibilities in their discussions in a logical and methodical manner, and they conclude in some instances that the answers may never be known because of the vagaries of the archaeological data (the discussion surrounding the possible coeval occupation of Garoga and Klock, for example). You can almost hear them talking, but what about this? Or did we consider that? This is very stimulating for the reader.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance
The economy of territory that became the United States evolved dramatically from ca. 1000 ce to 1... more The economy of territory that became the United States evolved dramatically from ca. 1000 ce to 1776. Before Europeans arrived, the spread of maize agriculture shifted economic practices in Indigenous communities. The arrival of Europeans, starting with the Spanish in the West Indies in 1492, brought wide-ranging change, including the spread of Old World infectious disease and the arrival of land- and resource-hungry migrants. Europeans, eager to extract material wealth, came to rely on the trade in enslaved Africans to produce profitable crops such as tobacco, rice, and sugar, and they maintained connections with Indigenous communities to sustain the fur trade. The declining number of Indigenous peoples, combined with growing numbers of those of European or African origin, altered the demographic profile of North America, particularly in the territory east of the Mississippi River. Over time, Europeans’ consumer choices expanded, though the wealth gap between white colonists grew, ...
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Books by Peter C Mancall
Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts.
Contributors:
Introduction (Amy Buono and Sven Dupré)
Chapter 1. Philosophy and Science (Tawrin Baker)
Chapter 2. Technology and Trade (Jo Kirby)
Chapter 3. Power and Identity (Peter C. Mancall)
Chapter 4. Religion and Ritual (Lisa Pon)
Chapter 5. Body and Clothing (Carole Frick)
Chapter 6. Language and Psychology (Doris Oltrogge)
Chapter 7. Literature and the Performing Arts (Bruce R. Smith)
Chapter 8. Art (Marcia Hall)
Chapter 9. Architecture and Interiors (Cammy Brothers)
Chapter 10. Artifacts (Leah R. Clark)
Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or "cabinets of curiosities." But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another.
The fourteen essays in Collecting Across Cultures represent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge—some factual, some fictional—about distant peoples in an increasingly connected world.
Papers by Peter C Mancall
Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts.
Contributors:
Introduction (Amy Buono and Sven Dupré)
Chapter 1. Philosophy and Science (Tawrin Baker)
Chapter 2. Technology and Trade (Jo Kirby)
Chapter 3. Power and Identity (Peter C. Mancall)
Chapter 4. Religion and Ritual (Lisa Pon)
Chapter 5. Body and Clothing (Carole Frick)
Chapter 6. Language and Psychology (Doris Oltrogge)
Chapter 7. Literature and the Performing Arts (Bruce R. Smith)
Chapter 8. Art (Marcia Hall)
Chapter 9. Architecture and Interiors (Cammy Brothers)
Chapter 10. Artifacts (Leah R. Clark)
Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or "cabinets of curiosities." But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another.
The fourteen essays in Collecting Across Cultures represent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge—some factual, some fictional—about distant peoples in an increasingly connected world.