Early American History

In this article, we propose a new direction for social theory, based on a distinction between action and agency, a reconsideration of sociological theories of power, and a rereading of the transition to modernity. Drawing on
Aristotle, Carole Pateman, Hannah Arendt, and Ernst Kantorowicz, we propose a conceptual model of power centred on the sending and binding of another to be one’s agent in the world, and the varying representation of this relation and what it excludes. This approach allows a different understanding of modernity than is offered by accounts of power derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. With reference to the French Revolution and twentieth and twenty-first century presidential politics in the USA, we manifest the utility of the framework for the construction of a research
programme in historical and political sociology.

Thomas Jefferson's conviction that the health of the nation's democracy would depend on the existence of an informed citizenry has been a cornerstone of our political culture since the inception of the American republic. Even today's debates over education reform and the need to be competitive in a technologically advanced, global economy are rooted in the idea that the education of rising generations is crucial to the nation's future. In this book, Richard Brown traces the development of the ideal of an informed citizenry in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and assesses its continuing influence and changing meaning. Although the concept had some antecedents in Europe, the full articulation of the ideal relationship between citizenship and knowledge came during the era of the American Revolution. The founding fathers believed that the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press, religion, speech, and assembly would foster an informed citizenry. According to Brown, many of the fundamental institutions of American democracy and society, including political parties, public education, the media, and even the postal system, have enjoyed wide government support precisely because they have been identified as vital for the creation and maintenance of an informed populace.

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While Christian evangelization and conversion were often the primary justifications for imperial expansion in the early modern Atlantic world, the meaning of the word "conversion" remains contested among scholars, particularly when used to refer to non-European conversion to Christianity. Several historians have argued that the term "conversion" simplifies a complex process and reiterates a missionary mindset. This article surveys a variety of alternatives to the word "conversion," including syncretism, hybridity, affiliation, appropriation, and practice. While assessing the benefits and drawbacks of each of these terms, it argues that discarding the word "conversion" risks minimizing or overlooking the experiences of non-European converts. Instead, it is more accurate to say that conversionfor both Europeans and non-Europeanswas a process of transformation that occurred on multiple planes. The social, cultural, and political implications are easier to identify in the historical record, but historians also need to take seriously the possibility of religious transformation as well.

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.

Using a transatlantic approach that employs Black perspectives, this study examines how enslaved people in Virginia considered and participated in Bacon's Rebellion in 1675-1676. Ultimately, it argues that from Black perspectives, Bacon's Rebellion was a militarized slave revolt.

On September 21, 1638, the Mohegans, the Narragansetts, and the English colonists on the Connecticut River reached an agreement at Hartford to settle their affairs following the Pequot War. The original copy of the treaty having been lost, scholars have depended almost exclusively on a copy prepared for the 1705 hearing of the Mohegan land case. However, this document represents only a fragment of the original agreement, leaving out four of the thirteen provisions agreed to by the parties in 1638. The original text of the treaty is reconstructed here by drawing on all of the surviving copies of the agreement: the 1705 copy already familiar to historians, a 1734 copy prepared during a later hearing of the Mohegan land case, and a newly rediscovered copy dating from 1665 and held among the British Library's Lansdowne Manuscripts. This reconstructed treaty illuminates how indigenous polities and English settlers sought to navigate the jurisdictional politics of early America. Moreover, it presents scholars with an important resource for reconsidering the evolution of Anglo-Indian relations in New England, particularly the breakdown of the relationship between the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Narragansetts in the early 1640s.

After the battle of Fallen Timbers in August 1794, the British government in Canada decided to send a Roman Catholic priest to Upper Canada to maintain the allegiance of the Native Americans to his Britannic Majesty, counteract the disloyalty of French Canadians, and act as commissary agent to native groups. Father Edmund Burke worked to prevent American General Anthony Wayne and his pro-American Canadians from influencing and escorting Native American leaders going to Fort Greeneville (Ohio) and concluding a peace treaty. A defender of conservative Catholicism and a friend to the British government, Burke failed miserably. Burke traveled to Detroit, River Raisin, Miami Rapids, and Sandusky out of religious habit (garments and clothing) well-armed with two, strong Christian Indians and a hardy Canadian doing the bidding of Sir Guy Carleton (Lord Dorchester) and Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe becoming involved in scandalous situations and murder plots. After a period of one year, he was ordered to Detroit to evacuate with the British in Upper Canada paving the way for Detroit and western Lake Erie region to become part of the new American Republic.
Burke's report on the desparate state of Catholic missions in Upper Canada sent to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation "de Prpaganda Fide" (the Red Pope) of the Holy Vatican in Italy in 1797 was shelved due to the turmoil of the Napoleonic War in Italy, the imprisonment of Pope Pius VII, and the dispersal of the cardinals. It wasn't until 1820 when the report was acted upon, but by then it was too late and Burke suffered his final insult with his death that same year.

The article provides the first modern analysis of one of the bestselling transatlantic evangelical poems of the eighteenth century, the Scottish minister Ralph Erskine's Gospel Sonnets. The article argues that the importance of the marriage metaphor and rhyme in the poem provided a specific meaning to the form of the couplet in eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelicalism-a form often associated with an outdated understanding of a monolithic enlightenment. In the case of Erskine, it produced the Calvinist couplet. What the author terms "espousal poetics" designates the much larger presence and purpose of the marriage metaphor in the emerging revivalist community: to fuse the paradoxes of a sound Calvinist theology with poetics.

This book examines the daily details of slave work routines and plantation agriculture in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, focusing on case studies of large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica, and Virginia. Work was the most important factor in the slaves'' experience of the institution. Slaves'' day-to-day work routines were shaped by plantation management strategies that drew on broader pan-Atlantic intellectual and cultural principles. Although scholars often associate the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment with the rise of notions of liberty and human rights and the dismantling of slavery, this book explores the dark side of the Enlightenment for plantation slaves. Many planters increased their slaves'' workloads and employed supervisory technologies to increase labor discipline in ways that were consistent with the process of industrialization in Europe. British planters offered alternative visions of progress by embracing restrictions on freedom and seeing increasing labor discipline as central to the project of moral and economic improvement.

This book provides a new conceptual framework for understanding how the Indian nations of the early American South emerged from the ruins of a precolonial, Mississippian world. A broad regional synthesis that ranges over much of the Eastern Woodlands, its focus is on the Indians of the Carolina Piedmont – the Catawbas and their neighbors – from 1400 to 1725. Using an “eventful” approach to social change, Robin Beck argues that the collapse of the Mississippian world was fundamentally a transformation of political economy, from one built on maize to one of guns, slaves, and hides. The story takes us from first encounters through the rise of the Indian slave trade and the scourge of disease to the wars that shook the American South in the early 1700s. Yet the book's focus remains on the Catawbas, drawing on their experiences in a violent, unstable landscape to develop a comparative perspective on structural continuity and change.

South Carolina was a staggeringly weak polity from its founding in 1670 until the 1730s. Nevertheless, in that time, and while facing significant opposition from powerful indigenous neighbors, the colony constructed a robust plantation system that boasted the highest slave-to-freeman ratio in mainland North America. Taking this fact as a point of departure, I examine the early management of unfree labor in South Carolina as an exemplary moment of settler- colonial state formation. Departing from the treatment of state formation as a process of centralizing “legitimate violence,” I investigate how the colonial state, and in particular the Commons House of Assembly, asserted an exclusive claim to authority by monopolizing the question of legitimacy itself. In managing unfree laborers, the colonial state extended its authority over supposedly private relations between master and slave and increasingly recast slavery in racial terms. This recasting of racial slavery rested, I argue, on a distinction, pervasive throughout English North America, which divided the world into spheres of savagery and civility. Beneath the racial reordering of colonial life, the institution of slavery was rooted in the same ideological distinction by which the colonial state’s claims to authority were justified, with the putative “savagery” of the slave or of the Indian being counterpoised to the supposed civility of English settlers. This article contributes to the literatures on Atlantic slavery and American colonial history, and invites comparison with accounts of state formation and settler colonialism beyond Anglo-America.

John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) canonized a settler colonial narrative activity that I call kinshipwrecking—a conventional mode of storytelling that destroys and moves to supplant traditional Indigenous kinship structures and obligations. Smith’s archetypal refusal of Indigenous kinship is arguably the most important element of his text, and yet it has been treated as an afterthought in most previous scholarship. His Historie depicts the process of colonization as a war between English patriarchal governance and Indigenous kinship systems—the latter of which are portrayed as power structures that must be infiltrated (through alliance or adoption) and exploited by the English and destroyed/transformed from within. The colony Smith wrote about is today remembered as the first permanent English settlement on Turtle Island, and Settlers in what some now call Canada and the USA continue to live their lives within the legacy of Smith’s archetypal and systematic rejection of Indigenous kinship. Using Mattaponi oral history as a counter narrative that both challenges and contextualizes Smith’s in/famous tale, this article considers the Settler mythology of Pocahontas and Wahunsenaca (Powhatan) through the lens of Indigenous customary or traditional adoption practices.

When metals are mentioned in early American histories, they tend to be the fabled gold of New World spaces (“El Dorado”), or the silver bullion of world trade (reales). But less noble metals tell equally important stories about the colonial past. This article analyzes promotional literatures from seventeenth-century Virginia and Venezuela to show how two writers converted a moment of currency crisis in early modern Europe and uneven metallic trade with Asia and Africa into new modes of imperial projecting in the early Americas. Over time, John Smith and Manuel Gaytán de Torres told and retold their stories, shaping their visions of colonial settlement into proposals that both reinforced and challenged their audiences’ desires. They followed the malleable potential of copper metals and the three stages of copper metallurgy to shape new narratives of possibility for indigenous, African, and European communities in Tsenacommacah and Cocorote, and to cast these narratives into diverse textual forms, such as shape poems, maps, paintings, relations, and histories. Part of the EAS forum, "The Global Turn and Early American Studies," edited by Mary Eyring, Chris Hodson, and Matthew Mason. Other papers in the forum are by Phil Stern, Sara E. Johnson, and Emily Conroy Krutz.

This essay tells the story of Ayubale twice: once by focusing on European actions and desires, and the other by centering the voices and perspectives of Native peoples. Indians are present in both renditions—after all, this was an attack upon an Indian town by a primarily indigenous military force. The first version begins with English efforts to attack St. Augustine, the main Spanish hub in Florida, and ends with the abandonment of San Luís, the largest mission town in Apalachee. Though mostly situated in Indian country, this narrative privileges Spanish-English imperial rivalries over Native geopolitics. José Zúñiga y Cerda, governor of Florida, embodied this perspective. He was well aware that "Hostilities of the pagan Indians, led by the English have succeeded in depopulating the Province of Apalachee."6 He also knew that the attack targeted Native spaces and involved "hostilities of the pagan Indians." Even so, Zúñiga y Cerda could not conceptualize anything other than that Europeans "led" the charge and should frame the course of events. The second version works against Zúñiga y Cerda's narrative by making Indians the active subjects/agents of the actions. By centralizing Native peoples this retelling problematizes the chronology, geography, and actors prioritized by Spanish and English sources. In this version Ayubale is more than a colonial story taking place in Indian country. It is an Indian story that extensively shapes imperial interests in North America.

The legacy of the covenanters in North America can be measured through the commercial and political networks they forged with Dutch reformed, Independent, and puritan allies in the seventeenth century. These alliances were forged by their mutual antipathy to episcopacy, royal absolutism and catholicism. English Americans protected and supported the sons of covenanters and their mercantile and political projects to allow them to evade and undermine imperial restrictions on their work and worship. Covenanters earned a reputation as redoubtable and reliable anti-popish reactionaries that inspired British officials to settle Scots on dangerous colonial frontiers in the eighteenth century.

In “Discovering Slave Conspiracies: New Fears of Rebellion and Old Paradigms of Plotting in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” Jason T. Sharples uses an investigation into slave conspiracy in seventeenth-century Barbados to examine how colonizers attempted to make sense of subject populations. When investigators in 1692 believed that they had uncovered a planned rebellion, they assessed the intended violence in a way that exaggerated the threat. In refashioning guiding concepts drawn from existing frames of reference for insurrectionary violence—most notably knowledge of slavery in ancient Rome and memories and expectations of Catholic violence against Protestants—and applying them to life in Barbados, they grappled with the unfamiliar in ways that betrayed the importance of analogical thinking. Sharples uses this case to examine the intersection of Barbadian social history and European and African discourses in the production of knowledge. His analysis suggests a model for how overlapping discourses can interact through nested operations of analogical thinking. By emphasizing the discursive creation of knowledge, his article contributes to recent debates over whether slaves intended to rebel in alleged insurrectionary conspiracies in colonial America and the early United States. It also sheds light on collective resistance more generally by identifying conspiracy scares and actual rebellions as distinct but related phenomena. The American Historical Review 120, no. 3 (June 2015): 811-843. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.3.811

Pehr Kalm’s voyage to America in 1748–51 produced a treasure trove of observations about climate, soil, and other matters of natural history. A close reading of Kalm’s travel journal, published writings, and correspondence reveals a deep ambivalence about the operation of the natural order in the New World. Kalm’s fieldwork and interviews with settlers charted processes of species extirpation, degeneration, soil exhaustion, and climate change. This interest in the environmental impact of settlement reflected in great part Kalm’s commitment to cameralist science. Kalm’s American voyage was a direct extension of his earlier biosprospecting tours in the Old World. He and his Swedish contemporaries hoped to transform the natural order of the nation through schemes of acclimatization and internal colonization. Such ambitions were in turn framed within a universal history of climate change. Kalm’s experience in the New World confirmed the global scope of these processes, while stressing the risk and uncertainty associated with projects of climate improvement. In this sense, Kalm’s voyage offers an important yet neglected entry point into the history of climate science.

This article proposes that the commons is best understood as a relation among people, land, water, flora, and fauna that requires performance. The "performative commons" takes place in opposition to the alienating and disentangling work of the plantation machine and the systemic disarticulation of lifeworlds that marked the onset of racial capitalism and an epochal transformation of the earth identifiable as the Plantationocene.

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The ocean was frequently as hostile an environment for plants and animals as it was for humankind in the eighteenth century. Existing methods of preserving the plants, fish, birds, and land animals that provided the raw materials for European science increasingly proved insufficient for the often long voyages that brought them from colonial and indigenous collectors; specimens arrived dead when they were needed alive, rotten and damaged when they were needed whole, and they frequently suffered as they encountered negligent and uninterested sailors, and rats and other shipboard pests that showed too much interest. This paper examines strategies of specimen transport adopted by French and British naturalists in the Atlantic world during the first half of the eighteenth century, arguing for the importance of maritime spaces that have often been overlooked in histories of the expanding reach of European science. Atlantic networks of specimen transport were simultaneously distinctly national and endlessly entangled. Efforts to discipline maritime social environments diverged along distinctly national lines, influenced by larger patterns of scientific sociability in both Britain and France. At the same time, however, naturalists drew on a cadre of common practices when they packed and preserved specimens for transport. The study of specimen transport demonstrates the geographic expanse of the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies at work more generally in eighteenth-century science; these forces simultaneously strengthened national scientific cultures and supported a cosmopolitan network of naturalists who communicated specimens and the methods for making them throughout Europe and the wider world.

5 called the "state of exception" through a genealogy of the figure of Cincinnatus. In classical Rome, Cincinnatus was named dictator not once, but twice; first to save the city from invaders, and second to put down a popular, democratic uprising. Here we see the two sides of exception, or what I call the two faces of Cincinnatus: 10 enemyship, and sovereign violence. These two faces are linked by an anti-democratic logic that is premised on the will of "the people," as becomes clear in the counter-revolutionary writings of the founders of the United States.

The June 1888 issue of the Phonographic World magazine presented John Pynchon, an ancestor of Thomas, as “The First American Shorthand Reporter”. While most biographical criticism to date of Thomas Pynchon has focused on the cameo appearance of a thinly veiled William Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, we here set out further historical information on John alongside an appraisal of shorthand in the novels of Thomas

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued fiat paper money as their principal internal medium of exchange. This system arose piecemeal across the colonies making the paper money creation story for each colony unique. It was true monetary experimentation on a grand scale. The creation story for Maryland, perhaps the most unique among the colonies, is analyzed to evaluate how market forces, media influences, and the power of various constituents combined to shape its particular paper money system.

This article explores how, as dogs evolved and were bred into distinct varieties in Europe and North America from precontact to the present, whites in America used them to judge both Indians and themselves as natural improvers. When colonists first compared their own dogs to those of Native Americans, they found Indian dogs too wolf-like and vicious. But as ecological pressures in cities and rural spaces threatened to undo European breeds during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many whites came to doubt their status as nature's masters. It was only during the twentieth century, as whites observed the spread of feral dogs on reservations, that they reimagined Indians and their dogs as savage and themselves as potential rescuers. This study highlights the importance of biological evolution to European perceptions of Indians. It also refines the field of evolutionary history by treating biology and history less as distinct forces and more as mutual processes.

With Irene Quenzler Brown.

In 1806 an anxious crowd of thousands descended upon Lenox, Massachusetts, for the public hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. Not all witnesses believed justice had triumphed. The death penalty had become controversial; no one had been executed for rape in Massachusetts in more than a quarter century. Wheeler maintained his innocence. Over one hundred local citizens petitioned for his pardon—including, most remarkably, Betsy and her mother.

Impoverished, illiterate, a failed farmer who married into a mixed-race family and clashed routinely with his wife, Wheeler existed on the margins of society. Using the trial report to reconstruct the tragic crime and drawing on Wheeler’s jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America. They imaginatively and sensitively explore issues of family violence, poverty, gender, race and class, religion, and capital punishment, revealing similarities between death penalty politics in America today and two hundred years ago.

Beautifully crafted, engagingly written, this unforgettable story probes deeply held beliefs about morality and about the nature of justice.

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Trade in the early modern Atlantic grew a great deal. While acknowledging that this growth had important economic, social and cultural consequences, scholars have yet to fully explain its causes. This paper argues that formal religious institutions were key. Based on records from colonial Philadelphia, it shows how the Quaker meeting created a legal forum to resolve commercial disputes. The meeting enforced its verdicts by gathering and disseminating information about disputes locally and across the Atlantic world through the Society of Friends' formal organisation of meetings. Thereby, it re-enforced reputation mechanisms, facilitating the expansion of Philadelphia's trade. In pre-modern societies, long-distance trade constituted a key motor for economic growth. The expansion of trade in the British Atlantic facilitated social mobility and the emergence of the middling sorts as an economic and political force in England. Some prominent scholars have argued that it laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution, making it the root of present-day global inequality. 1 The factors determining trade expansion, however, remain unclear. Economic historians researching trade have been strongly influenced by the New Institutional Economists (NIE). 2 These argue that within Europe, the emergence of strong, centralised states who enforced property rights enabled trade. European states were however unable to extend their control to the American colonies. The growth of trade in the Atlantic despite weak state structures poses a puzzle yet to be solved. This article offers a solution to this puzzle. Based on the extensive records of colonial Philadelphia's Quaker Monthly Meeting, it shows that in the face of weak state institutions, formal religious institutions evolved to enforce property rights. Its argument is threefold. First, the Meeting established its own legal forum, where it solved commercial disputes through arbitration. Second, it did this in order to compensate for the unreliable public courts. Third, it ensured that litigants honoured its decisions by means of a formally reinforced reputation mechanism. The importance of reputation mechanisms in early modern trade is well established. The Quaker Monthly Meeting is distinct as it found a way to employ reputation mechanisms formally, thereby increasing their impact. It

The eighteenth-century Georgian mansion holds a special fascination in both Britain and America.  Beginning in the late seventeenth century, small classical houses  developed as a distinct architectural type.  From small country estates to provincial towns and their outskirts, these ‘gentleman’s houses’ proliferated throughout the British Atlantic world.

The Gentleman's House in the British Atlantic World analyses the evolution of these houses and owners to tell a story about incremental social change.  It challenges accounts of the newly wealthy overspending on houses and material goods. Instead, The Gentleman’s House offers a new interpretation of social mobility characterized by measured growth and demonstrates that colonial Americans and provincial Britons made similar house building and furnishing choices.

The field of women's history emerged and developed through the joint efforts of scholars, librarians, and archivists. When the field emerged in the early 1970s, the combined labor of individuals in these academic disciplines unearthed otherwise obscure archival evidence, shaped a new framework for research, and fueled dynamic inquiry into the historic experiences and modern understandings of women's lives. Despite such collaborative origins, historians do not always incorporate a broad understanding of library and archive practice into their scholarship. By illustrating efforts to reconstruct the life of one eighteenth-century woman on the Kentucky frontier, this essay illustrates how knowledge of archival collection and provenance provides vital perspective on historic experience. Given the long tradition of collaboration between librarians, archivists, and women's historians, this essay suggests that renewed attention to such relationships will provide important new opportunities for future research.

Black activists petitioned Congress for the first time in 1797 and again in the winter of 1799--- 1800. Historians have previously understood these events in negative terms, mistakenly assuming that white abolitionists did not support the black petitioners while incorrectly asserting that Congress determined African Americans lacked the First Amendment right of petition. Drawing on new manuscript evidence, this article demonstrates that the black activists found important Quaker allies in the Philadelphia Meeting for Sufferings. Moreover, the House of Representatives formally received the second petition and subsequently addressed some of the petitioners' concerns. These episodes demonstrate the early abolitionist movement's interracial character and political influence despite racial prejudice and the Constitution's proslavery provisions.

Fears of wood scarcity were common in early modern England, and proponents of colonial expansion into Ireland and Virginia drew on these anxieties to justify their enterprises and to solicit support for projects exploiting colonial woods. They argued that Ireland and, later, Virginia were the edges of a wooden frontier. Closely examining the connections between ironworks in Virginia, southwest Ireland, and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries reveals a more complex political ecology that transcends broad concepts of scarcity and abundance. Contemporaries disagreed about the extent and severity of English wood scarcity. Colonial ironworks competed against each other and with domestic and European producers. Many investors in and leaders of ironworks understood that to compete on quality and price they needed to exploit regulatory differences, forge commercial connections with other producers and merchants, and secure access to markets, materials, and expertise. The Virginia Company’s attempts to build ironworks, culminating in a short-lived project at Falling Creek, demonstrate that early Virginia colonists saw their woods through an Atlantic lens and understood that North American natural abundance needed to be made, not just discovered.