Authors and Thesis

Question 1

Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of Revolutions

Answer 1

Caitlin Fitz, 2016. 19th century America. All about how Americans rationalized their support for Latin American uprisings and revolutions. Usually coalesced around support for white and white-passing leaders. U.S. constructing the myth of inspirational revolution.

Question 2

The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Early America

Answer 2

Josh PIker. 18th century, Creek, Cherokee, British. All about how different narrators serve different needs. I.e. Acorn Whistler could play up his importance to Okfuskee, Mary Bosomworth could flex her importance as Creek, Brits could accuse Acorn Whistler of undermining Brit authority. All about instability and the centrality of personal relationships.

Question 3

Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier

Answer 3

James Merrell, 2000. 18th and 17th centuries. Familiarity was both a chance for respect and enmity. Frontier folks were the turning points, and did a lot to undo the first fifty years of diplomacy.

Question 4

A Not So New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America

Answer 4

Christopher M. Parsons. 17th-18th century. French colonists imposed their national identity onto the physical landscape, determining fitness by how close it resembled France. Agriculture was part of the process of converting Iroquois and Alongquian peoples.

Question 5

Marketplace of Revolution.

Answer 5

T.H. Breen. 18th century. All about how the consumer revolution fostered a distinct American identity prior to the outbreak of Revolution.

Question 6

Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914

Answer 6

John McNeill, 2010. 18th and 17th centuries. One of the things that really sticks out for me is that deforestation lead to fewer birds which lead to less mosquito predation which lead to YELLOW FEVER. Sugar revolutions and viruses both made history.

Question 7

Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America

Answer 7

Virginia DeJohn Anderson, 2006. 17th and 18th centuries. * Three main actors: livestock, Indians, colonists
* They changed history because of their interactions, not their separations
English and Indigenous animal husbandry practices revealed fundamentally different perspectives on this natural environment. Livestock was seen as a mark of Englishness.

Question 8

No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution

Answer 8

Rachel Herrmann, 2019. 18th century. Her Rev. era is 1750s-1830s. Victual warfare employed against the British and their Iroquois allies during the Revolution. Former enslaved people were forced to find food and prepare it for the British Army. Samuel Kirkland believed Natives should only practice European style agriculture, part of a conversion thing.

Question 9

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

Answer 9

William Cronon, 1983. Enlightenment thinkers viewed the triumph over the environment as a sign of human progress. Natural history presents certain limitations depending on your framework: Europeans thought of time as linear, whereas so much of nature is cyclical. * Colonists refused to extend property rights to Indians
* This was individual ownership rubbing up against collective sovereignty
Europeans spoke of the environment in terms of commodification.

Question 10

Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste

Answer 10

David Hancock, 2009. Commodities history! They help us see networks more clearly. 1750s, wine knowledge came to be associated with elite people in North America, as well as wine knowledge. The influence of the state was far more indirect, merchants were the ones who were creating connections. Randle and John Mitchell brought wine to the PA backcountry.

Question 11

Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World

Answer 11

Marcy Norton, 2008. Early 17th century, chocolate began appearing in Madrid. * Tobacco was central to everyday life in the Americas

• Fears that Europeans who used tobacco and chocolate were “idolators”
• Chocolate and tobacco were techniques and labors as much as they were raw agricultural products
• Association of chocolate with sexually charged vitality
• Tobacco was either used in smoking tubes or crushed up with lime which was ingested or applied topically
• Formalized rites imbued tobacco and chocolate with social and sacred qualities
• Consuming chocolate and tobacco was an act of solidifying communal bonds
• Black people, mestizos, and Creoles were increasingly accused of exhibiting heretical behavior
• A movement away from understanding chocolate as medical to being associated with sorcery and sacrilege
  
  • Fears that Spanish women would learn how to use chocolate to bewitch and poison from their Indian counterpart

Question 12

Domingos Alvarez, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World

Answer 12

James H. Sweet, 2011. 18th century. Religion helped foster diaspora and the Americanization of Africans began in Africa. 18th century. * Catholic brotherhoods were central to Afro-Brazilian social and cultural life
* Domingos rejected them for re-inscribing hierarchy
* Domingos’ confession avoided any references to “virtues” that could be construed as coming from the devil, very aware of what the Inquisitors were looking for
* Africans were able to tie themselves to Portuguese culture through the blending of Catholicism and previous traditions
* His powers were not just an individual phenomenon it was part of a network of knowledge accumulation
Looking at Inquisition documents!

Question 13

American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World

Answer 13

Susan Scott Parish, 2006. * European knowledge was bound in American biota and nature-knowledge
* Colonial women were challenged that their curiosity was “fatal”
* Monsters were regular features of the New World tales
* Association of Indians with diabolism
18th century habit of viewing both the environment and the body as a landscape.

Question 14

Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America

Answer 14

Wendy Bellion. 19th century. Three distinct styles of interest to the American public: trompe l’oeil pictures, optical devices, and popular spectacles of deception. Art was a challenge to Americans to prove their optical perception. Both a desire for a fantastic retreat from reality and a fear of things that were not as they seem.

Question 15

The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth

Answer 15

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. By the 18th century, there was a construction of this romantic ideal of women spinning cloth in their households. Really an idealization of domestic femininity rather than an acknowledgement of labor.

Question 16

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America

Answer 16

Jennifer Van Horn. Just sublime. I want to focus on grave motifs and prosthetics. * Art production was tied to the production of national value
* And art consumption was linked to morality

Question 17

American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700

Answer 17

Molly Warsh, 2018. Pearls associated with wealth, femininity, and sexuality, though only available to those far from the class that harvested them.

Question 18

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana

Answer 18

Sophie White, 2013. Frenchification was the basis for colonization, emphasized a shared cultural identity. Clothing offered an elastic means of expression.

• Ascetic practices actually paralleled Algonquin and Iroquois spiritual practices
• Body care was a huge point of exhibition for cultural difference
• Clean linen displaced washed bodies as a sign of cleanliness
• Women were associated with clothes maintenance
• French men occasionally dressed in Indian garments for diplomatic meetings

Question 19

Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic

Answer 19

Mary Kelley, 2006. * Women were embarking upon economic self-support
* Reason and affections were the twin pillars of sound argument
* Part of the post-Revolutionary vision was a united white public
* Politics of respectability that melded femininity with morality
Republican womanhood: I think it’s important to note here that this was an educated ideal.
Women’s education was also used as a means of preserving rank in a newly democratic society
Using feminine ideals as a means of resistance.

Question 20

Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West

Answer 20

Ned Blackhawk, 2006. Violence can be used as both a subject and a methodology. * Great Basin peoples engaged in raids to fight back against encroaching Spanish colonialism

• Before conquest, Indigenous violence was mostly localized
• Trade could also ensure Spanish military protection
• Slavers further displaced Paiute and non-equestrian Shoshone further from their homelands
• Two goals in the West:
  
  • Identify the most accessible routes across land, following rivers
  • Profit

Question 21

Freedom’s-Mirror:-Cuba-and-Haiti-in-the-Age-of-Revolution

Answer 21

Ada Ferrer, 2014. Basically, as Haiti became independent, the Spanish tightened colonization in Cuba out of fear of Haitian influence spreading. * Cuba was formed by slavery, monoculture, and plantations

• The news received by Cubans was that Black rebels had risen up outside of their own volition and denied the brutality of slavery
• Not one neighboring country recognized Haitian independence
• New Haitian government assumed a defensive position

Question 22

Jamaica in the Age of Revolution

Answer 22

Trevor Burnard, 2020. 1760: Tacky’s Revolt. * Jamaica was way more important than America during the Age of Revs.
* Wow this is topical. The presence of “fear” and “terror” in the historic discourse
* Fears of slave revolt were central to planters’ thinking
* Linked to fears that the English elite would reject their gentility
* HIS CORRECTIVE: Planters were more concerned with instilling fear in their enslaved population
Edward Long wanted to Anglicize Jamaica as much as possible. War capitalism: Sven Beckert’s whole thing is that war capitalism evolved into industrial capitalism. “War capitalism is a form of economic organization intimately tied to the series of transformations of the Americas unleashed in the aftermath of the Columbian Encounter and what Beckert calls “the recreation of the world.”

Question 23

The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

Answer 23

Richard White, 1991. * Middle ground: place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages.

• Pays d’en haut: referring to this as an explicitly Indian-white creation
• Mutually comprehensive world
• “American invented Indians and forced Indians to live with this invention.” p. xxxi
• The central aspect of the middle ground was the willingness of an actor to justify their actions by in terms of what they perceive their partner’s cultural premises to be

Question 24

Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783

Answer 24

Daniel Usner, 1992. * Frontier exchange: focusing on economic interactions —> turned into a strategy of survival

• Gift-giving: commercial transaction adapted to cultural custom, gave signal that colonists were living peacefully on Native lands* Stressing the difference between 18th and 19th century slavery
• French alliances with Natives strategic to provide a bulwark against English expansionism
• Male immigrants initially far outweighed female immigrants
• Mississippi Valley Indigenous peoples: long tradition of mixing crop cultivation with hunting, gathering, and fishing
• African American herders: huge role in spreading livestock production across Louisiana

Question 25

The Comanche Empire

Answer 25

Pekka Hammalainen, 2008. From 1750-1850, Comanches were THE dominant power in the Southwest. *
* Goals: coexist, control, exploit p. 5
* “Transnational networks of violence” within the interior, this is super helpful framing
* Comanche migration was a turning point in American history*
“Western Comanchería had began to replace New Mexico as the paramount economic, political, and military power center in the Southwest.” p. 74
* Blending of “violence and trade” I feel like this is a pretty great summary of empire
* Emphasizing Comanche CULTURAL ascendancy in New Mexico: raiding; purchasing maize; circulate stolen goods for profit
* Strong, centralized institutions

Question 26

The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai’i and the Early United States

Answer 26

Noelani Arista, 2019. * Chiefly speech was paramount
* “Agency” is too rooted in western political Enlightenment traditions
* Emphasis on a confluence of worlds rather than contact
* New Englanders mythologized Kamehameha as a military conquerer and “civilized (European)” man
* Mana is genealogically and socially constructed
* Materials objects helped create an American mythos of Hawaii
* Funds were raised for American missionaries by propagating myths of the “warrior young savage Hawaiian male” (19th century)
1820s, attempts to protect Hawaiian women and dispel missionaries.

Question 27

Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society

Answer 27

Mary Beth Norton, 1996. Focusing on 1620-1670. * Gender defined social relationships
* Approaching power both inside and outside the household
* Power in colonial America lay in the hands of men, who expected to govern women p. 6
* The family was the foundation of the state
* Marriage ruled everything, truly
Thomas/Thomasine Hall: their life is representative of colonial legal needs to resolutely define binary gender; reveals the extent of communal body inspection; ordered to dress as both a man and a woman

Question 28

The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution

Answer 28

Robert Parkinson, 2016. * “Common Cause” had origins in appealing to Protestant unity in England

• Continental Association: comprehensive boycott strategy
• This was a war of representation
• “The American Revolution” was different from the “Revolutionary War”
• They HAD to destroy public affection for English ancestors

Question 29

Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattoes and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies

Answer 29

Ann Twinam, 2015. * Iberian v. Anglo-world: Spanish legislative discrimination against those lacking “clean blood” vs. the biological inferiority language of the Anglo world
* Pardos and mulattos who applied for whiteness were also recognized as vassals
* There was a pretty significant private-public bifurcation in Spanish America
Black and parda women: had far fewer means of applying for whiteness, could engage in concubinage, marry a lighter skin man, etc.
We now know that few petitioned, and even fewer obtained, royal decrees that granted whiteness. Yet, those who suggested that such mobility was possible were not wholly mistaken. The whitening gracias al sacar could only have existed because it rested on the real mobilities of unknown thousands of slaves, free blacks, castas, pardo, and mulatto vassals and soon-tobe citizens who leveraged those potentials inherent in their worlds to seek better lives for themselves and their children.

Question 30

White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1812

Answer 30

Winthrop Jordan, 1960s. * Noting that the English didn’t like African peoples from the start; saw them as promiscuous and un-Christian

• Rooting English attitudes towards Africans in anti-Blackness
• Lots of Christian revival interest in the “curse of Ham” (that his curse was to be Black)
• Perceptions of African heathenism
• Slavery was assumed to be a perpetual condition; immediately distinct from indentured servitude
  
  • Captivity differentiated the two

Question 31

Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

Answer 31

Maya Jasanoff, 2011. Spirit of 1783: British Empire significantly expanded around the world-and loyalists were both agents and advocates of imperial growth; clarified commitment to liberty and humanitarian ideals; enhanced taste for centralized, hierarchical government* Frames the Am. Rev. explicitly as a civil war p. 9

• Majority of Loyalists just went to different British colonies
• Nearly 1200 Black Loyalists moved to Africa to found Sierra Leone
• Oaths really scared off a lot of potential patriots* Great Riot: July 26, 1784, disbanded soldiers rioted against Black refugees in Shelburne
• Land grants: the number one source of discontent among loyalist refugees

Question 32

Sensibility and the American Revolution

Answer 32

Sarah Knott, 2009. * Sensibility: human sensitivity of perception; the essential link of self and society/Knott understands it as a mode of self, a holistic self. * “Revolutions reinvent societies.”

• Sentimental project implies a social revolution, the reconstitution of self and society
• Sensibility was a project of the elite

Question 33

The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763

Answer 33

Paul Mapp, 2011. He’s urging historians to remember the continent and move away from the eastern coast. * “This study has argued that perceptions of western American geography influenced the course of imperial diplomacy, that ideas about the undiscovered West contributed to the origins, unfolding, and outcome of the mid-eighteenth century’s Great War for Empire”
* Anxieties about westward expansion contributed to all out imperial warfare

Question 34

Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age

Answer 34

Sylvia Frey. Black liberation movement marked the Southern Revolutionary theater. *
* The three central institutions of white society: the church, the courthouse, the plantation house

Question 35

Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth Century North America

Answer 35

Nancy Shoemaker, 2006. * Nation: emphasizing the ambiguity of the 17th and 18th century English definitions, ones that could just be referencing political entities
* Tribe: it rose in popularity in the 19th century as a way to exclude non-European peoples from the political organization of nations

Question 36

Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America

Answer 36

Dan Richter, 2001. * Facing east centers Native history and places European colonizers in the foreground
* First encounters can best be communicated through object and rumor than perhaps by face-to-face interaction

Question 37

“Nothing Says Democracy Like A Visit from The Queen: Reflections on Empire and Nation in Early American Histories.”

Answer 37

Grasso and Wulf, 2008. Empire and nation as mutually emergent.

Question 38

“Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas.”

Answer 38

Eric Hinderaker and Rebecca Horn, 2010. * Nationalist preoccupations have fragmented histories of the Americas

• Pushing back against the nation-state (common theme alert!)
• So this is inching towards “Vast Early America” in that it reminds scholars that continental histories still follow national borders/boundaries and neglect interconnected locales outside of the continental scope
• Solutions? One may be to lean into regionalization
• Be wary of the comparative histories, for they can run into flattening generalizations

Question 39

“Lying Together: The Imperial Implications of Cross-Cultural Truths,”

Answer 39

Piker, 2011. * Perhaps it is best to say that power was far more fragile than previously understood in both the European and Indigenous camps

• Looking for a microhistory of empire, of understanding imperialism as fundamentally local
• Empires were powerful; but Natives were also absolutely capable of affecting imperial politics

Question 40

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804

Answer 40

Alan Taylor, 2016. Synthesis of non-Whiggish Revolutionary history.

Question 41

Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic

Answer 41

Rosemarie Zagarri, 2008. 1830s: conservative backlash against women. * Female politicians: saw themselves as independent political beings, as opposed to republican mothers or wives
* Women’s rights: ambiguous, didn’t necessarily imply the fight for suffrage. Women were seen as partisan rather than patriotic after the Revolution.

Question 42

Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

Answer 42

Kathleen DuVal, 2015. The people with stakes in the Gulf Coast wars: French, Spanish, British, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, people of African descent. The Gulf Coast constituted a site of imperial contestation adjacent to the Am. Rev.

Question 43

Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast

Answer 43

Christine DeLucia, 2018. * King Philip’s War is basically the lodestone for discussing historical relations between New Englanders and Native Americans
* We are STILL impacted by the colonial period; there is a materiality and physicality to historical and remembered violence
Two foundational sites of meaning for America: Indigenous peoples and slavery

Question 44

Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England

Answer 44

Jenny Hale Pulsipher, 2018. All 17th century. Talking mainly about how John Wompas could manipulate the British against their own perceptions of Indigineity.

Question 45

An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America

Answer 45

Michael Witgen, 2012. * Two stereotypes ruled 19th c. American views of Native Americans: brutality and nobility
* Using Native storytelling to create a unique American folklore p. 11
* Investigating the very bounds of the notion of “discovery”
* The thesis: you can write a history of Native North America in the 17th century
We’re still overly reliant on European “discovery” myths

Question 46

Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England

Answer 46

Jeani O’Brien, 2010. New Englanders began writing Natives out of their local histories early on to construct a false sense of self and superiority.

Question 47

“Grounded Histories: Land and Landscape in Early America.”

Answer 47

Karen Halttunen, 2011. 1980s (for my own benefit): the era of concerted pushback against the primacy of the nation-state

• There was an established European tradition of reading the landscape as text
• “history was inextricable from place.” p. 519
• At the time she’s writing, there’s a revived interest in regional and local histories
• So basically, give more deference to local vernacular and knowledge: for both historic and present day agents

Question 48

Contested Spaces of Early America

Answer 48

Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, 2014. * Thinking of a colonial America that is as expansive as could possibly be

• “Colonial maps were expressions of desire, not reality.”
• European maps also represented Indian knowledge of geography and self-hood
• “Following that lead, we have consciously chosen to define early America as a single unified space defined by indigenous experiences with colonialism.” p. 20
• Focusing on “Indian cores.”

Question 49

Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?,

Answer 49

Peter Colcanis, 2006. Lol he just hated this turn.

Question 50

Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives,

Answer 50

Mapp, 2006. He’s interested in transcending imperial boundaries.

Question 51

British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections

Answer 51

Philip J. Stern, 2006. * “The British Atlantic” gets scholars away from the limitations of the “nation-state” view

• Worries that the geographic scope is too narrow
• Historians tend to divide expansion into two categories: for colonization or commerce

Question 52

Beyond the Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections,

Answer 52

Allison Games, 2006. * I’m intrigued by the assertion that historians identify themselves first by geography, then by historical period

• Place is often the starting point of historical research
• “Historians consequently find themselves struggling to write nonnational histories within national paradigms.” p. 676
• She’s cautioning against viewing colonization as the predetermined goal of European settlers in the North American Atlantic
• Basically, she’s not totally against the Atlantic as a model, but worries that it creates artificial connections

Question 53

How Do You Get from Jamestown to Santa Fe?: A Colonial Sun Belt,

Answer 53

Juliana Barr, 2007. * The Spanish borderlands fit within the historiography of the American South

• The Gulf of Mexico as a starting point incorporates far more of the early colonial Spanish history of North America: does this still foreground Eurocentrism???
• “The West” is a region that defers to European expansionism, whereas the colonial Sun Belt incorporates Indigenous histories
• Need to incorporate a better historiographical understanding of Indigenous slavery