Early American History

When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. Following Champlain's example, fellow colonists nurtured similar gardens through the Saint Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes region. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind. As Parsons relates, colonists soon discovered that there were limits to what they could accomplish in their gardens. The strangeness of New France became woefully apparent, for example, when colonists found that they could not make French wine out of American grapes. They attributed the differences they discovered to Native American neglect and believed that the French colonial project would rehabilitate and restore the plant life in the region. However, the more colonists experimented with indigenous species and communicated their findings to the wider French Atlantic world, the more foreign New France appeared to French naturalists and even to the colonists themselves. Parsons demonstrates how the French experience of attempting to improve American environments supported not only the acquisition and incorporation of Native American knowledge but also the development of an emerging botanical science that focused on naming new species. Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

In the eighteenth-century, France’s metropolitan authorities and colonial officials tasked the French western explorer Pierre de La Vérendrye to integrate the Indigenous peoples of the Petit Nord – Cree, Assiniboine, Monsoni, Anishinaabeg, and Dakota – into the network of French-mediated alliances emanating from the Great Lakes. The governor-general of New France, known as Onontio by the Natives, sought to ensure the symbolic subjugation of all Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes and the Petit Nord. Unlike the Great Lakes, devastated by endemic warfare and virulent diseases, the Indigenous social formations of the Petit Nord and Northern Great Plains remained politically cohesive and autonomous in the eighteenth-century. Thus, the Cree, Assiniboine, Dakota, and others, resisted creating a “middle ground” with La Vérendrye and other French newcomers, as they had little desire or need of French mediation in their territories. La Vérendrye’s ambitions for a French-mediated peace, or “Pax Gallica,” were thwarted in the overwhelmingly Native political space of the Petit Nord and Northern Great Plains.

This article forms part of my larger effort to write about my family’s history. Consider Tiffany was a scion of the early Tiffany settlers in the colonies of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Tiffany’s particular fame lies in his manuscript, “The American Colonies and the Revolution [c. 1600-1795],” a history of the American colonies from their founding through the Revolution from a Tory’s point-of-view. He divided his manuscript into nine books. Here, I have transcribed and annotated Book V which covers the Revolution from 1774 to 1780.

The war of 1812 went bad and except for Jackson post peace victory at New Orleans it ended badly too. The war and peace taught many Democratic Republicans unpleasant lessons about the feasibility of Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800. Democratic Republicans were anti National Bank but if the National bank had been rechartered than the Secretary of the Treasury could have borrowed the $18 million he needed to fund the war from the bank since there was no national bank the secretary of the treasury was forced to make deals with John Jacob Astor and Stephen Giraud for personal loans to keep the country going. The Democratic Republicans were also supposed to oppose taxation as an infringement upon the liberty of the virtuous farmer. Well a government that does not tax is a government that cannot afford to fund internal improvement like the upkeep of roads, fund armies or navies. The dismal and haphazard performance of the United States forces underscored the folly of small government. Madison was not the first person to realize these inconsistencies but he was the most important.

Maps were at the heart of cultural life in the Americas from before colonization to the formation of modern nation-states. The  essays in Early American Cartographies examine indigenous and European peoples' creation and use of maps to better represent and understand the world they inhabited.

Drawing from both current historical interpretations and new interdisciplinary perspectives, this collection provides diverse approaches to understanding the multilayered exchanges that went into creating cartographic knowledge in and about the Americas. In the introduction, editor Martin Bruckner provides a critical assessment of the concept of cartography and of the historiography of maps. The individual essays, then, range widely over space and place, from the imperial reach of Iberian and British cartography to indigenous conceptualizations, including "dirty," ephemeral maps and star charts, to demonstrate that pre-nineteenth-century American cartography was at once a multiform and multicultural affair.

This volume not only highlights the collaborative genesis of cartographic knowledge about the early Americas; the essays also bring to light original archives and innovative methodologies for investigating spatial relations among peoples in the western hemisphere. Taken together, the authors reveal the roles of early American cartographies in shaping popular notions of national space, informing visual perception, animating literary imagination, and structuring the political history of Anglo- and Ibero-America.

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.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674017603

Conventional understandings of Catholicism, especially the claim that the pope held temporal power over all civil rulers, presented a signal challenge to early American Catholics’ civil and religious liberty. Yet reform-minded Catholics in the North Atlantic world asserted their independence from the temporal powers of external authorities, including the pope. Catholics who participated in the American founding, such as Charles Carroll of Carrollton and John Carroll, drew from an intellectual tradition of conciliarism that was rooted in Catholic thought yet compatible with republicanism. The Carrolls’ public support of the nation’s foundational documents and their development of the American Catholic Church presented to the broader political and religious public a Catholic tradition that advocated not only a republican view of temporal independence but also a juridical, nonhierarchical understanding of church and state. Catholics of this sort were not a foil to American religious and political arrangements; instead, they fit their beliefs within the ideologies of the American founding and thereby answered Protestant charges that Catholics should be legally penalized. These conclusions offer compelling reasons to include the conciliarist tradition within the “multiple traditions approach” of American founding historiography.

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Concluding summation of the paper...
"In a time that calls out for meaningful change, the Tom Paine who transforms Foner’s Revolutionary America, his ability to articulate radical ideas to new audiences and his capacity tosubmit contemporary institutions to withering critiques in ways which effectively raised thedemand for far-reaching change, make his cast of mind and belief in mankind’s capacity to shape its own destiny an essential component of today’s politics."

The body of a short article published in the Token Corresponding Society Bulletin for December 2016 (Vol. 12, no. 1), numbered there pages 24-32. This article researches a 17th century token issuer from Great Yarmouth, Stephen Tracey, who was also a Pilgrim Father.

A brief history of early Plymouth settlers, both Puritan and Pilgrim plus information on Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum located in Plymouth, Massachusetts.  It's a Smithsonian Institution Affiliate, the name Plimouth based on the 17th century spelling of Plymouth.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from

This paper develops the thesis that the primary driving force behind Christopher Columbus' voyages of "discovery" was an apocalyptic vision that had him as a primary player blinding him in this case to the humanity of the people he "discovered."

Historians of colonial British North America have largely relegated piracy to the marginalia of the broad historical narrative from settlement to revolution. However, piracy and unregulated privateering played a pivotal role in the development of every English community along the eastern seaboard from the Carolinas to New England. Although many pirates originated in the British North American colonies and represented a diverse social spectrum, they were not supported and protected in these port communities by some underclass or proto-proletariat but by the highest echelons of colonial society, especially by colonial governors, merchants, and even ministers.

John Hanson is a man who may have been completely lost to history, if not for one indisputable fact: on November 5, 1781, he was elected President of the United States of America. Another fact is that George Washington was not elected until seven years later in 1788 and did not take office until the following year. As John Adams said, “facts are stubborn things.” 

This paper will examine the life, impact, and memory of John Hanson by attempting to answer three questions: Who was John Hanson?; What did Hanson’s presidency mean to Americans at the time?; and how has he been included, or not, in the American memory?

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.

Edition of this little book, published in 1863 in the midst of the American Civil War, develops the theme of the meaning of patriotism in a newly founded country. The protagonist, possibly involved in Aaron Burr's apparent attempt at founding a new state, in a burst of youthful pride declares that he does not want to hear the words "United States" again. His wish is granted, and he spends the rest of his days on ships asea. Edited by Sasha Newborn

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.

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.

Teachers of history face a contradictory challenge: we seek to encourage our students to recognize how different the past was from the present, while, at the same time, prodding them to see how issues in the past resonate with current concerns. If we are successful, the very strangeness of the past throws similarities of predicament or process into sharper relief. One of my favorite early American texts, published in 1746, does this beautifully.

This article addresses the double erasure of both women and the enslaved people whom they owned from the conjoined histories of slavery and empire. It shows how the economic practices of free women of European and African descent helped to make Jamaica the wealthiest and largest slaveholding colony in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic world. The growth of Britain’s American colonies created novel financial and social opportunities for women. They acted as vigorous participants in a high-risk marketplace that was being made global by European imperial activities. As merchants, women thickened the economic ties between Britain and the Caribbean, and helped to make Jamaica an important commercial hub. Financial pragmatism rather than nationalist sentiments drove them to pursue trade in Spanish territories, while also profiting from the frequent military conflicts between European powers. Women’s abilities to pursue entrepreneurial ventures were deeply intertwined with slave ownership. They had a vested interest in maintaining and advancing the severe labour regime in Jamaica and elsewhere in British America. Slave ownership reconfigured women’s financial, legal and social positions. In the colony, the status of being free came to matter more than any other signifier of identity, including gender.