1
University of Florida
Department of History
Semester I, Fall 2012
History 6198: Early American Society
Flint 013, Wednesdays 3:00-6:00pm
Dr. Juliana Barr
Keene-Flint Hall, #021
(352) 273-3364
Office Hours: Tuesdays 2-4:30pm, Wednesdays 11-12:30, and by appointment
This course covers the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, places the European invasion and settlement of North America in the context of African and American Indian history, and develops comparisons among the regions claimed by the English, Spanish, and French. Key themes are: cross-cultural encounter; slavery; social, ethnic, class, and gender hierarchies; religious conflict and conversion; politics, empire, and revolutions – all of which will be examined across the diversity of regions and peoples of early North America.
Readings
Each week everyone will read the core assignment. In addition, each person will also select an item from the list of secondary titles; there will be no duplication of secondary readings. Generally, an individual will be free to choose the work that most interests him/her, but some “volunteers” may be sacrificed to ensure that interpretive diversity prevails. All books assigned as core readings are available for purchase at the UF bookstore but you should check online at Amazon, Alibris, and Abe for less expensive copies. The secondary readings are left to your discovery, reading, and xeroxing at the library or online website of your choice.
In readings and class discussions, it will be the job of you and your colleagues to determine what questions each author seeks to explore, what type of evidence she or he employs to answer these questions, and how it is they reach the conclusions they do.
Written Assignments
You will write three papers, 7-8 pages, typed, double-spaced. You may choose which two of the first four questions to address, but everyone must confront the final essay for your third paper. In writings these essays, you need use only course readings. No outside research is needed or desired. If you wish to write on a different topic, please discuss your proposal with me. Late work will not be accepted without penalty. All papers will be due on Friday at 5:00pm.
DUE FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – Detail the shifts and consolidations of political OR religious worlds for Indians and Europeans in seventeenth-century America.
DUE FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12 – Characterize economic networks of the early American world.
DUE FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 – Evaluate the relationship of slavery to colonial social and economic development.
DUE FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – Assess the importance of one or more of the following – gender, race, class – for the construction of social order in early America.
DUE WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12 – Discuss whether “colonial” is a period or a process.
REWRITE POLICY
You may rewrite either or both of the first two assigned papers (time constraints prohibit rewriting the final one), but only after talking with me about such details as the new due date and the kinds of changes to be made. You must inform me of your decision to rewrite a paper by the Friday following the class session at which I first return the original version. You will ordinarily receive one week to rewrite, but I will be flexible about negotiating extensions for good cause. The old draft must accompany the new version when you turn it in to me. Rewriting cannot lower your grade (nor can changing your mind about handing in a revised paper), but it does not by itself guarantee a higher one; you must substantially rework the essay, following my comments and initiating your own improvements too.
Grading
Papers (each 25%)75%
Class Discussion**25%
** Students are expected to attend and to actively engage in each and every class discussion. Absences will be counted against you; more than two absences will result in a failing grade. Participation should reflect careful, timely reading of and thoughtful engagement with the assigned readings.
I.BEGINNINGS
Week 1/August 22: Introduction to the Course
Week 2/August 29: Introduction to the Americas, Hello Americas
Core Reading: Felipe Fernández-Armesto. The Americas: A Hemispheric History
Secondary Readings:
Please browse through the last ten years of the William and Mary Quarterly (which you can do online through the library website) and evaluate what appear to be the most recent trends in Early American history
II. POLITICS
Week 3/September 5: To Infinity . . . and Beyond
Core Reading:Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America
Secondary Readings:
Overview
James Axtell, “Colonial America without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections,” Journal of American History 73
(1987), 981-96
James H. Merrell et al., Forum: “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William & Mary
Quarterly, 69, 3 (July 2012), 451-540
Steve J. Stern, “Paradigms of Conquest: History, Historiography, and Politics,” Journal of Latin American Studies
24 (Quincentenary Supplement, ed. Tulio Halperín Donghi), 1992, 1-34
Trade, Warfare, and Diplomacy
Heidi Bohaker, “The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701,”
William and Mary Quarterly 63, 1 (2006), 23-52
Catharine M. Desbarats, “The Cost of Early Canada’s Native Alliances: Reality and Scarcity’s Rhetoric,” William
and Mary Quarterly 57 (1995), 609-30
W. J. Eccles, “The Fur Trade and Eighteenth-Century Imperialism,” William & Mary Quarterly 40 (1983), 341-62
Patricia Galloway, “‘The Chief Who is Your Father’: Choctaw and French Views of the Diplomatic
Relation,” in Peter Wood, et al, eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, 254-278
Cornelius Jaenen, “Amerindian Views of French Culture in the Seventeenth Century,” Canadian Historical Review 55 (September 1974), 261-91
Joshua Piker, “Lying Together: The Imperial Implications of Cross-cultural Untruths,” American Historical Review
116, 4 (October 2011), 964-86
James Merrell, “The Indians’ New World: The Catawba Experience,” William & Mary Quarterly 41 (1984), 537-65
Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William & Mary Quarterly 40 (Oct. 1983), 528-59
Brett Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance,” William & Mary Quarterly, 63 (2006), 53-80
Nancy Shoemaker, “An Alliance Between Men: Gender Metaphors in 18th-Century American Indian Diplomacy
East of the Mississippi,” Ethnohistory 46 (1999), 239-63
Richard White, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History 65 (September 1978), 319-343
Territory, Land, and Sovereignty
Patricia Albers and Jeanne Kay, “Sharing the Land: A Study in American Indian Territoriality,” in Thomas E. Ross
and Tyrel G. Moore, eds., A Cultural Geography of North American Indians, 47-91
Juliana Barr, “Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the ‘Borderlands’ of the Early Southwest,”
William & Mary Quarterly 68 1 (January 2011), 5-46
James Taylor Carson, “Ethnogeography and the Native American Past,” Ethnohistory 49 (Fall 2002), 769-88
J. Brian Harley, "Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter," Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 98 (1992), 522-44
James Merrell, “The Indians’ New World: The Catawba Experience,” William & Mary Quarterly 41 (1984), 537-65
Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” William & Mary
Quarterly 53 (July 1996), 435-58
Peter J. Usher, Frank J. Tough, and Robert M. Galois, “Reclaiming the Land: Aboriginal Title, Treaty Rights and
Land Claims in Canada,” Applied Geography 12 (April 1992), 109-32
David J. Wishart, An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians, 16-35
Week 4/September 12:Father Knows Best
Core Reading: Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776
Secondary Readings:
Nationalism and Identity
T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in
Need of Revising,” Journal of American History, 84 (June, 1997), 13-39
Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776, 89-130
Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity, 16-50
Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America, 95-129
Winthrop Jordan, “Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776,” Journal of American History
60 (1973), 294-308
Peter C. Messer, Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-century America, 17-44
Caroline Winterer, “From Royal to Republican: the Classical Image in Early America,” Journal of American
History, 91 (2005), 1264-1290
The People
Paul Gilje, Rioting in America, 12-34
Benjamin H. Irvin, “The Streets of Philadelphia: Crowds, Congress, and the Political Culture of Revolution,
1774-1783,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 129 (2005), 7-44
Benjamin H. Irvin, “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768-1776,” New England Quarterly,
76 (2003), 197-238
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden
History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, 211-47
Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, 263-87
Steven J. Stewart, “Skimmington in the Middle and New England Colonies,” in William Pencak, et al., Riot and
Revelry in Early America, 41-86
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1-52
Alfred F. Young, “English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,” in Margaret Jacob and
James Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, 185-212
Republican and Monarchical Discourses
Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics, 3-58
Patricia U. Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America, 99-127
Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, 11-54
Paul Downes, Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature, 31-58
Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in France and America, 92-127
Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-century England
and America, 163-99
Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “The Widow Ranter and Royalist Culture in Colonial Virginia,” Early American Literature, 35
(2004), 41-66
Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “‘Subjects . . . Unto the Same King’: New England Indians and the Use of Royal Political
Power,” Massachusetts Historical Review 5 (2003), 29-57
Ed White, The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America, 1-27
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 57-92
III.RELIGIONS AND BELIEFS
Week 5/September 19: You Can Do Magic
Core Reading: David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New
England
Secondary Readings:
Overview
Jon Butler, “Coercion, Miracle, Reason: Rethinking the American Religious Experience in the Revolutionary Age,” in Religion in a Revolutionary Age, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, 1-30
Charles L. Cohen, “The Colonization of British North America as an Episode in the History of Christianity,” Church History 72 (2003), 553-68
Charles L. Cohen, “Puritanism,” in Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, vol. 3, 577-94
Religious Culture & Popular Piety
Anne S. Brown and David D. Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in
Early New England,” in Lived Religion in America, ed. David D. Hall, 41-68
Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-
1700, 231-285
Richard Godbeer, “‘Love Raptures’: Marital, Romantic, and Erotic Images of Jesus Christ in Puritan New England, 1670-1730,” New England Quarterly 68 (1995), 355-84
Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century
New England, 93-135
Lyle Koehler, “The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation during the Years of Antinomian Turmoil, 1636-1640,” William and Mary Quarterly 31 (1974) 55-78
Mark A. Peterson, “The Plymouth Church and the Evolution of Puritan Religious Culture,” New England Quarterly 66 (1993), 570-93
Marilyn J. Westerkamp, “Engendering Puritan Religious Culture in Old and New England,” Pennsylvania History 64 Special Issue (1997), 105-22
Worlds of New England
Elise Brenner, “To Pray or to Be Prey: That is the Question: Strategies for Cultural Autonomy of Massachusetts Praying Town Indians,” Ethnohistory 27 (1980) 135-152
David Harley, “Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession,” American Historical Review 101 (1996), 307-30
Gloria Main, “Gender, Work, and Wages in Colonial New England,” William & Mary Quarterly 51 (1994), 39-66
Daniel Mandell, “‘To Live More Like My Christian English Neighbors,’” William & Mary Quarterly 48 (1991), 552-79
David Paul Nord, “Teleology and News: The Religious Roots of American Journalism, 1630-1730,” Journal of American History 77 (1990-91) 9-38
Mark Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” William & Mary Quarterly 58 (2001), 305-47
David Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in 17th-
Century Martha’s Vineyard,” William & Mary Quarterly 62 2 (April 2005), 141-74
Week 6/September 26: Blessed Be the Indians
Core Reading: Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits
Secondary Readings:
Tekakwitha Interpretations
K. I. Koppedrayer, “The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin: Early Jesuit Biographies of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha,” Ethnohistory 40 (1993): 277-306
Nancy Shoemaker, “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood,” in Negotiators of Change, ed. Nancy Shoemaker, 49-71
Iroquois, Indian Women
David Blanchard, “. . . To the Other Side of the Sky: Catholicism at Kahnawake, 1667-1701,” Anthropologica 24 (1982)
Judith K. Brown, “Economic Organization and the Position of Women among the Iroquois,” Ethnohistory 17 (1970): 151-67
Kathleen M. Brown, “The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier,” in Negotiators of Change, ed. Nancy Shoemaker, 26-48
Theda Perdue, “Columbus Meets Pocahontas in the American South,” Southern Cultures 3, 1 (1997), 4-21
Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” Journal of Women’s History 2 (Winter 1991), 39-57
John Steckley, “The Warrior and the Lineage: Jesuit Use of Iroquoian Images to Communicate Christianity,”
Ethnohistory 39, 4 (Autumn 1992), 478-509
Christopher Vecsey, “The Story and Structure of the Iroquois Confederacy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54 (1986): 79-106
Natalie Zemon Davis, “Iroquois Women, European Women,” in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds.,
Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, 243-58 or in Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell, eds., American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850, 97-118
Cross-Cultural Religious Relations
Takao Abé, “What Determined the Content of Missionary Reports? The Jesuit Relations Compared with the Iberian Jesuit Accounts,” French Colonial History 3 (2003): 69-83
James Axtell, “The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures,” in Natives and Newcomers, 145-73 or in The European and the Indian, 39-86
Dominique Deslandres, “Dreams Clash: The War over Authorized Interpretation in 17th-Century French
Missions,” in Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster, eds., Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early
Modern Atlantic, 143-53
Carol Devens, “Separate Confrontations: Gender as a Factor in Indian Adaptation to European Colonization in New France,” American Quarterly 38 (1986), 461-80
Rebecca Kugel, “Of Missionaries and their Cattle: Ojibwa Perceptions of a Missionary as Evil Shaman,” Ethnohistory 41 (1994) 227-44
Tracy Leavelle, ‘Bad Things’ and ‘Good Hearts’: Mediation, Meaning, and the Language of Illinois Christianity,”
Church History 76, 2 (June 2007), 363-94
Cynthia Radding, “Crosses, Caves, and Matachinis: Divergent Appropriations of Catholic Discourse in
Northwestern New Spain,” The Americas 55 (1998), 177-201
James P. Ronda, “‘We Are Well As We Are’: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions,” William and Mary Quarterly 34 (1977): 66-82
IV. IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID
Week 7/October 3: Trading Spaces
Core Reading:Stephen J. Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America
Secondary Readings:
Atlantic Worlds
David Armitage, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Analysis?” American Historical Review 104 (1999), 427-45
Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 65-100
W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the
Northwest Atlantic, 1500-1800,” American Historical Review, 113 (2008), 19-47
Judith Carney, “African Antecedents of Uncle Ben in U.S. Rice History,” Journal of Historical Geography 29 1
(January 2003), 1-22
Peter A. Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (October 2006), 725-42
Paul Mapp, “Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (October 2006), 713-24
Commerce, Markets, and Economic Development
Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New
England,” William & Mary Quarterly 51 (1994), 601-624
James Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William & Mary Quarterly 35
(1978), 3-32 AND “Communications,” William & Mary Quarterly 37 (1980), 688-700
James Henretta, “The Transition to Capitalism in America,” in The Transformation of Early American History,
eds. James Henretta, Michael Kammen, and Stanley N. Katz, 218-38
John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789, 17-34
Peter Mancall and Thomas Weiss, “Was Economic Growth Likely in Colonial British North America?” Journal of
Economic History 59 (1999), 17-40
Jacob M. Price, “The Atlantic Economy,” in Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America, 18-42
Winifred B. Rothenberg, “The Emergence of a Capital Market in Rural Massachusetts, 1730-1838,” Journal of
Economic History 45 (1990), 3-29
Consumption & Capital
T.H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,” Journal of British Studies 25
(1986), 467-99
Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760-1820,” William & Mary Quarterly, 62
(2005), 577-624
John E. Crowley, “The Sensibility of Comfort,” American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 749-782
Robert S. DuPlessis, “Was There a Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-century New France?” French Colonial
History, 1 (2002), 143-159
David Jaffee, “The Ebenezers Devotion: Pre- and Post-revolutionary Consumption in Rural Connecticut,” New
England Quarterly, 76 (2003), 239-264
Jane T. Merritt, “Tea Trade, Consumption, and the Republican Paradox in Prerevolutionary Philadelphia,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography, 128 (2004), 117-148
Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,” William & Mary Quarterly
47, 1 (1990), 3-29
Week 8/October 10: Multicultural Markets
Core Reading: Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783
Secondary Readings:
Overview
Allan Greer, “National, Transnational, and Hypernational Historiographies: New France Meets Early American