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"Colonial Period (1600-1775)"
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Republic of Indians
A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who challenged European empires from the inside, Republic of Indians tells the story of Indigenous leaders who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law.While in the Spanish Empire, Natives were a recognized part of \"la república de indios, \" the \"republic of Indians, \" other Natives across the early American South understood themselves to be joined with European colonists in larger polities, each jealously guarding their own bodies of liberties under royal sanction. Thus, rather than simply rejecting European pretensions to rule them as subjects and vassals, Native Southerners as diverse as the Apalachees, Pamunkeys, Powhatans, and Timucuas redefined their status to become political players in legislative assemblies and the courts of distant monarchs. They pushed for incorporation in larger political systems in which they had a say and were themselves instrumental in creating.Adapting pre-invasion practices to the technology of writing and the challenges of colonialism, Indigenous petitioners sought exemptions from labor and protection for \"the lands that God gave to them, \" as well as the right to install preferred leaders, avoid enslavement, ally with the Crown against colonists, ease harsh colonial laws, and even amend the terms of treaties and compacts. Bradley J. Dixon shows how their petitions also stand as enduring contributions to American political thought and how it was these \"vassals\" and \"subjects\" who gave meaning to the modern idea of tribal sovereignty. In the South, the Spanish and English empires came to resemble one another precisely because they were both dependent to a remarkable degree on maintaining Indigenous political consent and were founded in large part on Indigenous conceptions of law.
eBook
An Anxious Pursuit
In An Anxious Pursuit , Joyce Chaplin examines the impact
of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of
American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses
particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress,
tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia,
and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern,
improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice
as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates
the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life.
By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of
cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic
history.
Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private
papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton
cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a
modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to
improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive
anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The
basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties,
according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery.
Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of
the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower
South's ability to compete in the contemporary world.
Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some
of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues
that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the
antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a
reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an
outright rejection of those ideas.
eBook
My life in the American colonies
Living in the American colonies was difficult at times as towns were built, governance was established, and people from many different backgrounds, including Native Americans, learned to live together. By the 1770s, many colonists were asserting their belief in a new country free from English rule. Readers meet a young colonist growing up during the tumult of the pre-Revolutionary era.
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Slaves and Englishmen
Technically speaking, slavery was not legal in the English-speaking world before the mid-seventeenth century. But long before race-based slavery was entrenched in law and practice, English men and women were well aware of the various forms of human bondage practiced in other nations and, in less systematic ways, their own country. They understood the legal and philosophic rationale of slavery in different cultural contexts and, for good reason, worried about the possibility of their own enslavement by foreign Catholic or Muslim powers. While opinions about the benefits and ethics of the institution varied widely, the language, imagery, and knowledge of slavery were a great deal more widespread in early modern England than we tend to assume.In wide-ranging detail, Slaves and Englishmen demonstrates how slavery shaped the ways the English interacted with people and places throughout the Atlantic world. By examining the myriad forms and meanings of human bondage in an international context, Michael Guasco illustrates the significance of slavery in the early modern world before the rise of the plantation system or the emergence of modern racism. As this revealing history shows, the implications of slavery were closely connected to the question of what it meant to be English in the Atlantic world.
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Early North America in global perspective
\"Early North American history is a field in flux. In the last thirty years, the field of Atlantic History has transformed scholarly studies of colonial America, bringing to light the many connections linking the Americas to Africa and Europe. Recently, though, historians have begun to question the utility of the Atlantic framework. Some suggest that it overlooks global phenomena, while others argue for a hemispheric or continental perspective on North America's early history.Early North America in Global Perspective collects the most interesting and innovative scholarly approaches to these questions. Anchored by a robust introduction that guides the reader through the various conceptual arguments, the fourteen essays gathered here introduce students to some of the finest historians of early America working in expansive and stimulating ways. These essays capture the complexity of North America's past and are in tune with the global influences that shape its present. \"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Captive's Position
Why do narratives of Indian captivity emerge in New England between 1682 and 1707 and why are these texts, so centrally concerned with women's experience, supported and even written by a powerful group of Puritan ministers? InThe Captive's Position, Teresa Toulouse argues for a new interpretation of the captivity narrative-one that takes into account the profound shifts in political and social authority and legitimacy that occurred in New England at the end of the seventeenth century. While North American narratives of Indian captivity had been written before this period by French priests and other European adventurers, those stories had focused largely on Catholic conversions and martyrdoms or male strategies for survival among the Indians. In contrast, the New England texts represented a colonial Protestant woman who was separated brutally from her family but who demonstrated qualities of religious acceptance, humility, and obedience until she was eventually returned to her own community. Toulouse explores how the female captive's position came to resonate so powerfully for traditional male elites in the second and third generation of the Massachusetts colony. Threatened by ongoing wars with Indians and French as well as by a range of royal English interventions in New England political and cultural life, figures such as Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and John Williams perceived themselves to be equally challenged by religious and social conflicts within New England. By responding to and employing popular representations of female captivity, they were enabled to express their ambivalence toward the world of their fathers and toward imperial expansion and thereby to negotiate their own complicated sense of personal and cultural identity. Examining the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, Hannah Swarton, and John Williams (who comes to stand in for the female captive), Toulouse asserts the need to read these gendered texts as cultural products that variably engage, shape, and confound colonial attitudes toward both Europe and the local scene in Massachusetts. In doing so,The Captive's Positionoffers a new story of the rise and breakdown of orthodox Puritan captivities and a meditation on the relationship between dreams of authority and historical change.
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Faithful Bodies
In the seventeenth-century English Atlantic, religious beliefs and practices played a central role in creating racial identity. English Protestantism provided a vocabulary and structure to describe and maintain boundaries between insider and outsider. In this path-breaking study, Heather Miyano Kopelson peels back the layers of conflicting definitions of bodies and competing practices of faith in the puritan Atlantic, demonstrating how the categories of white, black, and Indian developed alongside religious boundaries between Christian and heathen and between Catholic and Protestant.Faithful Bodiesfocuses on three communities of Protestant dissent in the Atlantic World: Bermuda, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In this puritan Atlantic, religion determined insider and outsider status: at times Africans and Natives could belong as long as they embraced the Protestant faith, while Irish Catholics and English Quakers remained suspect. Colonists interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West Central Africans shaped their understandings of human difference and its acceptable boundaries. Prayer, religious instruction, sexual behavior, and other public and private acts became markers of whether or not blacks and Indians were sinning Christians or godless heathens. As slavery became law, transgressing people of color counted less and less as sinners in English puritans eyes, even as some of them made Christianity an integral part of their communities. As Kopelson shows, this transformation proceeded unevenly but inexorably during the long seventeenth century.
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