In his influential essay “Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations,” historian Brian DeLay observes that despite some important calls for correction, American Indian peoples have largely fallen “outside the professional mandate for diplomatic history.”1 Building on an earlier argument by historian Arthur N. Gilbert, DeLay notes that the categorization of Native peoples as “legal oddities” since at least the mid-nineteenth century has fueled the field’s oversight and is itself largely a consequence of colonialism and imperialism.2 Moreover, the continued erasure of Indigenous people from American diplomatic history depends on scholarly assumptions that Native peoples had no “foreign policy” and were both “disconnected from” and “irrelevant to . . . international events.”3 Yet, as DeLay points out and as decades of work within the fields of Indigenous and settler colonial studies have demonstrated, there is a rich source base providing evidence to the contrary.4 Among the many contributions of James L. Hill’s monograph, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818, its forceful call for greater incorporation of southeastern Indians into the diplomatic history of the Atlantic world is topmost. Hill’s study addresses the intersecting themes of diplomacy, trade, and sovereignty in the Creek confederacy during the tumultuous period between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the end of the First Seminole War, with an emphasis on the Chattahoochee and Flint River regions in present-day Georgia and Florida. But both his subjects and his source material range much further as he takes readers from Havana to Halifax, from Saint Augustine to Quebec, and from Tallahassee to London. Rather than appearing disconnected from or irrelevant to international relations—per DeLay’s indictment of much foreign relations history—Creek, Seminole, and
{"title":"Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill","authors":"A. Hudson","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0025","url":null,"abstract":"In his influential essay “Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations,” historian Brian DeLay observes that despite some important calls for correction, American Indian peoples have largely fallen “outside the professional mandate for diplomatic history.”1 Building on an earlier argument by historian Arthur N. Gilbert, DeLay notes that the categorization of Native peoples as “legal oddities” since at least the mid-nineteenth century has fueled the field’s oversight and is itself largely a consequence of colonialism and imperialism.2 Moreover, the continued erasure of Indigenous people from American diplomatic history depends on scholarly assumptions that Native peoples had no “foreign policy” and were both “disconnected from” and “irrelevant to . . . international events.”3 Yet, as DeLay points out and as decades of work within the fields of Indigenous and settler colonial studies have demonstrated, there is a rich source base providing evidence to the contrary.4 Among the many contributions of James L. Hill’s monograph, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818, its forceful call for greater incorporation of southeastern Indians into the diplomatic history of the Atlantic world is topmost. Hill’s study addresses the intersecting themes of diplomacy, trade, and sovereignty in the Creek confederacy during the tumultuous period between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the end of the First Seminole War, with an emphasis on the Chattahoochee and Flint River regions in present-day Georgia and Florida. But both his subjects and his source material range much further as he takes readers from Havana to Halifax, from Saint Augustine to Quebec, and from Tallahassee to London. Rather than appearing disconnected from or irrelevant to international relations—per DeLay’s indictment of much foreign relations history—Creek, Seminole, and","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43853035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Polygamy: An Early American History by Sarah M. S. Pearsall (review)","authors":"Lindsay M. Keiter","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0027","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46575295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00182168-10368881
Camilla Townsend
night. It was 1581, and they had recently relocated their fledgling town inland in an effort to protect it from seaborne attack. But the Kalinagos who broke the people’s slumber with sudden violence were well informed, for one of their number had produced a map based on knowledge he acquired while he was living in the town as a slave. He had escaped not long ago and made his way home to the island of Dominica on a raft. Now he had returned with some well-armed brethren. This sixteenth-century version of special forces broke into the houses where they knew other Kalinagos were held, took the people they sought, and then melted away again into the darkness.1 Such an archival drama as this is the stuff of legend, or of Hollywood; it is also the stuff of modern historians’ dreams. No story could be more satisfying to most of us than this real-life drama featuring mobile, cosmopolitan, and feisty Indigenous people using the knowledge they had gained from their varied life experiences to empower themselves and their loved ones. Yet if we wish to end the movie that is playing in our mind’s eye on a high note, we cannot allow the camera to pull back or waver; we must not let it pick up the dozens, possibly hundreds, of other Kalinagos still in bondage in Puerto Rico, or any of the other enslaved people lying wide-eyed in the darkness, awaiting the horrors that the morrow would bring. Thinking about this wider view may make us uncomfortable. Is it the case that our desire to find a trajectory that demonstrates empowerment may sometimes—just sometimes—interfere with what we call our scholarship? Has the moment perhaps come for us to acknowledge that wider reality more
{"title":"At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America","authors":"Camilla Townsend","doi":"10.1215/00182168-10368881","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-10368881","url":null,"abstract":"night. It was 1581, and they had recently relocated their fledgling town inland in an effort to protect it from seaborne attack. But the Kalinagos who broke the people’s slumber with sudden violence were well informed, for one of their number had produced a map based on knowledge he acquired while he was living in the town as a slave. He had escaped not long ago and made his way home to the island of Dominica on a raft. Now he had returned with some well-armed brethren. This sixteenth-century version of special forces broke into the houses where they knew other Kalinagos were held, took the people they sought, and then melted away again into the darkness.1 Such an archival drama as this is the stuff of legend, or of Hollywood; it is also the stuff of modern historians’ dreams. No story could be more satisfying to most of us than this real-life drama featuring mobile, cosmopolitan, and feisty Indigenous people using the knowledge they had gained from their varied life experiences to empower themselves and their loved ones. Yet if we wish to end the movie that is playing in our mind’s eye on a high note, we cannot allow the camera to pull back or waver; we must not let it pick up the dozens, possibly hundreds, of other Kalinagos still in bondage in Puerto Rico, or any of the other enslaved people lying wide-eyed in the darkness, awaiting the horrors that the morrow would bring. Thinking about this wider view may make us uncomfortable. Is it the case that our desire to find a trajectory that demonstrates empowerment may sometimes—just sometimes—interfere with what we call our scholarship? Has the moment perhaps come for us to acknowledge that wider reality more","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47738230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In 1676, some imperial observers saw a hemispheric "Rising of the Indians" in the Caribbean and North America that threatened the colonial project, a fear largely forgotten today. Applying the heuristic of a widespread Native American revolution of 1676 to King Philip's War, Bacon's Rebellion, the Kalinago wars, and the Pueblo Revolt challenges the ways that historians have framed these events—often as discrete occurrences, often as failures to stave off settler colonialism. A broader chronological and geographic perspective offers a means to reconsider precipitants, results, and Indigenous peoples' goals in resistance. Four common emergent properties—slavery, mobility, the creation of pan-Indian, multiethnic communities, and cultural revitalization—connected these near-simultaneous events across space and shaped their outcomes. While historiography centers the Pueblo Revolt as a uniquely successful rebellion, other Native American groups managed to expel or circumscribe European colonizers' presence and power in the short and long term because of these uprisings. In ways often overlooked by scholars, the Kalinagos, the Wabanakis, the Susquehannocks, and the Haudenosaunee succeeded (at least for a time) alongside southwestern Native nations in maintaining sovereignty and limiting empire, while cultural renewal central to resistance sustained Wampanoag and Narragansett communities through brutal occupation.
{"title":"\"The Rising of the Indians\"; or, The Native American Revolution of (16)'76","authors":"M. Newell","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In 1676, some imperial observers saw a hemispheric \"Rising of the Indians\" in the Caribbean and North America that threatened the colonial project, a fear largely forgotten today. Applying the heuristic of a widespread Native American revolution of 1676 to King Philip's War, Bacon's Rebellion, the Kalinago wars, and the Pueblo Revolt challenges the ways that historians have framed these events—often as discrete occurrences, often as failures to stave off settler colonialism. A broader chronological and geographic perspective offers a means to reconsider precipitants, results, and Indigenous peoples' goals in resistance. Four common emergent properties—slavery, mobility, the creation of pan-Indian, multiethnic communities, and cultural revitalization—connected these near-simultaneous events across space and shaped their outcomes. While historiography centers the Pueblo Revolt as a uniquely successful rebellion, other Native American groups managed to expel or circumscribe European colonizers' presence and power in the short and long term because of these uprisings. In ways often overlooked by scholars, the Kalinagos, the Wabanakis, the Susquehannocks, and the Haudenosaunee succeeded (at least for a time) alongside southwestern Native nations in maintaining sovereignty and limiting empire, while cultural renewal central to resistance sustained Wampanoag and Narragansett communities through brutal occupation.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45607492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast by Chad L. Anderson (review)","authors":"D. Preston","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47453755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In the early sixteenth century, Europeans occupied the northwest Atlantic at Newfoundland and the Caribbean islands in a set of parallel colonial processes. Yet historians have been reluctant to write about Newfoundland and the Caribbean together, enforcing a north-south divide in the historiography. There is nonetheless reason to believe that a comparative-connective approach, considering both historical interconnections and important differences, offers a revealing new perspective on how Europeans approached and interacted with these two corners of the western Atlantic basin. Rereading both the surviving evidence and scholarly literature with an eye to European conceptions of island geographies, the role of Iberian empires, the importance of permanent settlements, and the nature of commercial connections in the early Atlantic shows two things. First, Europeans often actively connected their colonial efforts, conceptually and commercially, at both Newfoundland and the Caribbean in the early sixteenth century. Second, those connections changed and waned over time as the reality of differing ecologies and settlement patterns produced very different forms of occupation at Newfoundland and the Caribbean. Together, these points indicate that the historical relationship between Newfoundland and the Caribbean was more complex, contingent, and varied than historians have acknowledged.
{"title":"Beyond Bacalao: Newfoundland and the Caribbean in the Sixteenth Century","authors":"John G. Bouchard","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the early sixteenth century, Europeans occupied the northwest Atlantic at Newfoundland and the Caribbean islands in a set of parallel colonial processes. Yet historians have been reluctant to write about Newfoundland and the Caribbean together, enforcing a north-south divide in the historiography. There is nonetheless reason to believe that a comparative-connective approach, considering both historical interconnections and important differences, offers a revealing new perspective on how Europeans approached and interacted with these two corners of the western Atlantic basin. Rereading both the surviving evidence and scholarly literature with an eye to European conceptions of island geographies, the role of Iberian empires, the importance of permanent settlements, and the nature of commercial connections in the early Atlantic shows two things. First, Europeans often actively connected their colonial efforts, conceptually and commercially, at both Newfoundland and the Caribbean in the early sixteenth century. Second, those connections changed and waned over time as the reality of differing ecologies and settlement patterns produced very different forms of occupation at Newfoundland and the Caribbean. Together, these points indicate that the historical relationship between Newfoundland and the Caribbean was more complex, contingent, and varied than historians have acknowledged.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46525952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article analyzes how historians have framed and studied the relationship between slavery and religion in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In surveying the historiography, it becomes readily apparent that historians are far more interested in writing about Christianity among the enslaved than the religious histories of African-descended peoples' diverse belief systems. It has been more common for historians to study how cosmologies in Africa became religions in the Americas because of the basic ideas that structure history as a discipline. Historical scholarship with a thematic focus on religion has a long tradition of examining how various heterogenous religious systems became incorporated into Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy. By contrast, African religions that display parallel belief systems, eclectic incorporation of multiple cosmologies, religious authority not tied to a text, secret and undocumented initiation ceremonies, and a stubborn disregard for time as a linear process have made it difficult to analyze their customs, traditions, and belief systems through a historical framework. Consequently, African and neo-African religions in the Americas such as Santeria, Candomblé, and Vodun continue to draw the attention largely of anthropologists, whereas historians are more comfortable working within the change-over-time model and a narrative structure of Christian creolization.
{"title":"The Roots and Routes of African Religious Beliefs in the Atlantic World","authors":"M. Childs","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes how historians have framed and studied the relationship between slavery and religion in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In surveying the historiography, it becomes readily apparent that historians are far more interested in writing about Christianity among the enslaved than the religious histories of African-descended peoples' diverse belief systems. It has been more common for historians to study how cosmologies in Africa became religions in the Americas because of the basic ideas that structure history as a discipline. Historical scholarship with a thematic focus on religion has a long tradition of examining how various heterogenous religious systems became incorporated into Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy. By contrast, African religions that display parallel belief systems, eclectic incorporation of multiple cosmologies, religious authority not tied to a text, secret and undocumented initiation ceremonies, and a stubborn disregard for time as a linear process have made it difficult to analyze their customs, traditions, and belief systems through a historical framework. Consequently, African and neo-African religions in the Americas such as Santeria, Candomblé, and Vodun continue to draw the attention largely of anthropologists, whereas historians are more comfortable working within the change-over-time model and a narrative structure of Christian creolization.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45970038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since at least the 1990s, historians have linked the development of gentry class consciousness in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American colonies with a cultural ideal of genteel refinement that had developed earlier in England.1 Most men with property and power in the colonies lacked the genteel or aristocratic birth that had anchored upper-class status in England a century earlier. Instead, elite colonial men based their claims to gentry status on their adoption of upper-class British ideals of behavior, education, and speech. The boundaries between “polite” colonial gentlemen and the “vulgar” (2) lower sorts came to be marked largely by language and culture. In general, historians have treated gentility in eighteenth-century British America as the expression of a particular upper-class culture. Members of the political and social elite acted like gentlemen, presumably impressing one another with their dignity and authority. But what happened when people outside of the elite scoffed or thumbed their noses at the new ideals of politeness? Kristin A. Olbertson, in this deeply researched, provocative, and often brilliant book, The Dreadful Word, argues that in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, genteel codes of behavior were not merely informal norms but were imposed through the law on those who refused to defer to the polite elite. Specifically, politeness was enforced and enacted through the regulation of “impolite” (2) speech and the prosecution of speech crimes such as swearing, cursing, contempt of authority, defamation, and lying. Speech crime prosecutions were not new in the eighteenth-century. The Puritans who first settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 made vigorous efforts to regulate ungodly speech and prosecute behavior that was by then tolerated in the English legal system. Criminal prosecutions for swearing, cursing, railing (insulting or mocking someone), singing, making noise in public, lying, and defaming were ubiquitous in the seventeenth century. But scholars have long assumed that after Massachusetts agreed to adhere to the English common law under the Charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1691—the Second Charter—its courts became less concerned with victimless morals offenses and more concerned with crimes of property.2 With
{"title":"The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 by Kristin A. Olbertson (review)","authors":"Anne S. Lombard","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Since at least the 1990s, historians have linked the development of gentry class consciousness in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American colonies with a cultural ideal of genteel refinement that had developed earlier in England.1 Most men with property and power in the colonies lacked the genteel or aristocratic birth that had anchored upper-class status in England a century earlier. Instead, elite colonial men based their claims to gentry status on their adoption of upper-class British ideals of behavior, education, and speech. The boundaries between “polite” colonial gentlemen and the “vulgar” (2) lower sorts came to be marked largely by language and culture. In general, historians have treated gentility in eighteenth-century British America as the expression of a particular upper-class culture. Members of the political and social elite acted like gentlemen, presumably impressing one another with their dignity and authority. But what happened when people outside of the elite scoffed or thumbed their noses at the new ideals of politeness? Kristin A. Olbertson, in this deeply researched, provocative, and often brilliant book, The Dreadful Word, argues that in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, genteel codes of behavior were not merely informal norms but were imposed through the law on those who refused to defer to the polite elite. Specifically, politeness was enforced and enacted through the regulation of “impolite” (2) speech and the prosecution of speech crimes such as swearing, cursing, contempt of authority, defamation, and lying. Speech crime prosecutions were not new in the eighteenth-century. The Puritans who first settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 made vigorous efforts to regulate ungodly speech and prosecute behavior that was by then tolerated in the English legal system. Criminal prosecutions for swearing, cursing, railing (insulting or mocking someone), singing, making noise in public, lying, and defaming were ubiquitous in the seventeenth century. But scholars have long assumed that after Massachusetts agreed to adhere to the English common law under the Charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1691—the Second Charter—its courts became less concerned with victimless morals offenses and more concerned with crimes of property.2 With","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45896633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
At the Crossroads:Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America Camilla Townsend (bio) The people of San Germán, Puerto Rico, had gone to sleep for the night. It was 1581, and they had recently relocated their fledgling town inland in an effort to protect it from seaborne attack. But the Kalinagos who broke the people's slumber with sudden violence were well informed, for one of their number had produced a map based on knowledge he acquired while he was living in the town as a slave. He had escaped not long ago and made his way home to the island of Dominica on a raft. Now he had returned with some well-armed brethren. This sixteenth-century version of special forces broke into the houses where they knew other Kalinagos were held, took the people they sought, and then melted away again into the darkness.1 Such an archival drama as this is the stuff of legend, or of Hollywood; it is also the stuff of modern historians' dreams. No story could be more satisfying to most of us than this real-life drama featuring mobile, cosmopolitan, and feisty Indigenous people using the knowledge they had gained from their varied life experiences to empower themselves and their loved ones. Yet if we wish to end the movie that is playing in our mind's eye on a high note, we cannot allow the camera to pull back or waver; we must not let it pick up the dozens, possibly hundreds, of other Kalinagos still in bondage in Puerto Rico, or any of the other enslaved people lying wide-eyed in the darkness, awaiting the horrors that the morrow would bring. Thinking about this wider view may make us uncomfortable. Is it the case that our desire to find a trajectory that demonstrates empowerment may sometimes—just sometimes—interfere with what we call our scholarship? Has the moment perhaps come for us to acknowledge that wider reality more [End Page 207] distinctly and consider how we may want to see our practices evolve to account for it? Most of the authors in this joint issue of the William and Mary Quarterly and the Hispanic American Historical Review, "Colonial Roots/Routes in North America and Latin America," would vote yes. The editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review and the William and Mary Quarterly could not foresee what they would elicit when they released their call for contributions to a joint issue of the two journals. They fielded three panels at the 2019 meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) around the joint issue's theme. The editors simply sought scholars who wished to speak to both early Americanists and Latin Americanists, and given that the chosen venue was the ASE conference, they assumed the study of Indigenous peoples would play an important role. Beyond that, they had no expectations, as the theme was broad. A subset of the original presenters, as well as a few individuals who were solicited later, eventually met online in the spring of 2021 to discuss their fully elaborated papers and consider their collect
{"title":"At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America","authors":"Camilla Townsend","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0015","url":null,"abstract":"At the Crossroads:Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America Camilla Townsend (bio) The people of San Germán, Puerto Rico, had gone to sleep for the night. It was 1581, and they had recently relocated their fledgling town inland in an effort to protect it from seaborne attack. But the Kalinagos who broke the people's slumber with sudden violence were well informed, for one of their number had produced a map based on knowledge he acquired while he was living in the town as a slave. He had escaped not long ago and made his way home to the island of Dominica on a raft. Now he had returned with some well-armed brethren. This sixteenth-century version of special forces broke into the houses where they knew other Kalinagos were held, took the people they sought, and then melted away again into the darkness.1 Such an archival drama as this is the stuff of legend, or of Hollywood; it is also the stuff of modern historians' dreams. No story could be more satisfying to most of us than this real-life drama featuring mobile, cosmopolitan, and feisty Indigenous people using the knowledge they had gained from their varied life experiences to empower themselves and their loved ones. Yet if we wish to end the movie that is playing in our mind's eye on a high note, we cannot allow the camera to pull back or waver; we must not let it pick up the dozens, possibly hundreds, of other Kalinagos still in bondage in Puerto Rico, or any of the other enslaved people lying wide-eyed in the darkness, awaiting the horrors that the morrow would bring. Thinking about this wider view may make us uncomfortable. Is it the case that our desire to find a trajectory that demonstrates empowerment may sometimes—just sometimes—interfere with what we call our scholarship? Has the moment perhaps come for us to acknowledge that wider reality more [End Page 207] distinctly and consider how we may want to see our practices evolve to account for it? Most of the authors in this joint issue of the William and Mary Quarterly and the Hispanic American Historical Review, \"Colonial Roots/Routes in North America and Latin America,\" would vote yes. The editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review and the William and Mary Quarterly could not foresee what they would elicit when they released their call for contributions to a joint issue of the two journals. They fielded three panels at the 2019 meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) around the joint issue's theme. The editors simply sought scholars who wished to speak to both early Americanists and Latin Americanists, and given that the chosen venue was the ASE conference, they assumed the study of Indigenous peoples would play an important role. Beyond that, they had no expectations, as the theme was broad. A subset of the original presenters, as well as a few individuals who were solicited later, eventually met online in the spring of 2021 to discuss their fully elaborated papers and consider their collect","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135628441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：