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":"36 1","pages":"0"},"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}
Zachary Dorner’s Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century should find a wide readership in a variety of historical subfields, from the history of medicine and pharmacy to the history of the British Atlantic world, as well as the history of capitalism and the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. Dorner offers an enlightening portrait of the connections among empire, capitalism, and medicine, subjects long understood to be deeply interwoven but that have only recently begun to attract detailed archival work that demonstrates the precise mechanics of their interdependence. Where many historians of medicine focus on the production of medical knowledge or the patient-healer encounter, Dorner’s gaze is squarely focused on commerce; medicine serves the needs of business in his story, but it also emerges forcefully as a business itself.1 His work is at its most provocative when he suggests that this commerce came to shape the content and popular expectations of medicine, gearing it toward expedient use-this-for-that solutions and positing a standardization of human bodies through commercial and imperial needs. Merchants of Medicines deepens our appreciation of the early modern medical marketplace by adding a new set of consumers often overlooked in accounts that emphasize patient agency in a variegated, largely urban and European marketplace of medical pluralism.2 To the colorful crew of learned physicians, barber-surgeons, itinerant operators, bonesetters, tooth drawers, and midwives familiar to historians from the work of Roy Porter, Harold J. Cook, Margaret Pelling, Gianna Pomata, David Gentilcore, and others, Dorner adds protoindustrial apothecaries and chemists serving the new health care demands of an expanding British Empire.3 Far from the
{"title":"Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain's Long Eighteenth Century by Zachary Dorner","authors":"Justin Rivest","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Zachary Dorner’s Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century should find a wide readership in a variety of historical subfields, from the history of medicine and pharmacy to the history of the British Atlantic world, as well as the history of capitalism and the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. Dorner offers an enlightening portrait of the connections among empire, capitalism, and medicine, subjects long understood to be deeply interwoven but that have only recently begun to attract detailed archival work that demonstrates the precise mechanics of their interdependence. Where many historians of medicine focus on the production of medical knowledge or the patient-healer encounter, Dorner’s gaze is squarely focused on commerce; medicine serves the needs of business in his story, but it also emerges forcefully as a business itself.1 His work is at its most provocative when he suggests that this commerce came to shape the content and popular expectations of medicine, gearing it toward expedient use-this-for-that solutions and positing a standardization of human bodies through commercial and imperial needs. Merchants of Medicines deepens our appreciation of the early modern medical marketplace by adding a new set of consumers often overlooked in accounts that emphasize patient agency in a variegated, largely urban and European marketplace of medical pluralism.2 To the colorful crew of learned physicians, barber-surgeons, itinerant operators, bonesetters, tooth drawers, and midwives familiar to historians from the work of Roy Porter, Harold J. Cook, Margaret Pelling, Gianna Pomata, David Gentilcore, and others, Dorner adds protoindustrial apothecaries and chemists serving the new health care demands of an expanding British Empire.3 Far from the","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46483322","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":"Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution by Max M. Edling (review)","authors":"Craig Green","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"403 - 407"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48590497","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":"Communications","authors":"A. Vaughan, M. Grier","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0029","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"428 - 431"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45731934","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:The eighteenth-century Greater Southwest largely consisted of an intricate and fluid system of intersecting Indigenous borderlands. Within this maze of multiethnic composite power, Comanches were fewer, farther apart, less politically integrated, more vulnerable, and more dependent on allies than recent scholarship tends to acknowledge. The Comanchería did not expand indefinitely. Instead, it moved gradually southward, in part due to encroachment from enemy groups, and vast expanses of the southern plains remained beyond Comanche control throughout the century. The way scholars have misunderstood Comanche power raises several methodological and interpretive warnings for the study of early America. Rather than singling out polities or entire ethnic groups as long-term hegemons, we should consider the differing perspectives and interests within groups to uncover the complex dynamics connecting the multiple hubs of power that dotted the continent. And we should do so without minimizing or overlooking evidence that can be interpreted as vulnerability. Achieving this goal requires prioritizing the use of non-English-language original sources over potentially defective translations, more fully incorporating repositories outside the United States into our research, and listening carefully to past and present Indigenous voices, including evidence recorded by linguists and anthropologists.
{"title":"The Unsteady Comanchería: A Reexamination of Power in the Indigenous Borderlands of the Eighteenth-Century Greater Southwest","authors":"Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The eighteenth-century Greater Southwest largely consisted of an intricate and fluid system of intersecting Indigenous borderlands. Within this maze of multiethnic composite power, Comanches were fewer, farther apart, less politically integrated, more vulnerable, and more dependent on allies than recent scholarship tends to acknowledge. The Comanchería did not expand indefinitely. Instead, it moved gradually southward, in part due to encroachment from enemy groups, and vast expanses of the southern plains remained beyond Comanche control throughout the century. The way scholars have misunderstood Comanche power raises several methodological and interpretive warnings for the study of early America. Rather than singling out polities or entire ethnic groups as long-term hegemons, we should consider the differing perspectives and interests within groups to uncover the complex dynamics connecting the multiple hubs of power that dotted the continent. And we should do so without minimizing or overlooking evidence that can be interpreted as vulnerability. Achieving this goal requires prioritizing the use of non-English-language original sources over potentially defective translations, more fully incorporating repositories outside the United States into our research, and listening carefully to past and present Indigenous voices, including evidence recorded by linguists and anthropologists.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"251 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44813353","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}
M. Borsk, David C. Hsiung, Matthew Costello, Mary Kelley, M. Hale, K. Brown, C. Schmitt, G. T. Knouff, Tyson Reeder, Frederick C. Staidum, Lauren Duval, E. Connolly, J. King, Scott M. Strickland, G. A. Richardson, Hayley Negrin
Abstract:Few accounts of preemption—the exclusive right of the British Crown, and later the U.S. government, to acquire Indigenous lands—consider the impact of Indigenous law and governance on this fundamental Euro-American legal principle. This article examines conveyances made between Indigenous nations and their kin after 1763 to track the development and eventual divergence of British and American interpretations of preemption. Given by Cherokee, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabe leaders to the children of Indigenous women and settler men, these conveyances to kin wove property rights from the bonds of kinship to keep land and people within the legal orders of Indigenous nations. When pushed to recognize such conveyances by the parties involved, crown and federal officials could neither ignore the origins of this property in kinship nor agree whether preemption prohibited such arrangements. A remarkable series of conveyances made by the Senecas and the Anishinabek to one family, the Allans, in the 1790s reveals that U.S. officials understood Indigenous nations to be the object of preemption’s restrictions whereas British officials did not. Then, as now, thinking about preemption, in all its guises, required thinking about kinship. Both shaped how Indigenous nations experienced property and dispossession in North America.
{"title":"Conveyance to Kin: Property, Preemption, and Indigenous Nations in North America, 1763–1822","authors":"M. Borsk, David C. Hsiung, Matthew Costello, Mary Kelley, M. Hale, K. Brown, C. Schmitt, G. T. Knouff, Tyson Reeder, Frederick C. Staidum, Lauren Duval, E. Connolly, J. King, Scott M. Strickland, G. A. Richardson, Hayley Negrin","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Few accounts of preemption—the exclusive right of the British Crown, and later the U.S. government, to acquire Indigenous lands—consider the impact of Indigenous law and governance on this fundamental Euro-American legal principle. This article examines conveyances made between Indigenous nations and their kin after 1763 to track the development and eventual divergence of British and American interpretations of preemption. Given by Cherokee, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabe leaders to the children of Indigenous women and settler men, these conveyances to kin wove property rights from the bonds of kinship to keep land and people within the legal orders of Indigenous nations. When pushed to recognize such conveyances by the parties involved, crown and federal officials could neither ignore the origins of this property in kinship nor agree whether preemption prohibited such arrangements. A remarkable series of conveyances made by the Senecas and the Anishinabek to one family, the Allans, in the 1790s reveals that U.S. officials understood Indigenous nations to be the object of preemption’s restrictions whereas British officials did not. Then, as now, thinking about preemption, in all its guises, required thinking about kinship. Both shaped how Indigenous nations experienced property and dispossession in North America.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"124 - 125 - 154 - 155 - 160 - 161 - 164 - 165 - 167 - 168 - 172 - 173 - 176 - 177 - 181 - 182 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43221111","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":"Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands","authors":"David C. Hsiung","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"155 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42097516","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:The expansion of the plantation complex in seventeenth-century Virginia put Indigenous Virginians at risk of enslavement and land loss. In 1676, Cockacoeske, a Powhatan weroansqua, confronted both physical attacks on her land and legal and cultural arguments about her people’s lack of sovereignty. European travel writing and international law were fertile areas that colonists such as the newly arrived Nathaniel Bacon drew on to claim that Indigenous women such as Cockacoeske had no place as sovereigns and were instead suited to racial slavery. Almost captured and enslaved by Bacon, Cockacoeske rebelled against his racialized arguments for anti-sovereignty and slavery. She signed a treaty with the English Crown after the rebellion that changed the trajectory of Native slavery in Virginia: only Indigenous people whose nations could not establish sovereignty before the crown would be subject to racial slavery. Her successful battle to protect Powhatans shows how Native women like herself had to navigate the distinction between slavery and sovereignty in the early South. Though Cockacoeske was protected from enslavement, the slave trade into Virginia continued from the deeper South, and Indigenous women whose governments could not claim subjecthood or tributary status within the English Empire were successfully racialized and forced to pass slavery on to their children.
{"title":"Cockacoeske’s Rebellion: Nathaniel Bacon, Indigenous Slavery, and Sovereignty in Early Virginia","authors":"Hayley Negrin","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The expansion of the plantation complex in seventeenth-century Virginia put Indigenous Virginians at risk of enslavement and land loss. In 1676, Cockacoeske, a Powhatan weroansqua, confronted both physical attacks on her land and legal and cultural arguments about her people’s lack of sovereignty. European travel writing and international law were fertile areas that colonists such as the newly arrived Nathaniel Bacon drew on to claim that Indigenous women such as Cockacoeske had no place as sovereigns and were instead suited to racial slavery. Almost captured and enslaved by Bacon, Cockacoeske rebelled against his racialized arguments for anti-sovereignty and slavery. She signed a treaty with the English Crown after the rebellion that changed the trajectory of Native slavery in Virginia: only Indigenous people whose nations could not establish sovereignty before the crown would be subject to racial slavery. Her successful battle to protect Powhatans shows how Native women like herself had to navigate the distinction between slavery and sovereignty in the early South. Though Cockacoeske was protected from enslavement, the slave trade into Virginia continued from the deeper South, and Indigenous women whose governments could not claim subjecthood or tributary status within the English Empire were successfully racialized and forced to pass slavery on to their children.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"49 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45517363","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":"George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders by Keith Beutler (review)","authors":"Matthew Costello","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"161 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47076093","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 Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin (review)","authors":"Lauren Duval","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"198 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49326264","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}