The Other Revolution CHAPLIN, JOYCE E.
Early American studies,
04/2015, Letnik:
13, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The early American past is overdue for sustained attention as a distinctive stage in environmental history. As we denizens of the Anthropocene look toward some kind of post-fossil fuel stage of ...history, looking back at the preindustrial era of American history would help us identify what was at stake in making a transition into a carboniferous energy regime, and therefore what may be at stake in transitioning out of it. For that reason, the environment is a potent and relevant historical context, perhaps more so than the social, political, and cultural contexts that have driven the scholarship in the field of early American history over the last forty years. Much of that historiography has used the American Revolution as a pivot or terminus. But the industrial revolution and its crucial turn toward carbon-based energy was in the end even more revolutionary as a historical watershed. Indeed, the industrial revolution, the "other revolution," represents one of the greatest opportunities for early Americanists who are interested in environmental history, which should at this point mean all of us.
Subject Matter Chaplin, Joyce E
2001, 2009-07-31, 2003-02-28
eBook
By placing the history of science and medicine at the very center of the story of early English colonization, Chaplin shows how contemporary European theories of nature and science dramatically ...influenced relations between the English and Indians within the formation of the British Empire.
It is a given that the United States has been an important global power, yet it may be of at least equal significance that the nation has been an only faltering planetary power. Global is social — it ...implies the social relations that extend over the globe. In contrast, planetary is physical, indicating the physical planet itself. Far more historical studies have focussed on the former than on the latter; examining the history of the United States within planetary terms is only beginning to be done. One long tradition of human engagement with the whole Earth is the practice of circumnavigation, going around the world. This essay examines American circumnavigators' accounts ecocritically, in terms of their consciousness of the natural world, in order to explain that the United States came to the tradition of going around the world belatedly and not always beneficially.
I cannot possibly survey all the relevant points of expansion in this essay; doing so would come close to replicating the problem I wish to analyze. Instead, I will look first at older border ...crossings (between colonial America and other nations or empires dominated by Europeans), then at newer ones (between early America and non-European populations). In the first section, I will consider the connections that early American history has with United States history, British history, and the histories of other New World empires; in the second, I will examine the borders early America now shares with African history and Native American history and look at the muffled impact of cultural studies, particularly postcolonial theories. I will not examine interdisciplinary borrowing in and of itself (which would take at least another essay) but will instead look at some ways early Americanists' interest in or chariness of new methodologies has affected their crossovers into other historical fields.
Food in Time and Place Paul Freedman, Joyce E. Chaplin, Ken Albala / Paul Freedman, Joyce E. Chaplin, Ken Albala
2014
eBook
Food and cuisine are important subjects for historians across many areas of study. Food, after all, is one of the most basic human needs and a foundational part of social and cultural histories. Such ...topics as famines, food supply, nutrition, and public health are addressed by historians specializing in every era and every nation. Food in Time and Place delivers an unprecedented review of the state of historical research on food, endorsed by the American Historical Association, providing readers with a geographically, chronologically, and topically broad understanding of food cultures—from ancient Mediterranean and medieval societies to France and its domination of haute cuisine. Teachers, students, and scholars in food history will appreciate coverage of different thematic concerns, such as transfers of crops, conquest, colonization, immigration, and modern forms of globalization.
With this sweeping reinterpretation of early cultural encounters between the English and American natives, Joyce E. Chaplin thoroughly alters our historical view of the origins of English ...presumptions of racial superiority, and of the role science and technology played in shaping these notions. By placing the history of science and medicine at the very center of the story of early English colonization, Chaplin shows how contemporary European theories of nature and science dramatically influenced relations between the English and Indians within the formation of the British Empire. In Chaplin's account of the earliest contacts, we find the English--impressed by the Indians' way with food, tools, and iron--inclined to consider Indians as partners in the conquest and control of nature. Only when it came to the Indians' bodies, so susceptible to disease, were the English confident in their superiority. Chaplin traces the way in which this tentative notion of racial inferiority hardened and expanded to include the Indians' once admirable mental and technical capacities. Here we see how the English, beginning from a sense of bodily superiority, moved little by little toward the idea of their mastery over nature, America, and the Indians--and how this progression is inextricably linked to the impetus and rationale for empire.
The manner in which English colonists racialized Indian bodies without resorting to a "paradigm" shift, such as rejection of the belief in a common human origin, is discussed. The colonists often ...interpreted the Indians' susceptibility to disease as a kind of racial failing.
