A new look at Thomas Morton, his controversial colonial philosophy, and his lengthy feud with the Puritans Adding new depth to our understanding of early New England society, this riveting account of ...Thomas Morton explores the tensions that arose from competing colonial visions. A lawyer and fur trader, Thomas Morton dreamed of a society where Algonquian peoples and English colonists could coexist. Infamous for dancing around a maypole in defiance of his Pilgrim neighbors, Morton was reviled by the Puritans for selling guns to the Natives. Colonial authorities exiled him three separate times from New England, but Morton kept returning to fight for his beliefs. This compelling counter-narrative to the familiar story of the Puritans combines a rich understanding of the period with a close reading of early texts to bring the contentious Morton to life. This volume sheds new light on the tumultuous formative decades of the American experience.
Virginia 1619 Musselwhite, Paul; Mancall, Peter C; Horn, James
2019, 2019-06-17
eBook
Virginia 1619 provides an opportunity to reflect on the origins of English colonialism around the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic world. As the essays here demonstrate, Anglo-Americans have been ...simultaneously experimenting with representative government and struggling with the corrosive legacy of racial thinking for more than four centuries. Virginia, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not the product of thoughtless, greedy, or impatient English colonists. Instead, the emergence of stable English Atlantic colonies reflected the deliberate efforts of an array of actors to establish new societies based on their ideas about commonwealth, commerce, and colonialism. Looking back from 2019, we can understand that what happened on the shores of the Chesapeake four hundred years ago was no accident. Slavery and freedom were born together as migrants and English officials figured out how to make this colony succeed. They did so in the face of rival ventures and while struggling to survive in a dangerous environment. Three hallmarks of English America--self-government, slavery, and native dispossession--took shape as everyone contested the future of empire along the James River in 1619.
The contributors are Nicholas Canny, Misha Ewen, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Jack P. Greene, Paul D. Halliday, Alexander B. Haskell, James Horn, Michael J. Jarvis, Peter C. Mancall, Philip D. Morgan, Melissa N. Morris, Paul Musselwhite, James D. Rice, and Lauren Working.
Collecting Across Cultures Daniela Bleichmar, Peter C. Mancall / Daniela Bleichmar, Peter C. Mancall
03/2011
eBook
In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during ...their journeys. And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes-personal, imperial, missionary, or trade-and moved not only across space but also across cultures. Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on EuropeanWunderkammern, or "cabinets of curiosities." But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another. The fourteen essays inCollecting Across Culturesrepresent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge-some factual, some fictional-about distant peoples in an increasingly transnational world.
The Age of Failure MANCALL, PETER C.
Early American literature,
01/2021, Volume:
56, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
From the 1490s through the 1610s, the English failed more often than they succeeded in their efforts to explore and colonize the Western Hemisphere. But even when travelers did not return, ...chroniclers told their stories. Taken together, these texts constituted an archive of disappointment. In this essay, I identify the best-known accounts and set them into a historical narrative that unfolded before the English arrived in New Plymouth in 1620.
This article considers a clash of 2 historic ways of understanding human relations with the environment in James Bay, Canada, which stretches from 52° to 55° north latitude: Cree traditional ...knowledge and the writings of early 17th-century English explorers. The observations and practices of both Natives and newcomers reflected the enduring power of cold and the particular systems of information that emerged in a region where winter posed myriad threats. These different kinds of historical knowledge survive in different media, one oral and the other written. By considering them together, it becomes clear that the most radical environmental shift in the region occurred not with the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975, but instead over 300 years earlier. This conclusion suggests reconsideration of the environmental historian Alfred Crosby's notion of “ecological imperialism”, a process understood as the result of the movement of biota, with quick and far-reaching results across temperate zones in the Western Hemisphere (and in select other parts of the Earth). In and around James Bay, the arrival of Europeans—and their recognition that they could survive and extract resources from the region despite the dangers of its winters—initiated long-term environmental changes well before the transference of biota.
Historians have long known that the English explorer Martin Frobisher left five men behind on his voyage to Baffin Island in 1576. Those men later vanished from the historical record. But the mystery ...of their disappearance is only the start of the story. Investigating the texts surrounding Frobisher's three voyages to Nunavut along with other kinds of evidence, such as folklore and oral history, invests the saga of the five men with different meaning. First, microhistorical analysis can reveal the shifting place of the Arctic in English plans for the Western Hemisphere. Second, the differing stories about what happened to the men serve as a reminder that in this part of the world the fate of Europeans depended on maintaining good relations with local peoples. The Inuit knew how to survive the frigid climate of Nunavut, but the English did not. Lacking the kinds of advantages that the English possessed in other sites of encounter, the newcomers redefined their expectations: the North would be a place to harvest resources and perhaps traverse, but not territory that invited settlement. The Inuit remained the masters of the Arctic.
In response to the global turn in scholarship on colonial and early modern history, the eighteen essays in this volume provide a fresh and much-needed perspective on the wider context of the ...encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. This collection offers an interdisciplinary consideration of developments in Native America, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, highlighting the mosaic of regions and influences that formed the context and impetus for the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The volume reflects an understanding of Jamestown not as the birthplace of democracy in America but as the creation of a European outpost in a neighborhood that included Africans, Native Americans, and other Europeans. With contributions from both prominent and rising scholars, this volume offers far-ranging and compelling studies of peoples, texts, places, and conditions that influenced the making of New World societies. As Jamestown marks its four-hundredth anniversary, this collection provides provocative material for teaching and launching new research. Contributors: Philip P. Boucher, University of Alabama, Huntsville Peter Cook, Nipissing University J. H. Elliott, University of Oxford Andrew Fitzmaurice, University of Sydney Joseph Hall, Bates College Linda Heywood, Boston University James Horn, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation E. Ann McDougall, University of Alberta Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University David Northrup, Boston College Marcy Norton, The George Washington University James D. Rice, State University of New York, Plattsburgh Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania David Harris Sacks, Reed College Benjamin Schmidt, University of Washington Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University David S. Shields, University of South Carolina Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, McGill University James H. Sweet, University of Wisconsin, Madison John Thornton, Boston University
World and Ground Grasso, Christopher; Mancall, Peter C
The William and Mary quarterly,
04/2017, Volume:
74, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Many of the best recent works in early American history investigate the lives of specific people in particular places, reconstructing the past “on the ground” and connecting this local analysis with ...larger geographic or conceptual spaces. These are neither macrohistories that descend to the ground only for illustrative anecdotes nor microhistories that merely make big gestures to give their small stories broader relevance. The four exemplary world-and-ground essays in this Forum take us to the native Southwest in the centuries before and after European arrival; watch the English, Spanish, and French as they mark the North American landscape for Christ; look over the shoulder of a merchant in eighteenth-century Philadelphia; and follow enslaved Africans as they endure the passage from the slave ship's hull through the port of Charleston, South Carolina. The authors ask us to rethink Indian “prehistory,” European Christianization, Atlantic commerce, and the slave trade. The essays move between world and ground—between the Atlantic world, the continent, or the hemisphere and the lives of particular early American people and places—to interrogate the connections, and the disconnections, between these different levels of historical experience and change.
