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A pathbreaking look at Native women of the early South who defined power and defied authority "An artful, powerful book. . . . [A] substantial contribution to our knowledge of women in the so-called 'forgotten centuries' of European colonialism in the southeast."--Malinda Maynor Lowery, author of The Lumbee Indians "A remarkable book. Alejandra Dubcovsky pursued relentless research to uncover the histories of women previously unseen, even unnamed. As Dubcovsky shows, they had names, they had families, they had lives that mattered. The historical landscape is transformed by their presence."--Lisa Brooks, author of Our Beloved Kin Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, lo...
Informed Power maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of vital knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s. Challenging the notion of early colonial America as an uninformed backwater, Alejandra Dubcovsky uncovers the ingenious ways its inhabitants acquired timely news through largely oral networks. Information circulated through the region via spies, scouts, traders, missionaries, and other ad hoc couriers—and by encounters of sheer chance with hunting parties, shipwrecked sailors, captured soldiers, or fugitive slaves. For...
This award–winning study examines American Indian communities in Southern New England between the Revolution and Reconstruction. From 1780–1880, Native Americans lived in the socioeconomic margins. They moved between semiautonomous communities and towns and intermarried extensively with blacks and whites. Drawing from a wealth of primary documentation, Daniel R. Mandell centers his study on ethnic boundaries, particularly how those boundaries were constructed, perceived, and crossed. Mandell analyzes connections and distinctions between Indians and their non-Indian neighbors with regard to labor, landholding, government, and religion; examines how emerging romantic depictions of Indians (living and dead) helped shape a unique New England identity; and looks closely at the causes and results of tribal termination in the region after the Civil War. Shedding new light on regional developments in class, race, and culture, this groundbreaking study is the first to consider all Native Americans throughout southern New England. Winner, 2008 Lawrence W. Levine Award, Organization of American Historians
Although the Creeks constitute a sovereign nation today, the concept of the nation meant little to their ancestors in the Native South. Rather, as Steven Peach contends in Rivers of Power, the Creeks of present-day Georgia and Alabama conceptualized rivers as the basis of power, leadership, and governance in early America. An original work of Indigenous ethnohistory, Peach’s book explores the implications of this river-oriented approach to power, in which rivers were a metaphor for the subregional provinces that defined the political textures of Creek country. The provinces nurtured leaders who worked to mitigate dangers across the Native South, including intertribal war, trade dependence,...
"The colonial Low Country (the Carolinas, Georgia) and British Caribbean made up an integrated region quite distinct from the Chesapeake, Mid-Atlantic, or New England. Like Maryland and Virginia, the greater Southeast--which formed, as Mulcahy argues, a dynamic center of the British imperial scheme in the New World--relied on staple crops and slave labor. Yet the economic and social ties that bound the Carolinas and the West Indies created quite distinct cultures, black and white alike, giving planters, e.g., a sense of taste and behavior far more tropical and Continental than the ideals that influenced tobacco planters in the Chesapeake. The location and trade patterns of the Carolinas and West Indies encouraged the purchase of slaves from sources and in numbers that ensured far greater persistence of African traditions (and threats of violence) than elsewhere. Mulcahy offers us a short book that explores this early-American/Caribbean region in the manner of our other series titles--explaining the integrity if not unity of the region and what made it so and also comparing it to other economic/cultural regions in the colonial period"--
In the wake of their victory in the Tuscarora War (1711–15), English settlers forced the Tuscarora Indians of eastern North Carolina, along with the Meherrin, Core, Chowan, Mattamuskeet, Neuse, Hatteras, Bay River, and White Oak River Indians, to become colonial tributaries with assigned land reserves. As tributaries, these Native tribes had special duties and rights recognized by the colony, but they also had to navigate a new world thrust upon them by the colonial government and white settlers. Historian David La Vere argues that through this devious sleight of hand, the colony erased these groups’ designation as “Indians,” eliding their official, documented existence. The paper genocide of these Native peoples of eastern North Carolina reinforced the growing binary of Black and white society with no place for Native Americans. La Vere traces the process of racialization for both the Native American and wider North Carolinian populations in the decades that followed the war, using previously undiscovered material to chart the dehumanization that occurred as well as the repercussions of the tributary policies that were still felt nearly 200 years after the conflict.
Racism has permeated the workings of the U.S. Constitution since ratification. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, supporters of slavery ensured it was protected by rule of law. The federal government upheld slavery until it was abolished by the Civil War; then supported the South's Jim Crow power structure. From Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Era until today, veneration of the Constitution has not prevented lynching, segregation, voter intimidation or police brutality against people of color. The Electoral College--a Constitutional accommodation for slaveholding aristocrats who feared popular government--has twice in 20 years given the presidency to the candidate who lost the popular vote. This book describes how pernicious flaws in the Constitution, included to legalize profiting from human bondage, perpetuate systemic racism, economic inequality and the subversion of democracy.
In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote, “What then, is the American, this new man? He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.” In casting aside their European mores, these pioneers, de Crèvecoeur implied, were the very embodiment of a new culture, society, economy, and political system. But to what extent did manliness shape early America’s character and institutions? And what roles did race, ethnicity, and class play in forming masculinity? Thomas A. Foster and his contributors grapple with these questions in New Men, showcasing how colonial and Revolutionary conditions gave...
"Enclosure marshals bold new and persuasive arguments about the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. Revealing the Israel-Palestine landscape primarily as one of enclosure, geographer Gary Fields sheds fresh light on Israel's actions. He places those actions in historical context in a broad analysis of power and landscapes across the modern world. Examining the process of land-grabbing in early modern England, colonial North America, and contemporary Palestine, Enclosure shows how patterns of exclusion and privatization have emerged across time and geography. That the same moral, legal, and cartographic arguments were copied by enclosers of land in very different historical environments challenges Israel's current rationale as being uniquely beleaguered. It also helps readers in the United Kingdom and the United States understand the Israel-Palestine conflict in the context of their own, tortured histories"--Provided by publisher.
“Fitts combines archaeology and ethnohistory to explore Catawba strategies for retaining sovereignty and power in the colonial era. A model of interdisciplinary methodology, this book offers new insights into coalescence, colonialism, and Indigenous persistence.”—Christina Snyder, author of Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America “Skillfully mobilizes a rich array of historical and archaeological evidence to recover from obscurity the decisive role that Catawba women played in guiding their society through highly precarious times.”—Daniel H. Usner Jr., author of Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History “A fascinating gli...