A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America by Sam White

Reviewed by: The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon Troy Bickham (bio) Keywords War of 1812, James Madison, Napoleon, Military history The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon. By Jeremy Black. (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2009. Pp. 286. Cloth, $32.95.) As the author or editor of nearly one hundred books, Jeremy Black is perhaps the most prolific historian of his generation. In this volume he [End Page 703] applies his considerable expertise in military, political, and diplomatic history to the War of 1812. Although still described as a "forgotten war," the War of 1812 has garnered increased interest from historians as it nears its bicentennial. Yet almost all of the histories are parochial in that they are rooted firmly in North American national histories. Black's approach is to place the war in the broader, global contest between Britain and Napoleonic France, and at under three hundred pages Black's narrative is clear, concise, and accessible. His introduction includes an impassioned lament for what he describes as the "hostility to the teaching of military history in many American university history departments" (4-5), and he proceeds to make his case in the chapters that follow for how armed conflict shaped national institutions and ideologies. The structure is unsurprising, yet clear. The first chapter examines the path to war, followed by chapters on the American campaigns in 1812 and 1813, a chapter on the naval war, and a chapter on the British counterattack in 1814 and 1815. The book ends with two chapters by way of conclusion—a chapter labeled "consequences" and an actual "conclusion." The former alone is worth the price of admission and invaluable to anyone teaching the subject, both as a study of how wars shape nations and as a case for the international importance of the War of 1812. Specialists hoping for an acute strategic analysis may be disappointed. Black's approach to military history here is much broader in that he gives substantial consideration to geographical, ideological, economic, and diplomatic factors. His narrative of the war and his portrayals of the commanders in the field do not make major breaks with traditional assessments— Isaac Brock is praised, George Prevost is blasted, the U.S. Army is described as incompetent for much of the war, and James Madison is not deemed up to the task of leading the United States in wartime. Specialists in North American history are not likely to find bombshells in his telling of the North American side of the story, nor will British historians be surprised about his assessments of Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. However, if the accusations of North American parochialism and British disregard when it comes to the War of 1812 are true (and I believe they are), specialists in both North American and British history will find much that is both new and interesting in Black's more global account. Black points out that American touchiness about sovereignty was well founded, as stronger European powers had a habit of dismembering vulnerable states like Poland in 1795, bullying weaker states like Spain, and thrashing uncooperative neutrals, like Britain with [End Page 704] Denmark in 1807. Worse still, Britain had genuine, if vague, designs on expanding its remaining North American possessions. Americans also had good reasons to fear the threat of a strong military, as military coups had toppled the revolutionary governments of France and Haiti and caused problems throughout Spain's American empire. Even England's own foray into a government without a king in the seventeenth century had resulted in the military-backed rule of Oliver Cromwell. Black argues that these two conflicting concerns shaped American foreign policy and drew the United States into a war it was not prepared to fight. Not until 1814 did the U.S. Army possess the organization and professionalism necessary to face British regulars, but by this time the United States was broke and Britain was on the offensive, having defeated Napoleon, and shifted considerable military resources to North America. By placing the war in a more global context, Black chips further away at American exceptionalism and lays siege to the idea that the United States was the...

Reviewed by: Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History by Paul Schneider Michael Allen Paul Schneider, Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History. New York: Henry Holt, 2013. 416 pp. $20.00. The title of this book recalls a bygone era in more ways than one. Beginning nearly two centuries ago, a strongly held belief that the Mississippi River Valley was vitally important to American history and culture led scholars to write about it. Beginning with Timothy Flint’s Condensed Geography and History . . . of the Mississippi Valley (1828), authors described the Mississippi Valley as an exceptional cultural region. Their works include John W. Monette’s History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi (1848); Henry Lewis’s The Valley of the Mississippi (1854; originally published in German); J. W. Foster’s The Mississippi Valley: Its Physical Geography . . . (1869); and C. B. Walker’s vital The Mississippi Valley, and Prehistoric Events . . . (1880). Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1881) was followed by Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West (1889–96), a paean to the Great Valley, and James K. Hosmer’s concise chronological overview, A Short History of the Mississippi Valley (1901). Next, Frederick Jackson Turner outlined “The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History” in a 1908 keynote speech before the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, an organization whose very name and existence reflects the degree to which Americans saw the Great Valley as the heart of America. Throughout the twentieth century, Roosevelt’s and Turner’s sweeping portraits begat a number of more focused books about selected aspects of the Mississippi River Valley. Beginning in the 1970s, after the name-change of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association to the Organization of American Historians, new social historians produced scores of works focused on race, class, gender, and environment in the Valley of the Mississippi. Surveying all of this literature, one is struck by the fact that, of the hundreds of books written about the Mississippi Valley, all but a dozen [End Page 140] avoid synthesis. And of those dozen books which take a sweeping view, nearly all were written in the middle and late nineteenth century. Paul Schneider brings an impressive resume to Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History. A native of Amherst, Massachusetts, and graduate of Brown University, he has published in the New Yorker, Esquire, and the New York Times. He is author of the well-received The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness (1997), followed by a popular history of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard and several other books. He is currently editor of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine. “It’s impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi,” Paul Schneider states. “The river’s history is our history” (1). He begins his history of the Mississippi during the ice age and tells the story of prehistoric animals and men in the Great Valley. He devotes a major section to Mississippian Moundbuilders and their American Indian descendants, and then launches a discussion about the major European explorers—De Soto, La Salle, and Marquette—and the eighteenth century arrival of the British and their American subjects. This takes him into the history of the early American republic, Lewis and Clark, and the keelboat, flatboat, and steamboat ages on western rivers. The role of the Mississippi in General U.S. Grant’s Civil War campaigns marks the book’s crescendo, while a concluding section focuses on the author’s own Mississippi travels and his concerns for the river’s natural environment in an industrial age. Old Man River’s ample bibliography is composed of a mix of old and new scholarly secondary sources, firsthand accounts, and newspaper and magazine articles. As in his other publications, Schneider is adept at working with dozens of sources and expeditiously serving up documented, engaging, book-length narrative prose. This is not so much a book about the Mississippi Valley as one about events on or near the river itself. Schneider seems unaware of all but a few of the authors mentioned in the first paragraph of this review, or of his place in carrying on...

Locating Settler Colonialism in Early American History Jeffrey Ostler (bio) Is settler colonialism simply a trendy buzzword, or will it become an enduring and useful concept in North American history in general and early American history in particular? Recent criticisms (some seen in print, some heard in conference sessions and hallways) object to theorizations and applications of settler colonialism that appear reductionist and teleological, arguably leave little room for contingency, and risk reversing advances in the field that highlight Native agency and resist declensionist narratives of Native disappearance. Other critical commentary seems to imply that settler colonialism may be a useful framework (at least for some times and places) if modified and more carefully applied, while still other commentary suggests that the concept is more or less useless, if not dangerous, and should be encouraged to expire.1 Whether or not criticisms of settler colonialism will lead to the concept's elimination is anyone's guess. In my view, however, the concept is useful not simply as a theoretical construct but because it identifies an actual historical phenomenon. For that reason, it should be interrogated and refined, but it should also be retained. In other words, in the same way that scholars who object to particular theories of capitalism seldom deny capitalism's reality, problems in theorizing settler colonialism do not mean that it does not exist. If settler colonialism is a name for an actual historical phenomenon, where and when can it be found in early American history? [End Page 443] One place is in the founding of the United States, a process beginning with the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and ending around twenty-five years later with the Constitution's ratification. Although some accounts of the coming of the American Revolution continue to focus exclusively on matters of taxation and urban protest, a growing body of scholarship, partly inspired by a general recognition that American Indians are central to early American history, has emphasized the role of the 1763 Royal Proclamation, which restricted western settlement and created uncertainties for speculators in Indian lands.2 Although this scholarship has not necessarily invoked the concept of settler colonialism, it leads to the conclusion that a central purpose of the founding of the United States was to secure the freedom to convert Indian lands into private property, a process that meant, to use settler colonialism's terminology, the elimination of Indigenous people. This purpose was revealed during the Revolutionary War through U.S. military operations against Native nations that aimed not simply to defeat Indians allied with the British but to destroy Natives' resistance to colonial settlement in general and thus gain control over their lands.3 The importance of obtaining Native lands was also evident in the making of the Constitution, which established mechanisms for funding a national army to subjugate the multinational confederacy (including Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Miamis, Chickamauga Cherokees, and others) formed to defend its Ohio Valley territories in the late 1780s and early 1790s.4 Combined with the Northwest Ordinance (1787), which allowed new states to be admitted "on an equal footing" while at the same time sanctioning genocidal war against Native nations that resisted U.S. demands for their lands, the Constitution's federalism provided a framework for containing tensions between frontier/localism on the one hand and metropolitan/national authority on the other. In doing so, the nation's founding document created the cohesion necessary to pursue elimination.5 [End Page 444] To identify the elimination of Native people as central to the United States' founding does not mean that they were actually eliminated. Although the United States claimed a good portion of eastern North America, its ambitions often exceeded its capacity, especially in its early years. But the United States was nothing if not relentless, and even after military failures, most notably the Native confederacy's defeat of Arthur St. Clair's army in 1791, the federal, state, and territorial governments continued to mobilize fresh bodies for war and thereby wear down Native resistance. Using treaties as a mechanism for dispossession, the United States chipped away at Native lands in the Southeast, the Ohio Valley, and the lower Great Lakes...

The boreal forest is the second largest biome in the world containing 33% of the Earth's forest cover ([FAO 2001][1]) of which approximately 25% is natural. It is circumpolar and shares similar taxa across its range. It has approximately 20 300 identified species. Along with the tropics, the

Reviewed by: The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 by Dagomar Degroot Thomas Wozniak The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720. By dagomar degroot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-108-41041-0. $29.99 (paper). “Earth’s climate is a fantastically complex jigsaw puzzle, and every part contributes to the whole” (p. 26). In his book “The Frigid Golden Age,” Dagomar Degroot, associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, offers a detailed analysis of the relations between the period called the “Little Ice Age” and the rise of the Dutch Republic. Degroot is one of the co-founders of the Climate History Network, an organization of scholars who study past climate changes. His book starts with the long-term focus of previous scholarship on the Low Countries and offers an overview of the current state of research. The volume is subdivided in three parts with the keywords commerce, conflict, and culture. After a short and insightful introduction about “Crisis and Opportunity in a Changing Climate” (pp. 1–21), in chapter 1, Degroot defines his understanding of “The Little Ice Age” (pp. 22–51). Therefore he describes the key engines of atmospheric and oceanic circulations such as North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) etc., and their influence on the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. Having thus clarified the preconditions, he turns to the consequences [End Page 630] of climatic changes in the three areas mentioned above: commerce, conflicts, and culture. One of the most important sources of this book are ship’s logbooks as these contain a remarkable amount of information on weather conditions. In part I “Commerce and Climate Change,” Degroot describes in two chapters the influence of the climate on trade connections. In chapter 2 “Reaching Asia in a Stormy, Chilly Climate” (pp. 55–108), he shows that traveling by sea was more important to the Dutch republic’s coastal provinces than to most other European regions. In chapter 3 “Sailing, Floating, Riding, and Skating through a Cooler Europe” (pp. 109–151), Degroot gives an impressive overview on how diverse the Dutch transportation system was, using different kinds of waterborne travel and road nets. The Dutch farmers, engineers, sailors, and laborers found creative solutions to travel even in harsh weather conditions, since movement was essential to their economy and culture. The second part of the book deals with “Conflict and Climate Change” especially during the Eighty Years’ War, when different periods of Cooling and Warming affected the Wars of Independence (pp. 154–195). Degroot is able to show that climate change was a catalyst but rarely a cause of military victories and defeats. During the Anglo-Dutch Antagonism in the years 1652–1688 (pp. 196–249) frequent westerlies allowed English warships of unprecedented size to win more than twice as many battles, yet after a change in environmental conditions easterly gales and winds (“the Protestant wind”) helped the Dutch invasions across the English Channel. Nevertheless “no wars were ever won or lost solely because of climate change” (p. 247), but forecasts of wind directions were useful for choosing times for sea battles. In the third part, Degroot describes the consequences of single extreme events induced through climate change and their cultural expressions in painting, technology, and text production. In chapter 6 “Tracing and Painting the Little Ice Age” (pp. 253–276), he states that Dutch winter landscapes were not quite the straightforward representation of the Little Ice Age that they appear to us nowadays, however they reveal how Dutch artists thought about weather and how they perceived the consequences of climate change. In the last chapter “Texts, Technologies, and Climate Change” (pp. 277–299), Degroot stresses that relationships between climate change and culture can be difficult to pin down. In his “Lessons from Ice and Gold” (pp. 300–309) he concludes that the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic was framed by the Grindelwald [End Page 631] Fluctuation and the Maunder Minimum, two severe cold phases. The reasons why the Dutch prospered in this time were complex, and...

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in AmericaA Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America

Life changes as polar regions thaw

Contact, Mediation, and Myth in Early Latin American Literatures Joanne van der Woude (bio) Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Rolena Adorno. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 148 pp. Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico. Mónica Díaz. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2010. 229 pp. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru. Sabine MacCormack. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 320 pp. The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Yanna Yannakakis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 290 pp. Michel de Certeau wrote: "By an art of being in-between, he draws unexpected results from his situation"—an intriguing expression that opens Yanna Yannakakis's book. In her work, the citation applies to Native intermediaries, but it seems just as pertinent to scholars and teachers who (seek to) work comparatively. They, too, must distance themselves from their monolingual training and expertise in order to tackle new fields in the hope of "unexpected," or even enlightening, "results." This is true not only for those who work across languages but also for anyone who cultivates [End Page 201] a transatlantic, transcultural, or transhistorical perspective on early America—and so, suddenly, nearly everyone can be called a comparativist, in some sense of the word. I make this point in order to argue for the importance of Latin American scholarship to North American studies. The flourishing field of Latin American literature and history should be taken into account not just out of a sense of duty but because it offers real methodological and theoretical advantages. For those who still wonder why they should care, this review begins by pointing out specific genres and themes that are shared across the colonial Americas, and that would benefit from comparative consideration in criticism as well as in the classroom. Teaching, to be honest, is still complicated: there are few, good, affordable editions and translations of Latin American sources that can be assigned to undergraduate classes and professors harbor an understandable reluctance to assign many texts in translation or are simply hesitant to change time-tested syllabi. Rather than add another voice to the extensive debate about whether early American culture is best taught transatlantically, hemispherically, or both—let alone try to convince or castigate anyone about the need to assign more diverse texts—this overview begins by delineating productive pairings of Spanish writings with more canonical (and therefore usually English) texts. The idea behind this arrangement, which is followed by brief summaries and reviews of the four listed books, is to spark interest instead of inducing guilt, stressing the relevance of Latin American texts to current perspectives on North American literature and history. Fictional dialogues are a popular genre across the American colonies. John Eliot's Indian Dialogues (1671) comes most immediately to mind, as well as its scholarly readings by Kristina Bross, David Murray, and Thomas Scanlan. Although this tract was purportedly written to aid future missionaries, Eliot uses the opportunity to stage wishful exchanges that speedily convert Native leaders while also assuaging the fears of "a colonial audience concerned about the outbreaks of violence with coastal Algonquians" (Bross 119). (For the sake of realism, this piece is perhaps best read alongside another less fictional Eliot tract, though its obvious fakery also, arguably, constitutes its charm.) Christoph Saur's A Dialogue between a Newcomer and a Settler in Pennsylvania (1751), translated from the German by Patrick Erben for Carla Mulford's Oxford anthology (735-44), is a promotional piece for the Middle Colonies, which contains a wealth of information [End Page 202] on colonial Pennsylvania as well as on eighteenth-century Europe. It includes a spirited defense of Pietism, alongside such endearingly honest questions as: "If it would happen to me as it has happened to many people in this country [Germany], and I could not pay everything in cash and had to go into debt, would that be a big issue?" (Mulford 739). Helpful additions to this pair might be Manuel da Nóbrega's Dialogue for the Conversion of the Indians (Castillo and Schweitzer 1556-57) and the dialogue written by Fray Bernardino de...

Few aspects of American history have gone through as rapid a transformation as Native American history during the past generation. In the not too distant past scholars, including many anthropologists, wrote accounts of particular Indian ‘tribes’. Many of these works, which were often quite sympathetic to their subject, concentrated on politics and wars. Beginning in the late 1960s, historians, anthropologists, and those calling themselves ‘ethnohistorians’ began to bring new perspectives to the subject. To date, many of the most important studies focus on the period before 1850. Taken together, these works testify to the fundamental importance of understanding the histories of indigenous peoples in the Americas. In recent years, scholarship about Native Americans has boomed. The cluster of six articles here suggests the range of work being done in the field. Nicholas Rosenthal provides an overview of some of the major developments and Joshua Piker offers a penetrating view of the concept of race and how it has shaped our understanding of Native peoples in early America. Ruth Spack’s short essay on American Indian schooling reveals a shift in the history of education based on the incorporation of indigenous perspectives. Tyler Boulware investigates the notion of national identity and its application for Native peoples. Dixie Ray Haggard’s perceptive piece offers nothing less than a major revision of scholars’ understanding of the Yamasee War of the 1710s, an event that played a pivotal role in the southeast during the eighteenth century. Finally, Steven Hackel and Anne Reid reveal the benefits of electronic publication. Their essay on the Early California Population Project provides insight into a major database housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, a project now available to scholars that will revolutionize our understanding the period from the 1760s to the midnineteenth century. The full cluster is made up of the following articles:

The trend in the field of Native American history has been to discard Euro-American biases of past scholarship and to place Indian agency at the center of the historical process. Typically, these new histories illuminate how indigenous peoples accommodated to outside pressures in order to survive as coherent cultural entities. In this lengthy study, Pekka Hämäläinen goes one step further by showing how the Comanche people not only adapted to new political and economic realities wrought by various imperial projects but also competed with and bested European and Euro-American powers in controlling the heartland of the North American continent. The author traces the development of what he terms the Comanche Empire from its embryonic beginnings on the southern Plains at the outset of the eighteenth century to the height of its expansion and power in the first half of the nineteenth century. During this period of Plains hegemony, argues the author, the Comanche Empire was nothing short of an international powerhouse. The Comanches — rather than Spain, Mexico, the United States, or some other Indian polity — called the shots.Drawing from a variety of written sources, mostly generated by Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. administrators, Hämäläinen clarifies the major periods of Comanche expansion and its dynamics. He employs the analytical methods of both the humanities and the social sciences and remains attentive to “Comanche motives and meanings” (p. 13). Central to Comanche life were two particularly valuable commodities, the bison and the horse. The exploitation and management of livestock led to periodic modifications in Comanche political organization that, in turn, enabled manipulation of a vast trade network. At its height, the Comanche Empire incorporated peripheral economies well beyond its territorial base. Comanches traded for or raided livestock from Hispanic settlements in New Mexico, Texas, and ultimately as far south as Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luís Potosí. They complemented their limited diet with foodstuffs procured from indigenous groups on their eastern border, augmented their weaponry with guns and ammunition acquired from French and Anglo traders along the corridors of the Mississippi-Missouri waterway, and provided the livestock that revolutionized indigenous culture in the northern Plains. The empire’s sudden and precipitous decline after the U.S. Civil War was brought on not so much because of Euro-American solutions to the “Comanche problem,” but rather because climatic conditions severely affected the fragile ecosystem of Comanchería and undermined the horse-bison economic foundation of Comanche clout.There is much to commend in this formidable study, and those interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century borderlands, Mexican, and U.S. history will want to read and consider the work. Specialists may quibble with Hämäläinen’s characterization of Comanche political organization as an “empire”; they may doubt that Spain’s long-standing imperial aim was one of continual expansion, as the author claims, or that Indian policy in New Spain’s far north was so neatly “top-down” and imperial in scope; and they may feel that the struggles of the young Mexican nation are given short shrift. Even nonspecialists may find some of the author’s assertions to be a bit overblown — a product, perhaps, of his Comanche-centeredness. The Comanche arrival on the southern Plains, for example, is deemed “one of the key turning points in early American history” (p. 18). Comanche expansion past the Llano Estacado to the Balcones Escarpment in Texas is touted as “one of the most explosive territorial conquests in North American history” (p. 55); and the racial complexity and ambiguity resulting from Comanche slavery is regarded as the “crucible which forged Anglo-American understandings of Mexicans as a mixed, stigmatized, and subordinate class” (p. 359). In a similar vein, Hämäläinen tends to portray Comanchería as the primary focal point of imperial and national administra tors, largely ignoring other, greater concerns that may have occupied their attention. The Spanish monarchy faced uprisings on the peninsula and in the colonies (including a full-blown Andean rebellion), Napoleon’s occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, and colonial wars of emancipation. The fledgling Mexican nation had to deal with the delicate matters of state building and economic resuscitation after independence. And in the United States, slavery, immigration, and the looming sectional crisis were serious issues. Efforts to control Comanchería from the outside may have failed, but if looked at from a variety of other “centers,” Indian policy in what ultimately became the American Southwest, while important, was not the only thing to worry about.These points aside, Pekka Hämäläinen succeeds admirably in explaining the internal logic and coherence of Comanche power during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, in doing so, provides a new way to understand the historical development of the greater Southwest. Rubbing against the grain of traditional scholarship, this Comanche-centered interpretation of events is bound to shake things up. The greater Southwest will never quite look the same.

Reviewed by: Atlantic History: Concept and Contours William E. Doody Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. By Bernard Bailyn. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 160 pp. $18.95 (cloth). As Bernard Bailyn describes in the opening pages of his most recent book, Atlantic history has rapidly become a popular and significant field within the broader discipline of history. Harvard University's International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, of which Bailyn is the founder and director, is one of many conferences, publications, and teaching positions focused on the study of developing and evolving Atlantic networks. Now, from his vantage point as one of the leading figures in this field, Bailyn has written a valedictory examination of its development and major issues. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours will serve current and future historians as both an effective introduction to the field and an advanced exploration of its historiography. All the more appealing for its concise style, Bailyn's book is certain to find a prominent place on bookshelves and required reading lists. As is the case with Bailyn's many other books, Atlantic History is written in a clear and concise fashion. It will be easily understood by scholars and students alike and provides a comprehensive overview of the field in a manageable format. Divided into two very straightforward sections, the book fulfills a dual purpose. In the first section, Bailyn seeks to provide a historical framework to understand the development of Atlantic history as a field of study. He traces its origins to the period immediately following World War II, when politicians and others in the public arena sought to build on the U.S.-British alliance to form an "Atlantic partnership." By the early 1960s, that partnership had become a reality in NATO, and a variety of groups joined forces to create the Atlantic Council of the United States. The purpose of this body was to "stimulate thought and discussion with respect to the need and problems of developing greater Atlantic unity" (p. 9). Soon, the organization was publishing a journal and calling for greater awareness of the historical and future importance of the Atlantic region. It was in this environment, against the backdrop of transatlantic cooperation in World War II and the growing conflict of the Cold War, that historians began to consider the Atlantic not as a divider between Europe and America, but rather the common bond between the two continents. Quickly, historians on both sides of the Atlantic began to explore possible themes in the development of an "Atlantic civilization." While the move toward an Atlantic history was at times filled [End Page 105] with excitement and an "air of discovery," it was often met with hostility by unconvinced members of the profession (p. 27). In particular, many historians who were hostile to the political ideology of NATO and the governments in power at that time viewed Atlantic history merely as an attempt to provide cover for those geopolitical ideas. The rapid development of quantitative methodologies in history helped to accelerate interest in Atlantic history. In particular, explorations of demographic history raised new questions about the Atlantic slave trade. Migration studies of both North and South American populations abounded during the 1960s and 1970s. From those studies, social historians began to explore conditions among the various groups. Soon, economic and political histories were being written that considered developments on both sides of the Atlantic and in both hemispheres from a unified perspective. Bailyn quotes historical geographer D. W. Meinig, who described the Atlantic world as "the scene of a vast interaction" of cultures following the "sudden and harsh encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World" (p. 55). In the second half of Atlantic History, titled "On the Contours of Atlantic History," Bailyn turns his attention to the historiography of the early modern Atlantic. He echoes German historian Horst Pietschmann in describing Atlantic history as "a connecting element between European, North American, Caribbean, Latin American, and West African history" (p. 59). Bailyn argues forcefully that the history of this "New World" is not merely the combination of various national or imperial histories, but rather a new...

This article looks at the (North) American historiography on Spanish America with a particular focus on the fate of the Amerindians from the 1840s to the early 1960s. For over a century, (North) American historians routinely romanticized the Spanish conquest, while also routinely scorning the indigenous population (as well as mestizos and blacks), and embracing the rising pseudo-scientific Anglo-Saxon racism of the day. Down to the 1960s, (North) American historians by and large viewed Amerindians as savages and barbarians, while they interpreted the history of the Spanish conquistadores and their successors in ways that held Western civilization itself up as the main colonial heritage in the Americas (north and south).

Reviewed by: Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History ed. by Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush Andrea Zittlau Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush, eds. Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 317 pp. Paper, $35.00 Native ghosts have played an undeniably important role in American culture and history. From Pet Cemetery to Poltergeist, they have haunted our popular consciousness. With their edited volume Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush intend to investigate the tradition of Indian apparitions. The contributions from the fields of anthropology, cultural geography, history, literature, American studies, and Native American studies comprise a variety of case studies and approaches, but they all agree on criticizing a profound preoccupation with Western theory concepts that do not fit the nature of Indian ghosts. It is an ambitious book that should be understood as an inspiration to undertake serious study into the subject. As the editors make clear in their introduction, Native ghosts are an important element of colonial fantasy (viii) and are a particular kind of North American subjectivity (x). The editors seek to reach beyond the discussion of the imaginative and immaterial apparition of the ghost to include storied places and embodied practices (xi) to reveal how material circumstances have always been essential to ghost stories. Their book is to be read as a critique of the emphasis on literary analysis of Indian ghosts (and thus the emphasis on literary texts). But throughout the individual contributions, Renee L. Bergland's benchmark study The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (2000) remains a constant point of reference. The book is divided into three parts: "Methodologies," "Historical Encounters," and "The Past in the Present." The first part includes contributions by Michelle Burnham, Geneva M. Gano, and Coll Thrush that focus on literary texts and concepts from literary theory. Burnha discusses Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer as indigenous gothic, calling attention also to the multilayered concept of the ghost. To her the ghosts are the dead as well as their stories. They are places and embodiments of ideas that Alexie disrupts with his text. The second part of the book deals with historical events and their mystification. In "The Anatomy of a Haunting: Black Hawk's Body and the Fabric of History" Adam John Waterman traces the body snatching [End Page 281] of Black Hawk by Dr. James Turner. Waterman succeeds in connecting medical knowledge not only with the popular discourses on race in the second half of the nineteenth century but also with the intended disruption of the landscape and memory, dispossession, and a violent reconstruction of official historical narratives. Black Hawk's head is not a ghost but a symbol in its historical time as well as today. The irony of history has it that the bones stolen from the grave were returned to Black Hawk's widow, who, fearing another theft, left them in the charge of the governor (111). They were destroyed in a fire when the Geological and Historical Institution in Burlington, Iowa, burned down in 1853. Waterman's account can be read as a parable to contemporary discourses on museums and their human remains, a never-ending ghost story. The third part of the book, "The Past in the Present," takes its point of departure from contemporary locations and situations. It is also the part of the book in which indigenous perspectives are included. A particular insight is provided by Cynthia Landrum in her contribution "Shape-Shifters, Ghosts, and Residual Power: An Examination of Northern Plains Spiritual Beliefs, Location, Objects, and Spiritual Colonialism." Her analysis departs from the exhibition of material objects in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington dc and the haunting that occurred around them. But instead of examining the described incidents, Landrum continues to tell ghost stories of the location of Wounded Knee at night, of the Deer People, and of the White Buffalo Calf Woman. Ghosts are seen here as blank spaces in language, representing something words cannot express. But they also create blank spaces, as becomes obvious while reading Landrum's article. Her...

This paper examines the structure of glacial cycles, with a particular focus on the definition and complexity of cold stages in the stratigraphical record. The Middle and Late Pleistocene cold stages correspond to the classic orbitally-driven 100 ka glacial cycles. Closer examination of the global glacier-climate record also reveals that cold stages are structured within larger glacial cycles beyond the classic 100 ka pattern. ‘Mega’-glacial cycles closely correspond to 400 ka eccentricity cycles and the last two such cycles were bounded by MIS 19, 11 and 1. The last of these mega-cycles encompasses the Saalian Complex Stage in Europe, as well as the last cold stage (Weichselian Stage and equivalents) and has significant implications for how cold stages are defined. The irregular pacing of quasi-100 ka glacial cycles is likely to represent an internal mechanism related to ice-sheet evolution through cold stages and their interaction with ocean and atmospheric circulation. Internal climate drivers also explain short-term climatic fluctuations within cold stages such as Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and various other short-term interstadial-stadial transitions, such as the during the Late-glacial and the Younger Dryas Stadial, for example. Since the effects of global climate change are not manifested uniformly through time and space, such climatic effects result in diachronous boundaries in the geological record as well as spatial variability. This is especially characteristic of the Quaternary record where sediments and landforms record climate change over relatively short time intervals. This complexity, inherent in climate stratigraphy upon which the Quaternary stratigraphical record is built, poses challenges for regional and especially global correlations. In many studies cross-correlation within glacial cycles is achieved via the marine or ice-core records, especially for the last glacial cycle. However, whilst useful as records of time through the Quaternary, these records do not always reflect other processes on Earth. For example, it is now known that glacier behaviours around the world do not conform closely with the marine isotopic records, the latter being dominated by fluctuations in the Laurentide Ice Sheet over North America, overprinted by local factors. Whilst orbital forces caused by the Earth’s interaction with other planetary orbits in our Solar System are pivotal in modulating and pacing climate change, the most important driver of the magnitude of climate change that we see in the Quaternary are largely internal factors. It is the coincidence of these drivers with orbital parameters that explain the structure and characteristics of glacial cycles. Whilst similarities between global climate patterns between glacial cycles are apparent, such as the saw-tooth pattern of change observed in marine isotope records, the complexity within these cycles differs within every cycle.  Thus, every glacial cycle is unique. This means that stratigraphical frameworks for subdividing, ordering and correlating structural elements of Pleistocene cold stages will also be unique for each glacial cycle and requires careful consideration and definition. This is especially important for correct correlation of intra-cold stage climatic stratigraphical events across regions and ultimately for comparison with global climate temporal frameworks such as the marine or ice-core records.  

AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 2014.COLONIAL GENOCIDE IN INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICA. Edited by Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014.PERFORMING INDIGENEITY: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences. Edited by Laura Graham and H. Glenn Penny. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2014.In her influential book Transit of Empire, Indigenous scholar Jodi Byrd has provocatively asserted, story of the new world is horror, the story of America is a crime.1 The line, to varying degrees, reflects an assumption and theme that courses through these works, two of which are edited collections and one that reenvisions North American history, putting Indigenous people at the center of the story. But if the colonization of the continent was indeed a crime, as many of the writers featured here might broadly agree, there is much disagreement over the nature of the offense. For certain, the history of settler colonialism has wrought devastation and violence, but it has also engendered resistance at every turn and, in the face of great obstacles, fostered new expressions of cultural vitality among the world's Indigenous people.Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous History of the United States, along with Woolford, Benvenuto, and Hinton's volume, argues that the actions of some white settlers met the legal definition of genocide.2 These two books emphasize the role of violence in shaping North American history since the late 1400s. Conversely, the collection of essays edited by Laura Graham and H. Glenn Penny demonstrate the creative ways in which Indigenous people have asserted cultural and performative autonomy, both highly symbolic modes of resistance amid the systemic disruptions that millions of men and women have endured for over five centuries of colonization. Taken together, these three works represent some of the latest and strongest scholarship coming out of Indigenous studies. At their best, the authors refashion our understanding of national histories and convey how colonialism remains a process deeply embedded in our present moment.Dunbar-Ortiz rejects the classification of her ranging book as solely a work of Indigenous history. In fact, she states firmly from the outset, This is a history of the United (14). In its stronger moments, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is even global in scope, offering fresh comparisons and linkages to settler colonialism in other contexts such as in Ireland, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. However, as a word of caution, this is a work of synthesis, so the reader should not expect to encounter wholly new insights or previously unknown sources. Instead, Dunbar-Ortiz mostly presents well-known and widely studied events. Still, the book challenges triumphalist accounts of US history based on the achievements of Great Men (presidents, frontier settlers, and cultural icons to name just a few). And while such top-down narratives have fallen out of favor among most academics, Dunbar-Ortiz's book will further dislodge any lingering notions of a heroic past defined by brave frontiersmen who settled the continent in the name of liberty, justice, and equality. Hers is a more complex and darker story.An Indigenous Peoples' History first delves into the social and cultural arrangements of North America's precolonial societies. Given the scope and breadth of the book, Dunbar-Ortiz cannot describe the nuances of these early civilizations in thorough detail, but she does bust the myth that they were inferior or more simplistic to European forms of social organization. People of the Pacific Northwest, for example, developed highly organized cultures based on abundant salmon and timber. Meanwhile, corn and wild game nourished millions of others in the heart of the continent. One could travel from the Pacific Coast, across the Rocky Mountains, and through the Mississippi watershed to the Atlantic via an extensive network of trade and migratory routes that included rivers, streams, overland trails, and treacherous mountain passes. …