Mapping out Early America: Encounters between imperial and indigenous geographies

Abstract

AbstractWithin the last three decades, the geographic dimensions of Early American History have expanded. Transregional, Atlantic, Diasporic, Continental, Hemispheric, and Transoceanic perspectives have helped bring about the conceptualization of a “Vast Early America” connected with but not limited to Britain's North American colonies. This article surveys some of the historiographical trends that have propelled that shift. Recognizing that those changes overlapped with the so‐called spatial turn in the discipline of History more broadly, it approaches the topic through a spatial lens. It first considers how histories of cartography in Early America have led to a scholarly rethinking of the field's geographic dimensions. It then examines the ways historians have teased out some of the lived and imagined geographies that Native and European agents negotiated in North America. Because Native geographies were at the center of America's early history as well as the colonial encounters that reshaped it, much of the article's focus is on Native American spatial practices.