Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 (review)

Reviewed by: Modernity and Its Other: The Encounter with North American Indians in the Eighteenth Century by Robert Woods Sayre Bryan C. Rindfleisch Robert Woods Sayre, Modernity and Its Other: The Encounter with North American Indians in the Eighteenth Century. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017). Pp. 468. $34.98 paper. Robert Woods Sayre demonstrates how Euro-Americans observed the profound socio-economic transformations to British North America during the late eighteenth century—or the transition to "modernity"—and the role that the Native Peoples of North America played, involuntarily, in that process. First published in French in 2008, this book features well-known eighteenth-century authors like William Bartram, St. John de Crévecoeur, Philip Freneau, Jonathan Carver, and John Lawson, in addition to lesser known individuals such as Moreau de Saint-Mery and Alexander Mackenzie, who illustrate how Euro-Americans wrestled with the onset of a commercial world, and utilized the Indigenous Peoples of North America as either a reflection or a commentary of that process. It is through these authors that Sayre imagines a "decisive historical moment" in which the "modernity" of British North America "clashed radically with the 'premodern' Native American cultures with which it was in close contact," a "watershed…in a process of evolution toward capitalism and modernity" (4). By the turn of the nineteenth century, though, with the emergence of a market economy in the United States, this Indigenous parallel to Euro-American "modernity" faded into the romanticism of the "Noble Savage" stereotype and was replaced with the triumphal narratives of American progress that were embodied in the writings of George Catlin. Altogether, Sayre finds that the transition to a capitalist modern world—in the Weberian sense of the word—occurred at this critical juncture in the late eighteenth century, and proved intimately connected to, and inherently in tension with, the Native Peoples of North America. Sayre's book is divided into two parts: the "View of Modernity" by Euro-American authors during the eighteenth century, and their "Views of the Other," or "Travels in Indian Territory." In part one, Sayre compares and contrasts the writings of Crévecoeur, Freneau, and Saint-Mery to pinpoint the "onset of modernity in the English colonies through the eyes" of both famous and obscure writers. From the Letters from an American Farmer and The Rising Glory of America, to [End Page 141] Saint-Mery's little known treatises, Sayre uses such texts to demonstrate capitalist mentalities—or the primacy of a "profit motive"—and commercial structures throughout British North America, which deviated from the agrarian foundations of the colonies (88). When Native Peoples were mentioned, which was rather infrequently by these authors, they were a tool to critique the new "modernity" (75). One of the most intriguing insights by Sayre is his analysis of Crévecoeur's "Distresses of a Frontier Man," in which the narrator contemplates "escaping his predicament [when faced with "modernity"] by going to live in an Indian village where he is known and feels sure to be welcomed," thereby inverting Indigenous Americans as a source of comfort, nostalgia, and identity for the frontiersman (53). In part two, Sayre uses the writings of French and English authors—beginning with the Baron de Lahontan and Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, followed by Lawson and Carver, then Bartram, and lastly the fur traders Mackenzie and Jean-Baptiste Trudeau—to better explore how Euro-American writers understood their interactions with the Native Peoples of North America within that transition to modernity in the eighteenth century. These authors' observations varied from the expected, such as by defining Indigenous Peoples as premodern (complete with the value judgments that reflected the authors' predispositions to modernity), to the unexpected, such as Bartram's "passionate identification with the Other…[who] expresses a romantic revolt against the modernity that he was convinced had drawn away from the authentically human" (234). This conflagration of modernity and Other reveals what Sayre calls a "radical paradox" exhibited by all of his Euro-American authors: a "unanimity of praise" for Indigenous Peoples and cultures (and in some cases their moral and cultural superiority), but at the same time equating those peoples and cultures as antithetical to modernity...

Translation A. Zuercher Reichardt KEY WORDS translation, language, orthography, Iroquois, Mohawk, Joseph Brant, Native Americans, literacy, communication, missionaries, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Translation is having a moment in early American studies. Long gone is the era of scholarship defined by monoglot British colonialism clinging to the Eastern Seaboard: early America has become the study of various European, Indigenous, and African peoples, societies, and structures, a dynamic field concerned with the interactions of diverse—notably linguistically diverse—people across the breadth of the continent and the Atlantic world. Methodological and conceptual shifts toward studies of networks and communication, and toward questions of comparison and entanglement, have further pushed our migration beyond the strict confines of anglophone societies and material texts. Yet, for all its importance in early America, translation is not so simple a keyword to define. For the purpose of this essay, translation denotes, broadly (1) the process of communicating or attempting to communicate the meaning of a source-language text by means of a target-language text, and (2) the material text produced by this process.1 This essay does not offer an assessment of the field of translation studies but, rather, takes stock of how scholars of early America have approached historical instances of translation. And while attuned to the influence of cultural translation, this essay emphasizes linguistic and material translation performed both by professional translators and by editors, as well as by writers, readers, and others who more informally transformed the language and form of texts.2 [End Page 801] Long predating the recent widening of our field, one of the deepest lines of inquiry has concerned the translations of classical texts in the British colonies and early United States. This literature built to a fever pitch during the Revolutionary and early republic periods in studies that assessed the influence of ancient Greek and Roman texts during America’s founding. Other scholars have turned to the circulation of classical translations in other European colonies in North America, and to literary translations across the broader Atlantic world.3 Although early modern European scholarship on the professionalized process of translation and multilanguage texts has not been fully incorporated into early American studies, this literature underscores the important work still ahead to weave North American material text studies into the broader Atlantic, imperial, and European fields of print culture and communication studies.4 Translations were central to the book trade and all the more important for the circulation of newsprints across America and the Atlantic. Though many scholars have acknowledged the importance of foreign and recycled items in North American and European papers, work by Will Slauter and others has examined how mobile paragraphs of news crossed linguistic borders, using translation as a lens for reconstructing information and print networks. Translation of news was also actively wielded: American politicians encouraged translations of foreign newspapers to mold public opinion; printers founded and published French-language papers in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia, finding a large audience in the young republic.5 As this work suggests, then, translation should be central, even to material text studies deliberately focused on the British colonies and United States. [End Page 802] Joining scholarship on French-language newspapers is a substantial literature on German prints during the long eighteenth century. From studies of the colonial-era Philadelphische Zeitung, Germantauner Zeitung, and Christopher Saür’s Bible, to work on the early republic market for translations of German philosophical, scientific, and literary prints, the multilingual makeup of Euro-American populations put translations and translators at the center of the world of print.6 The place German-speaking peoples occupied in early America presents another important subject of translation. Interpreters and political intermediaries who operated as arbitrators between Iroquoian and Algonquian tongues, Germanic dialects, and English understood that translation was about far more than the transformation of texts between European languages—it was essential to the communications of European and Indigenous North Americans. Two of the more established fields in early American translation have revolved around Bibles and other religious texts printed in Native American languages, and around missionary education of Indigenous peoples.7 Following that scholarship, examinations of Indigenous textual forms and their...

No-Man's-LandThe Battlefield Watercolors of Claggett Wilson Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Symphony of Terror, Claggett Wilson, ca. 1919, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Alice H. Rossin [End Page 97] Like many aspiring artists, Claggett Wilson, born in Washington, DC, in 1887, rejected a conventional gentleman's education at Princeton to briefly study at the Art Students League of New York before sailing to Paris. He enrolled at the progressive Académie Julian, and from 1906 to 1910 showed his work at the Paris Salon, the art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. When he returned to the United States in 1913, Modernism had fully arrived. The International Exhibition of Modern Art, known simply as the Armory Show, featured 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over three hundred avant-garde European and American artists. Historically it became a Who's Who of Modern art: Pablo Picasso, Edward Hopper, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Cézanne, to name a few. Claggett Wilson's oil painting Moorish Girl, now lost, was exhibited among the works of these now better-known artists. Modernist artists sought to create symbols representing the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the impact of cities on contemporary life. As a means of signifying their doubts about time-honored values and institutions, they rejected the traditional use of perspective, color, and composition. Critics reviled the new work as an "insane" affront to artistic sensibilities. Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, with its overlapping images meant to express motion, was singled out for derision; a critic in the New York Times famously referred to it as "an explosion in a shingle factory." As an instructor at Columbia University Teachers College, Wilson was certainly interested in helping his students search for a unique, surprising kind of beauty as encouraged by the new art of the day. In 1917, when the United States entered the First World War, mobilizing more than 300,000 soldiers, thirty-one-year-old Wilson put aside his paintbrushes and left his teaching job to enlist as a combat marine. He believed that to be a fully realized artist, he needed to experience the world in all its complexity, including truly bad things. His desires, though honorable, were naive. After training as a second lieutenant, he found himself on the frontlines in France, where he experienced two of the bloodiest battles of the war: the Battle of Château-Thierry and the Battle of Belleau Wood. In the month-long Battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918, US marines struggled to block one of the German approaches to Paris, but they did so artlessly, advancing shoulder to shoulder, which had rarely been done since the slaughter of the British at the Somme in 1916. Wilson was wounded by poison gas and was left for three days lying in the muddy [End Page 98] no-man's-land between the American and German trenches before being recovered for medical treatment. Click for larger view View full resolution Front Line Stuff, Claggett Wilson, ca. 1919, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Alice H. Rossin World War I was called the "chemists' war" for its large-scale use of poison gas. The gases soaked into woolen uniforms, causing skin burns and blisters, and hung in noxious clouds over the trenches, resulting in near blindness, vomiting, and long-term respiratory problems; Wilson experienced respiratory difficulties for the rest of his life. After recovering at a hospital in Dijon, he returned to the front to witness Germany's surrender. Following the armistice, Belgian, British, French, and American forces stayed behind to maintain control of the occupied territories. While many of his buddies went home, Wilson was sent to the small town of Koblenz, Germany, for the Army of Occupation [End Page 99] of the Rhineland. To deal with the haunting memories of life in the trenches, a place filled with the stench of urine, rotting flesh and excrement, rats the size of cats, and men suffering from poison gas and shell shock, Wilson knew he needed to paint; it was the only thing that would bring him solace. He acquired a set...

About the Authors

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:

Reviewed by: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: The Great Pedestrian of North and South America by Donald E. Chipman David Rex Galindo Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: The Great Pedestrian of North and South America. By Donald E. Chipman. (Denton: Texas State Historical Association, 2012. Pp. 80. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. ISBN 9780876112519, $15.95 paper.) Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, and the African slave Estebanico were the only known survivors of Pánfilo de Narváez’ [End Page 92] 1528 tragic expedition to Florida. For eight years, the four argonauts wandered more than two thousand miles from the Texas Gulf Coast to the Pacific coast of Mexico, and then to Mexico City. The Spanish king rewarded Cabeza de Vaca with a governorship in Asunción, Paraguay, where he arrived in 1543, after walking another thousand miles from the Brazilian coast. Cabeza de Vaca was the first European to collect information on the landscapes and indigenous groups he visited in North and South America. As a result, his odysseys have received attention from historians, anthropologists, linguists, and even filmmakers. Historian Donald E. Chipman’s newest book synthesizes the latest scholarship and Cabeza de Vaca’s own memoirs with a well-written biographical narrative that covers the life of Cabeza de Vaca as well as his major deeds on the Americas. He does all this with erudition in just over sixty pages of text. Following a chronological script in six short chapters, Chipman covers Cabeza de Vaca’s story from birth until death. The first two chapters describe the Cabeza de Vaca’s background in Spain and the preparation of Pánfilo de Narváez’s expedition within the context of Charles V’s imperial politics and the Spanish conquest. The following three chapters chart Cabeza de Vaca and his group through Texas and northern Mexico. These chapters rely heavily on Cabeza de Vaca’s memoirs, the first European descriptions of what are now the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. For instance, chapters four and five summarize Cabeza de Vaca’s ethnographic observations of Texas and the northern Mexico indigenous communities. His last chapter focuses on Cabeza de Vaca’s trip to South America and his governorship of Río de la Plata in Asunción, Paraguay. This is perhaps the least known part of Cabeza de Vaca’s life. Here Cabeza de Vaca emerges as a leader and activist for Indian rights. Indubitably, Cabeza de Vaca’s experience in North America contributed to his leadership capabilities—his expedition to Paraguay only lost one man—and, what is more important to Chipman, increased his sensitivity concerning Indian affairs. Chipman points out that Cabeza de Vaca, like his contemporary Bartolomé de las Casas, became a “lay advocate of Indian rights on both American continents” (58). While Chipman’s narrative is mostly descriptive, at some points, the author also contributes to historiographical discussions such as the controversies over Cabeza de Vaca’s route through Texas in chapter 3. There is a good selection of maps (mostly borrowed from Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca), which are necessary to follow Cabeza de Vaca’s wanderings. Illustrations such as a contemporary sketch map of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea in 1519, a contemporary drawing of the loading and unloading of a horse for a translantic voyage or the Texas Surgical Society’s insignia recognizing Cabeza de Vaca as the first documented surgeon of Texas further support the story. Chipman’s book is a joy to read for its well-written narrative style and brevity. In a short space, the author has done a superb job in describing Cabeza de Vaca’s deeds within the context of Spanish colonialism and Texas history, fields the author masters. The book will undoubtedly prove useful for students and scholars as well as the general public and is a welcomed addition to the Texas State Historical Association popular history series. [End Page 93] David Rex Galindo Stephen F. Austin State University Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association

Queensland's 1897 legislation that was to regulate its Indigenous people for almost a century, and also as its Southern Protector of Aborigines from 1898 to 1904.Meston's contribution as a policymaker and Protector has received much scholarly attention, 2 however, his activities as a showman -that is, in exhibiting live Indigenous people and himself joining in the performances -are not so well known and have been documented only sporadically. 3 Even his best known offering, the Wild Australia Show, which was the subject of an exhibition held by the University of Queensland's Anthropology Museum in 2015, 4 has not been fully explored.This article takes a closer look at Meston's exhibiting activities, which can now be traced more easily with the help of online searching of newspapers.It shows that these activities were central to his policies for solving Queensland's ' Aboriginals problem' and to his work as a Protector, and eventually gained him a national reputation (or notoriety) as a showman.Further, Meston's forays

This research paper examines the contrasting portrayals of Amazonian indigenous cultures in the European, American and Chinese travel media, revealing the profound impact of historical, cultural and faith-based factors on tourism. It begins with an overview of the evolution of tourism and its multifaceted impact on indigenous cultures, highlighting the benefits of tourism for indigenous cultures. Through a comparative analysis of Western and Chinese tourism websites, this paper identifies differences in the way these cultures are depicted. Western depictions tend to romanticize and commodify indigenous cultures, portraying them as “noble savages” and emphasizing their poverty, isolation, and need for external protection. Closely linked to Western colonial history, Christianity and romanticism, these portrayals reflect a paternalistic view that often disregards the agency of indigenous communities. In contrast, Chinese depictions are influenced by Taoism and Confucianism, emphasizing harmony with nature, collectivism and social order. These depictions focus on the connection between aboriginal people and their environment, depicting them as models of ecological balance and collective living. The study also explores the historical and colonial contexts that have shaped such Chinese portrayals, reflecting China’s history of internal upheaval and resistance to cultural imperialism. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for a more nuanced and respectful approach to indigenous tourism that recognizes the agency, resilience and vitality of these communities, moving beyond mere stereotyping and commodification.

Reviewed by: Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture by Eleanor Jones Laura Turner Igoe (bio) Keywords Alexander von Humboldt, Philosophy, Natural world, Nature, Visual arts Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture. By Eleanor Jones Harvey with a preface by Hans-Dieter Sues. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 443. Paper, $75.00.) In the Alexander von Humboldt and the United States catalogue and exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eleanor Harvey takes a deep dive into nineteenth-century American thought and culture to tease out traces of Humboldt, “arguably the most important natural philosopher of the nineteenth century” (25). Although hardly a household name today, Humboldt was one of the best known and admired public figures [End Page 480] until his death in 1859. The Prussian-born naturalist traveled the globe and wrote more than 36 books and 25,000 letters to a global network of correspondents. His theory of the interconnectedness of humans and nature, radical at the time, formed the basis of his five-volume magnum opus, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1848–59). An international bestseller, Cosmos had a profound impact on past and current understandings of the natural world, inspiring visual artists, writers, and scientists from Charles Darwin to Rachel Carson. Although Humboldt spent only six weeks in the United States in 1804, discussing the Louisiana Purchase with Thomas Jefferson and inspiring Charles Willson Peale to come out of artistic retirement to paint his portrait, he proclaimed himself “half an American” and had a lasting impact on the nation’s cultural identity through his publications and correspondence. Each of the eight chapters in Alexander von Humboldt and the United States examines an area of Humboldt’s cultural impact—from his influence on early American naturalist–explorers to his lifelong advocacy of abolition and his deep interest in Native American ethnography. Humboldt’s imprint on American thought and culture has received a resurgence of scholarly attention in recent decades, most notably by literature scholar Laura Dassow Walls and historian Andrea Wulf, whose bestseller, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, thrust the polymath into popular culture.1 Harvey’s exhibition and catalogue, however, cement Humboldt’s significance to the visual arts, as she investigates his impact on Peale, Samuel F. B. Morse, Frederic Edwin Church, Carleton Watkins, Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, and Karl Bodmer, and their visions of the natural world and its inhabitants. Densely researched and dizzying in its chronological and cultural expanse, the catalogue convincingly lays out Humboldt’s significant mark on U.S. cultural identity and artistic production. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Smithsonian’s extended closures in 2020 and 2021, the Alexander von Humboldt and the United States catalogue has become, in many ways, a stand-in for the shuttered exhibition. Originally slated to open in March of 2020, the exhibition has only been open to the public for nine weeks (three weeks longer than Humboldt’s short stay in the United States). A number of online resources, [End Page 481] however, including lectures, tours, animated videos, and a complete checklist and label copy, provide multiple layers of access during the museum’s closure. Still, the catalogue and these virtual platforms cannot replicate the experience of viewing in person the masterworks Harvey has assembled, including the skeleton of a mastodon excavated by Peale in the early nineteenth century and borrowed from the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany. Harvey described her clearest revelation in “dusting for [Humboldt’s] fingerprints” across U.S. culture as finding his “far reaching influence on the development of what has been called America’s ‘wilderness aesthetic,’” defined as “finding positive value in uncultivated territory” (35). Because of Humboldt, the United States adopted nature and “the concept of wilderness specifically—as an emblem of the scale and scope of our cultural ambitions,” giving rise to the Hudson River School of landscape painting (29). Unfortunately, there is little critical interrogation of the darker side of this “wilderness aesthetic” and its affiliated colonialist enterprise.2 For Americans to embrace uninhabited wilderness as...

Reviewed by: Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens Lillian Nayder (bio) Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens, by Grace Moore; pp. xii + 210. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004, £47.50, $89.95. "I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage," Charles Dickens famously wrote in his 1853 Household Words article on the subject: "I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth" (7 [11 June 1853] 337). "I wish I were Commander in Chief in India," Dickens told Angela Burdett Coutts four years later, referring to what Victorians generally termed the "Indian Mutiny": "I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested . . . and raze it off the face of the Earth" (Pilgrim Letters, 8: 459). What to do with such statements— how to explain, dismiss, or justify them—is a problem that plagues Dickens critics, particularly those reluctant to consider him a racist or to accept, as anything but facetious, his cavalier references to genocide. Speaking in the novelist's defense, the editors of the Pilgrim Letters (1965–2002) note that Dickens's "imaginary threats of revenge" against mutinous sepoys "were less horrific than those expressed by many British commanders in the field" (8: 459 n. 8); and Michael Slater introduces "The Noble Savage" in volume 3 of his Dent Dickens's Journalism (1999) by pointing to the extenuating circumstances under which Dickens composed it, "provoked into writing" by A. T. Caldecott's London exhibition of "Zulu Kaffirs" in 1853 (141). Rather than seeking to temper Dickens's remarks or to exonerate him from charges of racism, Patrick Brantlinger, in Rule of Darkness (1988), criticizes Dickens's "genocidal attitudes" (126), while Myron Magnet, in Dickens and the Social Order (1985), foregrounds "the other Dickens," the reactionary figure whose "program for dealing with the Indian mutiny . . . is, like Mr. Kurtz's, to exterminate all the brutes" (4). In Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens, Grace Moore enters this debate, offering several competing explanations of Dickens's genocidal "calls," and discussing, more generally, his representations of class, race, and empire. Focusing on Dickens's treatment of American slavery, British India and the 1857 Mutiny, and the 1865 Jamaica Insurrection, Moore considers the interplay between his ideas of imperialism and race relations, on the one hand, and class relations and social reform on the other. Paying particular attention to "The Noble Savage," "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" (1857), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), as well as articles Dickens accepted for publication, she sets out to revise our understanding of his political vision. Her goals are ambitious and her claims are sometimes thought-provoking, although her arguments are often unconvincing. Defining herself against critics such as Brantlinger, Moore is reluctant to consider Dickens racist; her reading of "The Noble Savage" suggests the spirit in which she writes her book. Moore attempts to separate Dickens's voice from the essay's narrative voice, identifying the work as a response to Lord Denman, the abolitionist and former Chief Justice who harshly criticized Dickens for his parody of Mrs. Jellyby and alleged that he harmed the abolitionist cause. Like Slater, Moore argues that Dickens was provoked into writing his essay—not by Caldecott's exhibition but by Denman's attack. She contends that Dickens sought to refute his critic by adopting the very stance Denman wrongly attributed to him, "play[ing] along with the allegations" to demonstrate their "sheer absurdity" (67). [End Page 331] To support this revisionary reading, Moore asserts that the tone of "The Noble Savage" is "completely at odds with anything [Dickens] had written" and "becomes much more moderate and . . . akin to Dickens's own voice" after its opening (66–67). Yet these claims are untenable. Throughout his essay, Dickens ridicules races he perceives as inferior and savage—including the Irish—and instead of breaking with his past writings, his tone recalls that of his 1848 Examiner review of...

In Word or Deed:Practices of Print and Citizenship in the Early U.S. Nathan Jérémie Brink (bio) THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP: BLACK POLITICS AND PRINT CULTURE IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES. By Derrick R. Spires. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. A LITERATE SOUTH: READING BEFORE EMANCIPATION. By Beth Barton Schweiger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. The third chapter and seventeenth verse of the book of Colossians encourages its readers that their word and deed must be unified practices of faith. The scripture mentions shared songs and teachings, but also suggests the ethical model of Jesus demands peace and mutual concern overriding the marks of religion, people groups, and states of freedom or bondage. This scripture would be familiar to many of the antebellum urban Black activists and rural White female southern readers explored in new monographs by Derrick R. Spires and Beth Barton Schweiger. Both Spires' The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States and Schweiger's A Literate South: [End Page 7] Reading Before Emancipation consider not only the words their subjects' read or wrote, but rather examine their literary activities as culturally and politically significant practices. For their subjects, word and deed were not distinct categories but enmeshed practices demonstrating what they thought, how they encountered ideas, and the ways they enacted them in the world. However, these books reveal that readers of the nineteenth century did not uniformly interpret what this text's proposition that in Christ there is neither slave nor free meant in their own context. They show the divergence between communities of interpreters, with some who celebrated Black humanity and fostered revolutionary social restructure, and others whose tacit or overt support upheld ideas of white superiority and the institution of slavery in the early United States. In the early nineteenth-century United States, to read, talk about, recite, or share printed material sometimes took on significant civic meaning. Spires and Schweiger each contribute to an expanding field of studies on the practices of literacy and print culture during this period that push the field beyond the literary and print culture of White cosmopolitan elites. The Practice of Citizenship and A Literate South both problematize the view that literary culture was a normative, uniform, or straightforward building block for citizenship and public virtue in the early American republic. Neither relies upon discussion of the public sphere initiated by Michael Warner that serves as a dominant paradigm for understanding the broader subject of literacy and print culture in this period.1 Spires examines the practices and agency of African American thinkers and activists and Schweiger explores the access and agency of rural, mostly White women in Southern states. Each show how their subjects' reading, writing, and participation in print culture represented important cultural and political practices. The Practice of Citizenship was awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America. It offers an exceptional balance between recovery of under-examined sources and a powerful framework for understanding the significance of Black ideas and practices of citizenship in the early-nineteenth century United States. Spires, an associate professor of English at Cornell University, takes care to recognize literary historians such as Frances Smith Foster, Jocelyn Moody, Carla Peterson, and others, on whose work he builds. In contrast to asking where Black print culture of the nineteenth century fits within theorization of the early American public sphere so commonly considered since Warner's application of Jürgen Habermas' theory, or as creating a what Joanna Brooks has theorized as a Black counterpublic in print, Spires method of "black theorizing" takes Black writers of the nineteenth century at their word.2 Instead of considering how Black ideas of the period fit scholarly paradigms "in a largely white-defined discourse," Spires pays close attention to primary sources, textual details, and social practices of Black writers, preachers, authors, and their communities whose thought and action developed "a practice of citizenship." Spires offers a refreshing suggestion to "base our working definitions of citizenship on black writers' proactive attempts to describe their own political work."3 This method of "black theorizing" in Spires draws upon the [End Page...

A significant change in the representation of the Khoikhoi occurred in the 18th century. Increasingly, the Khoikhoi came to be depicted with a degree of sympathy, and joined the ranks of that growing category of humanity that enlightened Europeans came to identify as 'noble savages'. It is the purpose of this chapter to argue that this change in opinion was largely the result of the publication of Kolb's book about the Cape, which contained the most detailed and sympathetic description of the Khoikhoi to that date. It is also the author's intention to demonstrate that Kolb's book marked an important stage in the evolution of what he might call 'travel literature' into a genre akin to the scientific compilation of knowledge. Of great significance is the transformation that written culture, or established European knowledge about the Khoikhoi, underwent in the colonial context. Keywords:Cape Khoikhoi; enlightened Europeans; travel literature; Written culture

Reviewed by: Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America by Matthew Dougherty Elizabeth Fenton (bio) Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America matthew dougherty University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 250 pp. The notion that populations described in the Bible had somehow migrated and settled across the Atlantic emerged in tandem with European arrival in the Western Hemisphere. Speculation about the origins of Indigenous Americans by Europeans typically ignored accounts given by [End Page 242] Indigenous people themselves and attempted to reconcile the revelation of these "new" continents with biblical accounts of the world's creation. The most popular version of these theories that cropped up in the colonial period was what Matthew Dougherty refers to as the "Israelite Indian" story in his book, Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America. Within these stories, European encounters with Indigenous American nations not only initiated a new era in human history but also solved a long-standing biblical mystery. According to the book of 2 Kings, the Assyrian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Israel around 740 BCE and relocated the tribes that comprised it to lands that appear on no known maps. Those ten tribes have been "lost" ever since. The Israelite Indian story presented the tantalizing prospect that those missing tribes, at long last and through the providence of settler colonialism, had been found. As Dougherty's book demonstrates, the story held particular importance to people living through the early decades of US nation-formation. Lost Tribes Found is an eloquent study of how the Israelite Indian story allowed a wide variety of people to situate themselves within the United States in an era defined by racial violence, territorial expansion, and religious change. Lost Tribes Found is an essential contribution to both the broad field of early American religious studies and the more particular study of religious nationalism. It offers a fresh perspective on stories of Israelite American origins, which persisted, despite all the evidence running counter to their claims, into (and in some corners beyond) the nineteenth century. It also persuasively suggests that the frameworks of providential exceptionalism and "manifest destiny," while useful, do not fully explain the development of competing claims to sovereignty in the early national era. Dougherty's main contention throughout the book is that "comparisons of Indigenous peoples to Israelites or Jews often articulated forms of religious nationalism in the context of an expansive U.S. empire. These nationalisms claimed that God had chosen some people—American Jews, Indigenous peoples, Mormons, or White settlers—to have territory and political sovereignty" (16–17). American nationalisms, helpfully plural in this reframing, come into being through their entanglements with religion. Rather than producing a single nationalism aligned with a particular faith tradition, Dougherty shows, Israelite Indian stories facilitated the proliferation of (at times competing) nationalisms within the ever-shifting American landscape. Central to this book's argument is the notion that Israelite Indian stories produced intense emotions in those who heard and believed them. Those [End Page 243] emotions, in turn, "became entangled with multiple nationalisms that reimagined or opposed the United States' growing empire" (4). The book's first chapter, for example, shows how Israelite Indian stories allowed Protestant reformers not only to imagine a singular "Indian religion" but also "to evoke in their White readers feelings of hope and anxiety about missions to Indigenous people" (24). Such a reading allows Dougherty to explain why Israelite Indian theories such as Elias Boudinot's foundational text on the subject, A Star in the West (1816), simultaneously express feelings of love for and kinship with Indigenous populations and treat the expansion of a white US empire as inevitable. Lost Tribes Found's third chapter shows how two outsiders to this tradition—the Pequot Methodist preacher William Apess and the Jewish utopian Mordecai Manuel Noah—used Israelite Indian stories "to evoke the pride and hope needed to nucleate new Indigenous and Jewish nationalisms" that could perhaps counter the nation's ascendant white nationalism (74). Although they address competing versions of the Israelite Indian story, these chapters together show how this story conjured feelings of hope for a future of American...

Reviewed by: Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture by Eleanor Jones Harvey Laura Dassow Walls (bio) Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture eleanor jones harvey Smithsonian American Art Museum, in association with Princeton University Press 2020 444 pp. Few books on Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth century's world-famous explorer, scientist, and popular writer, are fully equal to their subject; this one is. It was created to accompany the exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, which opened in March 2020—just days after COVID-19 shut down the nation—and ran through July 2021. Fortunately the exhibit lives on, thanks to the online materials which include an illuminating video tour and a trove of additional educational materials, suitable for classroom use from elementary grades through college courses. [End Page 302] Even more fortunately, the exhibit will live on for decades to come in the pages of this magnificent book. Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the SAAM, has not only assembled a stunning exhibition; she has also written a panoramic narrative that takes in the full sweep of nineteenth-century American science, politics, art, literature, and culture. The result is a mammoth volume, its dense text leavened with scores of supplemental illustrations and interleaved with 110 full-color plates reproducing the exhibition's artworks and historical documents, the whole beautifully bound and wrapped in a lavish cover. This all makes it look superficially like an exhibit catalogue, a coffee-table book suitable for idle browsing. It may be that, but it's also much, much more, a book that begs to be read and reread. The more one studies the complex conversation offered here between the narrative and images, the more pathways it opens for further inquiry. As for the text itself, Harvey has written a rich, detailed, and lengthy scholarly monograph that brings Humboldt's America, and Humboldt himself, fully to life. She draws on the full range of world scholarship on Humboldt (including several works by the author of this review); but to it she adds reams of new information drawn from her own original archival research, including revelatory passages from Humboldt himself that have never before appeared in English. Even the most experienced Humboldt scholars will find surprises on every page, and all will appreciate the thoroughly annotated citations in Harvey's lengthy footnotes. The volume is capped off with the exhibition catalogue, plus a "selected" bibliography that nevertheless runs for twenty-four of its elephant-folio pages. The result is arguably the finest and most extensive single volume in English on the profound and far-reaching impact on the United States by that world-renowned German scientist, explorer, diplomat, artist, writer, and all-around force of nature, Alexander von Humboldt. Suppressed after his death by authorities suspicious of his poetic prose and hostile to his prodemocratic, anti-imperial politics, Humboldt today is overshadowed by his followers—especially the most famous of them, Charles Darwin. But in his own day, Humboldt was widely recognized not only as the world's most famous living scientist, but also as one of the era's most famous human beings, the very icon of science itself, seen as a progressive and humanistic endeavor open to all. For most of the nineteenth century, he was a ubiquitous presence, a point of reference in science, politics, culture and the arts across the Americas, Eurasia, and the British Commonwealth. We live, said Emerson, in "the Age of Humboldt." [End Page 303] To unpack Emerson's statement is a tremendous project, as this book—which is literally so large and heavy that reading it is a project in itself—makes clear. Humboldt's vision is impossible to describe briefly because it embraced, literally, everything there is; as many have noted, he was perhaps the last human being in modernity who could attempt to hold all knowledge in one brain. One could call him encyclopedic, for he sought to behold the full extent of the natural world in one grand, interconnected unity: his writings ranged from the celestial sphere composed of stars...

FUELLING THE DEBATE ON VIOLENCE IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND'S Maori community, scientists have claimed that what has been dubbed the 'warrior' gene is dominant in Maori males.1 The study contends that the gene, associated with aggressive and antisocial behaviour in general, might contribute to explaining the over-representation of Maori in violence statistics.2 Although ostensibly one-sided and ignorant of the broader socioeconomic context, such assertions create the need to interrogate the biased image of Maori people as 'warriors' - by Pakeha as much as by Maori - and its import for Indigenous culture today. By way of examining instances of Maori warriordom across socio-historical and cultural categories, changing notions of a Maori tradition of warfare are explored, interrogating the ways in which the concept of the warrior is embraced, maintained, and re-asserted as an intrinsic feature of modern Indigeneity, a process which reverberates in contemporary Maori writing.Colonial or Other' GazesContemporary stereotypes about Maori men frequently reduce their image to an instance of physicality, prowess, and often brutality, manifesting the Maori warrior as a cliche which is a perpetuation of colonial 'Othering' discourses. Such constructions negligently ignore and silence Indigenous cultural complexity and dynamics while at the same time reinforcing colonial notions of the 'noble savage'. The tradition of warfare seems to have emerged during the fourteenth century, a period that sawthe creation of an outstanding art and architectural tradition around the construction of finely carved and decorated meetinghouses; the development of an advanced science of horticulture; the formulation of a highly esoteric religious system; and the development of a complex social organization based on tribalism and chieftainship.3This cultural dynamic generated complex Indigenous communities, for which warfare was appropriated as a salient aspect of tribal life:Warfare was an extension of tribalism [ . . . ] and was so institutionalized that it permeated all areas of Classic Maori life: in art, meetinghouse carving served a powerful warrior-ancestor cult; chieftainship provided an energetic leadership system; and religion contributed a combative priesthood and spiritual support. Every tribal man, woman, and child served the institution of warfare.4Colonial constructions of Maori warriordom that hark back to traditional practices manifest themselves in oral tradition, colonial accounts, and archaeological evidence remain wilfully silent about the cultural complexity of the Indigenous people at that time, de-contextualizing warriordom by means of reducing the concept to an image of 'uncivilized' savagery and cannibalism. Even before settlers invaded the country at the close of the eighteenth century, colonial images of the savage 'warrior' were perpetuated by explorers to the Pacific, whose encounters with the Indigenous people in some part resulted in lethal confrontations or at least open hostility, as in the following manuscript of a journal entry from James Cook's first Pacific voyages:When ever we [were]viseted by any number of them that had never heard or seen any thing of us before they [generally] came off in [their] largest Canoes [...]. In each Canoe were generaly an Old man, in some two or three these use'd always to dire[c]t the others were better Clothed and generaly carried a halbard or battle ax in their hands [...]. As soon as they came within a1* a stones throw of the Ship they would there lay and call out Haromai hare uta a pateo age that is come here, come a shore with us and we will kill you with our patoo patoo's and at the same time would shake them at us, at times they would dance the war dance, and other times they would [trade with and] talk to us and answer such questons as were put to them with all the Calmness emaginable and then again begin the war dance, shaking their paddles patoo patoo's [. …