Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (review)

Some two hundred years before publication of William Cronon's Changes in Land, widely acknowledged text of early American environmental history, Indians in Spanish American borderlands were looking to environment to help interpret history legacv of European-Native encounters.1 In one account, Indians told a hunter who had found a mineral deposit in Spanish Louisiana that ore was the white treasure, and that amongst these mountains of Oar a noise was often heard like explosion of a Cannon . . . which Indians said was Spirit of white people working amongst their Treasure.' A similar tale recounted how uncommon Animal [was] seen by Natives in a lake in . . . New Mexico. It is compared to upper part of body of a Spaniard with his broad brimmed hat. The Indians express a dislike or abhorrence of place . . . assert that departed Spirits of first Spaniards who conquered their Country dwell in lake.3 Such stories record Natives'-or, perhaps, Anglo-American recorders'- enduring associations among death, Spaniards, precious metals, environments where all these things converged. These environmental histories, it seems, offered a fitting lens for interpreting key aspects of early contact era.Why ought environmental historians to pay more attention to early America Atlantic world, why, in turn, should early Americanists (and we define that term in its broadest terms, hemispherically) become more invested in telling stories about ecologies-about plants, animals, rivers, climates, all that? This is question that we asked ourselyes as we proposed organized this special issue of Early American Studies. After all, these are fields that do not necessarily jump to mind as easy allies. Scholars such as Peter Mancall have commented on irregular (if undeniably growing) appearance of environmental history in major journals of early American historv equally rare sightings of early Americanists at venues such as annual conference of American Society for Environmental History.4 Covering a time place before advent of sorts of scientifically minded sources that inform a great deal of more modern environmental historv' without an obvious stake in sort of moral project imagined for environmental historians Avho seek to influence policy public opinion about natural catastrophes both forecast already occurred-who seek nothing less than saving world, according to Donald Worster-studies of early American environments have lacked energy that has made field one of most dA'namic today.5Yet environment mattered to peoples of early America. At most obvious level, this was because they realized their health wealth were caught up in environmental circumstances as diverse as population of white-tailed deer, Avinter frosts, urban miasmas, rising floodAvaters. Decades centuries of priA'ation suffering created colonial communities attuned to local emdronments, millennia of experience created indigenous communities with a deep knowledge of American places. But early Americans' engagement with environment was also narrative historical: they told stories in which relationship between man nature was central to explaining past, present, future conditions of peoples places.This should challenge us as we consider genealogy of environmental history as a practice, for it suggests that environmental history has deeper roots in early American history than might often be appreciated. The standard historiographical periodization of environmental history tends to place its origins in twentieth century or, according to some borderlands scholars, Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis of 1890s. As Alfred Crosby put it, American environmental history got momentum in mid-twentieth century because legacy of Turner thesis had ensured that the historian of frontier was . …

As several contributors to this issue have noted, the field of early American literary studies was born with the “Puritan origins” model in which the significance of early American (particularly Puritan New England’s) literary and cultural productions was often appreciated mainly in terms of what they contributed to the later national (literary) culture of the US during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the 1990s, however, early Americanists issued their “declaration of independence” from the literary history of the American nation-state, objecting that the proto-nationalist paradigm is anachronistic and had done a disservice to a full appreciation of the rich and diverse cultural productions of the colonial Americas, which included not only geographical and cultural areas outside Puritan New England (such as Catholic Maryland) but also geographical areas not now part of the US (such as the Caribbean or Canada). One of the ironies of this declaration of independence from the proto-nationalist “origins” model, however, has been that early American literature has once again become British. Early Americanists have redefined their field as the “literature of British America,” engaging in more and more dialogue with their colleagues, not in American but rather in English Renaissance and eighteenth-century studies, while their colleagues in these fields, inspired by the postcolonial studies movement, have been interested in issues of empire and colonialism. Although the rejection of the “origins” model in early American literary studies has greatly energized the field and its

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Conversations: New and Emerging Approaches to Early American Studies Helen Kilburn (bio) and Melissa Morales (bio) Transatlantic Conversations: New and Emerging Approaches to Early American Studies A Workshop Jointly Sponsored and Organized by the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies and the Society of Early AmericanistsJohannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, 10 4–6, 2018 Scholars in Europe and North America often apply theoretical questions in different ways and proceed from different assumptions about the aims, methods, and rhetorical articulations of scholarly and critical innovation. —"Call for Papers," Transatlantic Conversations In October 2018 the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies hosted the Transatlantic Conversationsworkshop at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. The workshop was designed to offer early Americanists in Europe and North America the opportunity to collaborate for the purpose of uniting the different academic praxes of the various national academies across the two continents. In turn, the organizers hoped the workshop would enable delegates to address what they viewed as "gaps" in early American studies, specifically referencing "Eric Slauter's perceived trade gap between historians and literary scholars ( Early American Literature, 2008) … [and] the theory gap between early American literature and later disciplines identified by Ed White and Michael Drexler ( American Literary History, 2010)." In effect, the Transatlantic Conversationsworkshop asked participants to reconsider these boundaries. It encouraged potential participants to ask: What would happen if historians and literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic came together to share their individual work and critical texts [End Page 865]that inform this work? What would be the individual and collective benefits of exploring ways to bridge these geographic and disciplinary divides? Some of these aims were achieved by this workshop, but we believe that the Transatlantic Conversationsworkshop ought to be viewed as a starting point for a more substantial shift in how early Americanists approach transnational collaboration. academic praxis and critique of works in progress The workshop was organized around eight teams of four to five scholars who each precirculated a work-in-progress article and a theoretical text they believed to be central to their approach to early American studies. The eight groups and their moderators were: "Maritime, Transoceanic, and Global American Studies" (Nadine Zimmerli); "Print Culture and Periodical Studies" (Oliver Scheiding); "Revolutionary Media and the Media of Revolution" (Damien Schlarb); "Visual and Material Culture" (Allison Stagg); "Aesthetics, Empire, and Circulation" (Stephen Shapiro); "Religious Networks, Missions, and Reform" (Jan Stievermann); "Comparative Racial Formations" (Joshua Piker); "Environmental and History of Science/Institutions" (Ralph Bauer). In these groups delegates received constructive feedback on their work, which was well received by graduate students, especially, and which has already led to successful publications within that cohort (Helen Kilburn, "Jesuit and Gentleman Planter: Ingle's Rebellion and the Litigation of Thomas Copley S.J.," British Catholic History34.3 [May 2019]: 374–95). Group sessions enabled rich discussion that interrogated practice within the delegates' respective academies. A recurrent theme was the problem of "U.S.A. exceptionalism" in early American studies ("Maritime, Transoceanic, and Global American Studies"; "Religious Networks, Missions, and Reform"). Though many acknowledged that this phenomenon diminished significantly in scholarship, especially in Europe, colleagues working in the United States emphasized that students there remain invested in their national history without appreciation of early America as a part of a global network. Other groups commented on issues of periodization in different geographic and geopolitical contexts. For example, in the United States, "early American history" would likely be understood by most to include the early national period in the [End Page 866]United States (until c. 1820) while those working on the Americas broadly defined would mostly likely frame "early American history" as contemporaneous with the early modern period in Europe (c. 1400–1700). This issue of periodization was particularly pertinent to scholars in the group dedicated to the "Environmental and History of Science/Institutions," who acknowledged that the idea of the "Enlightenment" was central to their discipline but for which there was little consensus on periodization. Most importantly, delegates recognized that scholarly practice and archival material would vary significantly for scholars focused on different periodizations of "early American history." Importantly, this...

E -n IGHT years ago, at invitation of Institute of Early American History and Culture, a group of nine colonial historians met for a two-day conference at Princeton to consider state of research and teaching in field. report of conference took form of a jeremiad, a joint and protracted wail over low and languishing condition of Early American historical studies. Those of us who were at conference were agreed there has been a steady decline in teaching of colonial history.... That there has been a shrinking amount of research.... That this neglect is alarming....'' l One of first things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning in Early American history and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate history faculty to colleges when the present group of able scholars2 should lie in dust. Professor Carl Bridenbaugh was appointed to preach formal jeremiad to profession, which he did at Cleveland meeting of American Historical Association in December, I947. His sermon was later published in American Historical Review under title The Neglected First Half of American History.3 Mr. Bridenbaugh painted a sufficiently gloomy picture, highlighted with statistics showing, for example, a steady decline in number of articles, notes, and documents dealing with Early American history in American Historical Review since I920. I have one statistic to report for period since I947, and it is only moderately encouraging. As against seventeen contributions on Early American history printed in Review in eight years before Mr. Bridenbaugh's report, there have been twenty-three in eight years since-a fact which may be explained by Mr. Bridenbaugh's having been on Board of Editors during that time.

From Salvation to Damnation:Popular Religion in Early America Janet Moore Lindman (bio) Paul B. Moyer. The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm of Revolutionary America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xi + 264 pp. Note on sources, figures, maps, notes, bibliography and index. $27.95. Kathryn Gin Lum. Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ix + 310 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. In the introduction to his book, Awash in a Sea of Faith, Jon Butler contends that a plethora of religious choices turned antebellum America into "a unique spiritual hothouse," which was so "complex and heterogeneous" that it "baffle[d] observers and adherents alike."1 In divergent ways, both the books under review here capture the diversity and discordance of popular religion in early American history. The authors present compelling evidence in cogently argued narratives that address the advent of the new nation and its relationship to the emergence, on one hand, of a new religious group (Moyer) and the persistence of a standard component of Christian doctrine (Lum) on the other. Building on previous scholarship that has documented the varied religious repertoire of early Americans (by Catherine Brekus, Jon Butler, David D. Hall, Nathan Hatch, Christine Heyrman, Colleen McCannell, Erik Seeman and a host of others), Moyer and Lum attend to their respective subjects with meticulous and perceptive examinations that will be widely read, debated and cited by future researchers. Both authors are to be commended for extending scholarly knowledge of early American religious history through forceful and substantive arguments. Moyer for his contribution to the history of gender by bringing attention to a well known but often overlooked religious figure and sectarian group, and Lum for her incisive commentary on a prevalent, contested, and meaningful religious concept in early American society. Paul Moyer's book, The Public Universal Friend, explores the life and ministry of Jemima Wilkinson, a young woman from Newport who, after a serious illness in the fall of 1776, awoke to claim that her former self had died, that [End Page 570] she was neither male nor female, and that she had been resurrected as the "Public Universal Friend." Refusing to answer to her birth name, the Friend announced her intention to embark on preaching tours throughout New England to spread her version of the Protestant religion. These trips gathered several converts, who formed a new sect that became known as the Society of Universal Friends. Devised as a microhistory, Moyer's book covers Jemima Wilkinson from her Quaker background and early life in Rhode Island to the onset and expansion of her ministry to her final demise in New York in 1819. Along the way, we learn of the Friend's early ministry and itinerant travels, her growing notoriety and religious leadership, as well as the group's spiritual dynamics, internal conflicts, western migration, and land disputes. But this book is as much about the Friend's followers as its leader. Its chronological focus tracks the group's development and evolution over time from the early days of new converts to the last remnant of the Friend's followers in the 1840s. Each chapter title, taken from the Old Testament, correlates to its topic, e.g., chapter two, on the sect's beginnings and the group's early converts, is called "Numbers." "Exodus," chapter five, discusses the migration of the Universal Friends to central New York, while "Judges," the seventh and final chapter, examines the sect's factionalism, which led to a series of legal battles during the last two decades of Wilkinson's life. Moyer both adds to and expands upon previous scholarship on Jemima Wilkinson by Susan Juster, Catherine Brekus, and Herbert Wiseby. Most notably, Moyer solves the thorny issue of how to refer to Wilkinson the sectarian leader. The author utilizes female pronouns when discussing the Friend's life before her ministry and when providing outsiders' views of Wilkinson; he uses male pronouns to refer to the Public Universal Friend because that was what his followers did and that was how the Friend conceived of his ministerial leadership (I will adopt the same strategy in this essay...

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 Early Midwest in the Atlantic World Robert Michael Morrissey Catherine Cangany, Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 272pp. $45.00. Christian Ayne Crouch, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2014. 250pp. $35.00. David MacDonald, Lives of Fort de Chartres: Commandants, Soldiers, and Civilians in French Illinois, 1720–1770. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 262pp. $28.50. Histories of early America used to presume that the most important aspects of the process of early American development were the things that happened in the New World and that separated the American experience [End Page 142] from the Old World. Over the past two generations, an “Atlantic world turn” in early American studies has challenged this basic understanding in two ways. First, by contextualizing local early American histories in a wider frame, historians have called into question how unique New World experiences actually were, challenging the previously exceptionalist narratives of colonial American history. Secondly, by exploring the important connections and entanglements between early American places and events and their counterparts in the Atlantic basin, historians have demonstrated that certain aspects of early American history simply cannot be understood as local stories but demand to be understood as part of larger processes. As these insights have gained acceptance, historians have revised the basic narrative of early America, tying it to a larger transnational story organized around themes of economy, culture, migration and exchange. Three new books add to our understanding of the Atlantic dimensions of the early American Midwest. In Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany explores the tension between early Detroit’s status as a frontier colony and Atlantic outpost, elucidating the fascinating contours of this distinctive city along the way. In Nobility Lost, Christian Ayne Crouch vividly reconsiders the Seven Years War not simply as a colonial fight, but as a moment when French colonial and metropolitan military cultures came into contact and disagreement, with important results for the future of the French empire. Finally, in Lives of Fort de Chartres, David MacDonald expands the local history of Fort de Chartres in colonial Illinois Country by considering the transnational and cosmopolitan experiences of many of its important personages during the French regime, especially through the institution of the French Navy. Together, these studies shed valuable new light on the early Midwest, even as they remind us that, like early America generally, the Midwest was never just an isolated frontier divorced from the larger story of empires and global processes. In Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany defines an explicitly Atlantic research problem: how was the frontier city of Detroit simultaneously a frontier zone as well as an Atlantic entrepot? Founded in the early 1700s, Detroit began as a fur trade center, a place that was utterly remote from the colonial metropole, but also critically attached to it by its economic purpose. Picking up her history at the end of the fur trade phase and at the beginning of Detroit’s colonization by British and later American entrepreneurs, Cangany investigates how Detroit’s history continued to be defined by its remote situation as well as by its relentless cultural, political, and economic connections [End Page 143] to the wider Atlantic world. Detroit was, Cangany writes, “poised at the intersection of East and West, empire and frontier, core and periphery,” and this defined its history (3). For Cangany, Detroit was defined by important local idiosyncracies—“localisms”—that made it distinctive economically, politically, and culturally. This makes sense, given Detroit’s roots as a refuge for often defiant and self-interested traders, Indians, and later settlers. The dictates and preferences of central authority and empire often meant little to pragmatists on the ground in a place like Detroit, where Europeans with diverse agendas came together with Native people to fashion a hybrid world. At the same time, however, the frontier colony was not independent and its inhabitants wanted many of the economic, political, and cultural benefits that connection to the Atlantic offered. Thus was Detroit’s history centrally shaped by the tension between localisms and the standardizing tendencies of Atlantic world connections. Cangany...

Slavery and the Political Touchstones of a Young Republic Tamika Nunley Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. By Christopher James Bonner. America in the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 254 pages. Cloth, ebook. Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. By Bronwen Everill. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020. 328 pages. Cloth, ebook. Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community. By Vanessa M. Holden. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 182 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire. By Brandon Mills. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 259 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. By Derrick R. Spires. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 352 pages. Cloth, ebook. In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History. By Christopher Tomlins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020. 372 pages. Cloth, ebook. During the past decade, a resurgence of scholarship examining nineteenth-century politics and abolition has broadened to emphasize the actions of the enslaved and the articulations of Black political strategies. Though this literature lies beyond the conventional chronological boundaries of early American and Atlantic history, its robust ideas concerning political resistance and the afterlives of revolutions, as well as its assessments of commercial and cultural currents crossing the Atlantic, should be of considerable interest to scholars of early American history. In particular, recent work on the early nineteenth century using various modes of analysis—including speculation, literary history, and Black radical intellectual traditions—shows the myriad ways that slavery, resistance, and moral reform [End Page 135] shaped early American politics. Both the methods deployed and the historical trajectories uncovered by these scholars should prove generative for early Americanists and Atlanticists in future framings of their inquiries. Above all, recent scholarship has shown the vitality of Black political engagement. In In the Matter of Nat Turner, Christopher Tomlins uses a “speculative” approach, deploying a skillful reading and imagining of the sources, to offer a compelling retelling of Nat Turner’s life, beliefs, and intellect as well as the political significance of his rebellion. Tomlins begins with a treatment of how Turner appears in public memory, literature, and history. This approach allows the reader to think through the origins of the assumptions that shape how historians interpret Turner and the rebellion. For instance, as Tomlins shows, historians C. Vann Woodward and Eugene D. Genovese were influenced by novelist William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner in that they acknowledged the significance of the rebellion but remained largely dismissive of Turner as a credible historical figure and depicted him as a “hate-driven madman” (22).1 Tomlins reads the mediated testimony of Turner’s court deposition as a window into his biblical hermeneutics. He depicts Turner as not a fanatic but as an evangelical Christian who experienced sanctification and daily edification in preparation for holy war and makes the essential intervention of taking the theological interpretations of the enslaved seriously. More specifically, he shifts the focus from the conventional emphasis on Exodus and the Old Testament to the book of Luke in the New Testament. This move—away from drawing parallels between the enslaved and Old Testament Israelites and toward recognizing the self-image of Nat Turner, enslaved rebel, as sacrificial Christ figure—invites a level of analysis and complexity that the field desperately needs to understand the spiritual dimensions of resistance. According to Tomlins, “Turner is living entirely in sacred space and time, beyond Armageddon, his calling—at last clarified—to fight the final battle against Satan” (61). For Tomlins, the profoundly spiritual dimensions of Turner’s vision expose the problems with how scholars usually conceptualize resistance, which typically refers to the range of responses enacted by the enslaved to challenge enslavers and slavery itself, rather than to the epistemological foundations of resistance and their implications for broader debates. As Tomlins shows, responses to Turner even among white Virginians were far...

The Return of the Native:Recent Scholarship in the Literature of Christianization and Contact Phillip H. Round (bio) American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures. Joanna Brooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. vi, 255 pp. Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America. Kristina Bross. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. 257 pp. The Eliot Tracts: With Letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and Richard Baxter. Edited by Michael Clark. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. vii, 452 pp. Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Gordon Sayre. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xxii, 384 pp. The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility. Laura M. Stevens. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 264 pp. Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Hillary Wyss. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. xiii, 207. Attention to native people has ebbed and flowed among students of early American literature, as trends in the broader scholarship emphasized by turns the frontier, the "national character," and American imperialism. But the present interest in Native American culture may be traced to the 1970s, when parallels between America in Southeast Asia and America in Indian Country became nearly inescapable, and—as Gerald Vizenor recalls—the Vietnam War "aroused the nation to remember the inseparable massacres at My Lai, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee" (149). The same period that sawan incredible resurgence in early American literary studies (led by Sacvan Bercovitch's The Puritan Origins of the American Self) also witnessed a reexamination of the "Indian question." While Bercovitch tacitly condemned conformism in American culture by tracing its roots to the hegemonic symbolic and ritual structures of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence (1973), drew direct attention to indigenous peoples' role in American cultural development. Unlike Bercovitch (and Perry Miller before him), Slotkin saw American Indian people as central to "the fatal opposition" that lay at the center of the nation's psyche. "The story of the evolution of an American mythology is," Slotkin wrote, "the story of our too-slow awakening to the significance of the American Indian in the universal scheme of things generally and in our (or his) American world in particular" (17). Over the ensuing thirty years, scholars have awakened. Ethnohistorians like James Axtell set to work examining the reciprocal cultural relations entailed in Native and Euro-American contact, underscoring "the impact the major competing cultures of eastern North America had upon each other" (ix). This trend in the historiography reached its height in 1990, when Richard White published The Middle Ground, a work that forever changed the way American scholars viewed "Indian/White relations." Other historians, like Neal Salisbury and William Simmons, have written sensitive and native-centered accounts of life in the eastern woodlands in [End Page 376] both precontact and postcontact times. Literary scholars, influenced by Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes (Routledge, 1992) and Eric Cheyfitz's The Poetics of Imperialism (Oxford, 1991), began to explore the political dimensions of the narrative constructions from which the previous generation had parsed their "information" about native people in early America. Many found Pratt's description of the discourse of "anticonquest"—the ideological mystification of invasion as disinterested observation—particularly potent. Seeing such texts as Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and Restauration or New Englands First Fruits through "imperial eyes" meant not only re-envisioning colonialism as a discursive practice central to what is known as "early American literature" but also tracing the nuances, the critical political and mercantile purposes for which writing about native peoples was deployed in the early modern period. Viewing contact texts through imperial eyes in turn fostered a fruitful inquiry into the cultural investments of native people who performed in these texts and in texts of their own making. These performances, however filtered by European editors and writers, became recoverable and legible as parts of an emerging set of discourses surrounding colonial resistance. Many of the classic works of early American literary study have now been read to reveal their "point[s] of revolution," where (in Cheyfitz's words) "the colonized began...

Puritans and Pilgrims Christopher Grasso New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration. Early American History. By Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 582 pages. Cloth, ebook. One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginnings of English New England. By Francis J. Bremer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 267 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. By David D. Hall. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019. 525 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The World of Plymouth Plantation. By Carla Gardina Pestana. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. 244 pages. Cloth, ebook. They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty. By John G. Turner. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020. 459 pages. Cloth, ebook. There was a time, a couple of scholarly generations ago, when a certain breed of graduate student in early American history seemed to embrace Giles Corey as their patron saint. Corey had been accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692, but as the sheriff piled stone after stone upon him to force him to plea, Corey merely called for “more weight.”1 Three centuries later, [End Page 121] Corey’s New England Puritans appeared vital to understanding American religious and intellectual history. “Begin with Perry Miller’s two volumes on The New England Mind and work forward,” our mentors said. And as the next dense explication of Puritan theology or a six-hundred-page meditation on the cultural meanings of Plymouth Rock was added to our already long reading lists, like Corey we grinned or grimaced and called for more weight.2 But scholars have ceased to habitually plumb Puritanism for the deep sources of the “American mind” or the “American self.” We have long known how much Max Weber missed when he saw the Puritan strain of Protestantism as the font of “individualism.” We have long recognized that, despite the appropriations of politicians such as Ronald Reagan, John Winthrop’s 1630 invocation of a “city on a hill” was not a prophecy of American exceptionalism. In the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly at the end of the last century, Charles L. Cohen pronounced the end of the Puritan paradigm in early American religious history.3 New England Puritans, once dour giants bestriding American Studies, retreated to the hills and hollows of scholarly subspecialty, occasionally reemerging more fully as denizens of the seventeenth-century British Atlantic world. Perhaps most contemporary Americans only think of grim witch-hunting Puritans on Halloween and buckle-hatted Pilgrims on Thanks-giving, not giving much thought to the connections between the two. But most of the English settlers founding Plymouth were very much part of the larger movement that David D. Hall describes in his synthetic survey, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Hall himself is not much interested in the small Plymouth branch of the much larger Puritan tree. The other volumes under review here, however, each published with an eye toward the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower’s voyage, pay close attention to the significance of the Puritan version of “hot Protestantism” in that colony, even if they come to different conclusions.4 [End Page 122] Hall writes that when he began his doctoral work in 1959, historians of early New England tended to have “colonists unpack the luggage labeled Puritanism and magically turn into ‘founders’ of the America-to-be—founders of a literary tradition or something resembling democracy, and especially founders of a ready-made ‘identity’” (10). He names some of the leading American scholars who introduced the Atlantic turn to their studies of Puritan theology and practice: “Michael McGiffert, E. Brooks Holifield, Baird Tipson, W. G. B. Stoever, Theodore Dwight Bozeman, and Charles Hambrick-Stowe” (10–11) and also “Norman Fiering, Charles Lloyd Cohen, Francis J. Bremer, Richard Cogley, and Stephen Foster” (11). Most would add Hall to this list of luminaries. To an even longer list of British scholars, the name of Patrick Collinson stands out as a major influence. Hall’s early monograph, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the...

Reviewed by: Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding by Hannah Farber Jessica M. Lepler Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding. By Hannah Farber. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 349 pages. Cloth, ebook. If you insure an early American mercantile voyage, make sure to stow some cats on the boat; legend suggests you may need to literally put your "Catts in a bag" (246 n. 9) as evidence that you took the customary feline precaution against rats.1 You will not find this term in your insurance policy, but you will be expected to know it as part of the lex mercatoria—the purportedly universal, unchanging, and unspoken "laws of merchants" (19) that governed trade and maritime risk in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. You, dear reader, will need this tip because, in Hannah Farber's Underwriters of the United States, "you" are a character. This powerful new book about the hidden role of marine insurance in the establishment of the United States begins with a prologue written in the second person that explains how you—in the shape of a fictional, wealthy, white, male, married, Bostonian shipowner of 1800—manage the risk of a round trip to the Caribbean. Sailing the seas during the first half century of U.S. national history meant navigating a world at near-constant war. To insure against wartime spoilation—when a combatant illegally seized neutral ships and cargo—as well as more predictable damage (like that caused by rats), merchants pooled the risk of their community's voyages, gathered information, and signed contracts securing each other's assets. The process could be called "underwriting" (13), a term that also meant supporting an undertaking. The people and companies who underwrote the seafaring risk of American merchants—a group Farber describes as "marine insurers" (13)—are the subject of Farber's study. Despite a few intriguing case studies of famous (or infamous) insurers such as the revolutionary "financier" (14) Robert Morris or the scandal-prone Jacob Barker and his associates, however, this is not really a history of individuals or their companies.2 Farber's book, in her terms, is [End Page 467] about "a practice, not a class" (22), and prioritizes questions of "how" over "why" or "who." The practice that most interests Farber includes the range of techniques insurers used to engage in an unusual kind of "regulatory capture" (22) in which the industry predated the polity. For centuries, insurers acted within, beyond, and around the laws of countries to enforce the lex mercatoria's control over maritime trade. In the Age of Revolutions, when the sovereignty and stability of states were up in the air, the governmental role of insurers became especially apparent because insurers' governance of the seas was often more solid than the laws of the land. Shifting their practices to accommodate changing contexts, insurers employed the tools of their trade "opportunistically" (21) to assist in ushering the new United States into existence and solidifying its sovereignty. Accordingly, Farber describes the development of both the U.S. maritime insurance industry and the nation state as a "process of coformation" (22). Farber couples this big-picture analysis of "state making" (21) with the investigation of the everyday practices that constituted the early American insurance business. For example, she considers how insurers "wielded numerical calculations as weapons" (24). The mere suggestion that insurers' rates were based on complicated mathematics could convince customers and concerned citizens not "to question their decisions" (25). Appearing to be objectively actuarial, insurers could hide profit motives and political interests behind their seemingly mundane practices of quantification. This kind of everyday insurance practice is immediately foregrounded by Farber's second-person prologue. These first eleven pages also establish the purpose of the book for two different sets of readers of early American financial history. For one, the prologue explains the complex maritime insurance industry in a format accessible enough to be assigned to undergraduates. Meanwhile, for those immersed in the field, the book's opening section positions Underwriters of...

Reviewed by: Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic ed. by Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, David J. Silverman Alan Tully Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic. Edited by Ignacio Gallup-diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 320pp. $55.00 (cloth). In April 2013 the McNeil Center of Early American Studies hosted a short conference in celebration of John M. Murrin, longtime faculty member, now emeritus, of Princeton University’s History Department and stalwart supporter of the McNeil Center since its inception as the Philadelphia Center in 1978. Former students of Murrin fittingly focused the program and the resulting Anglicizing America volume of essays around the theme that both informed and served as a spring-board [End Page 350] for much of his scholarship dating from his 1966 Yale doctoral dissertation, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts”—sometimes referred to as the most cited and influential unpublished dissertation dealing with early American history. For Murrin, what he called “Anglicization” was that process by which diverse English colonies in North America, from the late seventeenth century through the immediate pre-Revolutionary years became “increasingly more alike, expressing a shared Britishness in their political and judicial systems, material culture, economies, religious systems and engagement with empire” (p.1). This sweeping Anglicization, he argued, gave coherence and direction to early American history, which with various mutations continued through the Revolution and on into the early decades of national history. John Murrin’s intellectual accomplishments are certainly worthy of celebration. For the last four decades of the twentieth century, his has been one of the truly worthwhile voices reflecting on the history of early America. When Murrin spoke out at conferences and colloquia, and in the sixty-odd articles and the textbook synthesis he wrote, he was always worth listening to. Over the years, he mastered a great deal of the raw archival material of early American history, confronted, interpreted, and built upon a superb knowledge of an increasingly rich historical literature, and generously shared wonderful turns of imagination and originality that could instigate debate and inspire, animate, and challenge others to stretch their reach. He took some delight in shaking both peers and students out of the comfort of familiar narratives. It is in this spirit that some of Murrin’s students have authored essays in this collection. The editors articulate their collective desire to take their mentor’s Anglicization insights beyond mainland colonial America, where Murrin had built his case, forward in time within the national American narrative, as well as more widely into both the multi-empired, diversely colonized, and ethnically and racially complex Atlantic World, and the intersecting American borderlands that evinced a multitude of Native American practices and perspectives. This, however, is not easily done. Once we extend the Anglicization conceptualization in time and space, the framework can easily become either so elastic as to lose its sharpness and salience or so rigid that it fails to acknowledge truly important developments or dimensions that are an inescapable part of the larger canvasses. The strongest parts of this collection are, with two exceptions, in the first part of the book. Murrin’s own introductory essay from 1974 is, as so many of his essays are, concise and clearly articulated, with a through-line emphasizing how Anglicization became a dominant shared [End Page 351] characteristic of the still diverse but maturing mainland North American colonies that lasted into the Revolution and beyond. Andrew Shankman builds on this piece with a valuable synthesis of more recent scholarship that thoroughly demonstrates the continuing relevance of Murrin’s insight. Thereafter, however, because the Anglicization framework is simply not the most fruitful way of framing the issues they choose to explore, even the best essays lose some of their punch. For example, Geoffrey Plank’s essay on early American warfare, which is both edifying and provocative, really juxtaposes North American military practices with those of Europe. The strut of eighteenth-century colonial militia officers may have been British, but the evolution of practices of warfare belong within a broader conceptual framework that at the very least substitutes “Europeanization” for “Anglicization.” As he has done elsewhere, Simon Newman adds...

IntroductionThe Global Turn and Early American Studies Mary Eyring, Christopher Hodson, and Matthew Mason On a crisp afternoon in January 2016, a minivan full of early Americanists turned onto Park City, Utah's traffic-choked Main Street and into the flow of global history. From the late nineteenth century until the Great Depression, the street played host to thousands of miners, many of them immigrants from eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and China, whose labor pulled tons of silver ore from beneath the Wasatch Mountains into the world economy. After flirting with ghost-town status after World War II, Park City became a winter sports mecca in the 1960s, and Main Street's saloons were turned into cosmopolitan après-ski spots. Today the narrow thoroughfare is best known as the home of the Sundance International Film Festival, an event that brings upwards of $80,000,000 and crowds of globe-trotting tourists to Park City—and into whose opening festivities the early Americanists had unwittingly driven. As the minivan crept on, past the premiere of Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation, past various beautiful people (Adam Scott from Parks and Recreation proving a particular favorite), the fruits of globalization were on full and seductive display: prosperity, consumer bounty, and multicultural sociability ruled the day. And then everything changed. As we write the introduction to these four essays, all of which the authors presented (after their inadvertent jaunt through Sundance) at a conference sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Seminar in Early American History, the foundations of modern globalism have [End Page 1] come under attack. In June 2016 Great Britain voted itself out of the European Union, with the "leave" campaign leaning hard on antiglobalist rhetoric. Donald Trump won that November's presidential election in the United States by railing against free trade, immigration, the United Nations, and anything else that smacked of the global order that had, he claimed, saddled American workers—Rust Belt whites especially—with "poverty and heartache."1 Like the thriving nationalist movements of continental Europe, these campaigns trafficked in strikingly xenophobic rhetoric and attracted and emboldened racial nationalists. Yet these British and American cases also fit into a long, complex genealogy of populist antiglobalism born of cultural and economic dislocation: a family tree whose branches stretch from Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines to post-Soviet Russia to revolutionary Iran.2 Where it all ends, no one knows. But in the age of Brexit and Trumpism, probing the history of global integration and its discontents suddenly seems more pressing than ever. Great shocks, after all, often produce great insights. Over the past two decades, for instance, the stark reality of anthropogenic climate change has driven scholars to reconsider the place of environmental transformations in early American history and literature.3 Perhaps, then, the recent hammer blows to the neoliberal world order can spur early Americanists to more—and more critical—engagement with what has come to be known as the "global turn." Scholars began taking this turn in the heady 1990s, an age defined by the border-shattering collapse of the Soviet bloc, the market seeking of multinational corporations, and the early days of the World Wide Web. Marrying the expansive geographical frames of world history and subaltern literary studies to a series of unifying concepts—connection, cosmopolitanism, flows, and (especially) integration chief among them—they sought to dismantle national narratives by reconstructing a global past that, in many respects, seemed to foreground their global present. Like the more modest but closely related "Atlantic turn," the global turn found plenty of boosters, [End Page 2] forcing even those scholars who clung to well-worn methodological paths to reckon at least with the rhetoric, if not the substance, of "planetarity."4 To be sure, the odd naysayer did crop up. In their rush to describe a "single system of connection," writes the historian Frederick Cooper, globalists too often neglected the "limits of the connecting mechanisms," allowing their "totalizing pretensions" to artificially flatten a global landscape pockmarked by a patchy distribution of power, resources, and intellectual capital.5 Such critiques, however, gained only so much purchase. With parochialism now a byword, the global turn promised not only relevance...

Cultural Formations in Colonial North America and the Early National United States Jeffrey H. Richards Jason Shaffer , Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Pp. 230.$45.00. Cynthia A. Kierner , The Contrast: Manners, Morals, and Authority in the Early American Republic (New York: New York University Press, 2007). Pp. x, 145. $60.00. Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan , Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Pp. xiv, 239. $59.95. Bryan Waterman , Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Pp. xv, 318. $55.00. The establishment of an intellectual and artistic culture in the British colonies of North America and postwar new republic of the United States has been the subject, in constituent parts, of a number of studies in the last decade, the books under review among them. Scholars have long found the American Revolution a rich source of historical interest; more recently, the 1790s have drawn the attention of cultural historians. Together, the period from 1750 to 1800 constitutes not merely the founding of the British American polity but also a period of cultural experimentation that laid the grounds for future cultural developments. But in many ways, these periods, for the past and recent investigation, still remain not fully known. And if none of the books being considered here shocks with surprising revelations, each in its own way offers up information and insights into sometimes familiar, sometimes obscure situations and personages that in the accumulation urge scholars of the American eighteenth century to explain in even greater detail what this confusing, radical, reactionary, sanguinary, exhilarating half-century was truly about. [End Page 462] One difficulty facing all scholars of the period is determining what constitutes an American culture. Neither the Stamp Act riots, nor the Boston Massacre, the Declaration of Independence, nor even the inauguration of George Washington as the first president under the new constitution specifically delimits the beginning of an intellectual and artistic heritage that can be claimed to be specifically American. The long shadow of colonialism extended well past these signpost events, past Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, Edwin Forrest and Margaret Fuller, at least into the 1860s, when an aging Nathaniel Hawthorne struggled with three incomplete novels about Americans recovering an English past, and thus, a vestigial British identity. Nevertheless, writers, artists, actors, and orators on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that the North American colonies were not Great Britain, as much as some colonials tried to emulate English squires and at certain moments declared the differences to be stark and clear. The truth is, however, that colonials-turned-citizens of the United States often wanted it both ways, an identity that declared the specificity of residence in the New World within a broader framework of transatlantic circulation and exchange. Americanness could be performed, it seemed, as a way of trying out certain attitudes and behaviors—republican simplicity and restraint, for instance—and as a playacting upon the theater of the world, where individuals and nations postured and gestured for places on the macrocosmic stage before global audiences. That consciousness of acting before the eyes of the world had a long history in colonial North America, but as Jason Shaffer reiterates in his fine new study, Performing Patriotism, it became especially acute during the long Revolutionary period when professional theater itself found a place in the colonial landscape. For Shaffer, the linkage of the political and theatrical generates expression of a rising American nationalism within the context of an imported cultural frame. As he points out, the "appropriations of texts, both theatrical and polemical, helped to generate an American nationalism that used British culture against itself, invoking both the cultural affinity between the two nations and their irreconcilable political differences" (7). In Shaffer's view, a touchstone play like Joseph Addison's Cato, long known as a Washington favorite, carries with it complex associations and registers of political position when transplanted to a New World setting and...

Reviewed by: Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America ed. by Paul Musselwhite et al. Philip Misevich (bio) Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America paul musselwhite, peter c. mancall, james horn, editors Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019 336 pp. Colonial Virginia holds a special place in the history of the United States and the popular imagination of most Americans. Its foundation [End Page 295] rests on two well-known pillars that would seem, at least on the surface, to contradict each other. The General Assembly, the first representative self-governing body in the Americas, illustrates a particular spirit of participatory democracy that animated the colony's early history, at least in comparison to other seventeenth-century settings. The exploitation of enslaved Africans and their descendants, on the other hand, exposes the brutality and depth of unfreedom that equally defined the character of the settlement. That the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, the same year the Assembly was established, makes early Virginia a particularly rich environment to probe the interconnected histories of slavery and freedom and consider how they shaped colonialism in the English Atlantic world. Growing out of a conference that Dartmouth College hosted in 2017, the essays in the volume under review, written by senior and junior scholars, require readers to rethink central themes in colonial American history. They collectively reveal how slavery and freedom were born together, and not by accident. The volume interrogates ideas—about people, gender, space, race, work, community, and the environment—that influenced English perceptions of the Americas and describes the practices that both fueled and disrupted colonists' often-utopian visions of the "New World." Many contributors stick closely to the title's narrow spatial and temporal boundaries; others are more wide ranging in their coverage. The thirteen chapters are not formally organized into larger parts or sections, but they can be loosely grouped according to shared themes. The editors use the introduction to reflect on the meaning of 1619, whose significance, they note, "lies in the extraordinary conjunction of events that ultimately gave definition to the English colonial project and shaped American society for centuries to come" (9). While they acknowledge the uncertainty and messiness that were such prominent realities of colonial decision-making, what emerged in Virginia, they assert, was no mere "jumble of tragic coincidences, but the interweaving of ideology, pragmatic experience, and international rivalries" that "fed into, and were shaped by, local contingencies in Virginia and elsewhere around the Atlantic rim" (12). Situating the colony in such diverse contexts is a complex task that is particularly well suited to an edited collection. Contributions by Peter C. Mancall, Lauren Working, and Nicholas Canny assess, to varying degrees, pre-1619 ideas about Virginia, targeting its natural world, Indigenous inhabitants, and prospects for settlement. In [End Page 296] the wake of England's flailing early efforts to establish a permanent foothold in the Americas, advocates for continued colonial expansion sought novel ways to drum up financial and moral support for their cause. Man-call describes how a simple picture that the younger Richard Hakluyt, one of England's great collectors of information about the wider world, gave to the naturalist Edward Topsell took on new meaning in this context. The gift, an image of a "virginia bird," represented one of the many foreign and exotic objects of which Europeans tried to make sense. Something so seemingly mundane as the discovery of a new bird, plant, or other unknown commodity, Mancall suggests, could transform the calculus of colonization. Working's chapter also considers how the English made sense of the Americas, focusing on English-Powhatan encounters and their impact on English political culture. That Europeans characterized as "savage" the Indigenous American societies they encountered is well documented; Working notes, however, that such perceptions provoked larger concerns in London about the shortcomings of the English settlers who inhabited the colony, too. Knowledge about Virginia filtered back into Europe and gave birth to new discourse informed by English ideas about developments in the colony. Canny adds a comparative perspective. While they had prominent differences...