Sarah Winnemucca, Translation, and US Colonialism and Imperialism

Th e complex, oft en troubled relationship between American Indians and whites has played out numerous times on the national stage of Washington, DC, not only in theaters that have showed performances like Pocahontas, or Th e Settlers of Virginia: A National Drama in 1836 but in the hosting of Native American delegations since the creation of the United States.1 In January 1880 Northern Paiute activist Sarah Winnemucca accompanied her father, her brother Natches, an unidentifi ed young relative, and the Washo leader known as Captain Jim to DC (see fi g. 1). She and the others were invited in large part because of a petition she had sent to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz criticizing William Rinehart, the Malheur Reservation agent who would become Winnemucca’s ardent enemy. Th e Northern Paiutes who had been invited to DC by the US government had not been formally elected to represent their nation; Northern Paiute society traditionally consisted of bands, each with a headman, so that little centralized governance existed. Winnemucca’s father had come to be known by whites as Chief Winnemucca, a refl ection more of nonNatives’ attempts to locate authority in a single fi gure rather than an accurate depiction of his stature among Northern Paiutes. At least since Sarah Winnemucca’s grandfather, known as Truckee, had welcomed white settlers to the area, the family had enjoyed a certain political power in relation to white society. Th e delegation went to the US capital in hopes of restoring Northern Paiutes to the Malheur Reservation in Oregon, where they had initially enjoyed comparatively good treatment by agent Samuel Parrish. In early 1879, however, following the Bannock War, residents of the Malheur Reservation had been forcibly removed to Yakima (now spelled Yakama) Reservation in Washington Territory, a 350mile journey that took a number of lives.

Playing the Indian Princess?:Sarah Winnemucca's Newspaper Career and Performance of American Indian Identities Carolyn Sorisio (bio) On May 2, 1883, the Northern Paiute educator, translator, author, and activist Sarah Winnemucca lectured at Boston's Hotel Winthrop, declaring: I can tell you how few of the Government supplies reach the Indians; how one little blanket was provided to shelter a family of six from the cold; how three blankets were supposed to be enough for fifteen Indians, when each of them should by right have had one; how, indeed they often have to buy the very supplies that the Government has promised to give them in exchange for their land. I have asked the agents why they did these wrong things. They have told me it was necessary for them to do so in order to get money enough to send to the Great Father at Washington to keep their position. I assure you that there is an Indian ring; that it is a corrupt ring, and that it has its head and shoulders in the treasury at Washington. ("Princess Winnemucca on the Treatment of Indians") Winnemucca had been lecturing for two months at the start of a northeastern lecture tour, speaking on behalf of "all the Indians who [were] afflicted with that terrible pest—the Indian Agent" ("Indian Agents"). Winnemucca commented that most people did not "know much about Indians," and thus many of her lectures promoted cultural as well as political awareness. Her immediate goals were to secure land rights for Northern Paiutes and to persuade the US government [End Page 1] to allow for the return of Northern Paiutes who had been unjustly removed to Yakima, Washington, after the Bannock War. She told audiences: I want to test the right of the Government to make and break treaties at pleasure. They gave my people that place of land, and I want to ask whether it is legal for them to sell it or not. And in this work I want your help. Will you give me your influence? My work must be done through Congress. Talk for me and help me talk, and all will be well. ("Appeal for Justice") To these ends, by fall 1883, Winnemucca published the book for which she is best known today, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims.1 Winnemucca's increased prominence—resulting from the news media's coverage of her lectures and book and assisted by the indefatigable promotional efforts of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody—earned her access to many influential reformers and politicians. By spring 1884, she testified before the US House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs. When she returned to Nevada, funds donated by eastern reformers allowed her to challenge US boarding school and English-only policies. Winnemucca's campaign would have been much harder, if not impossible, had she failed to garner newspaper coverage. In an age when American newspapers reported on US-Indian Relations in a sporadic and biased manner, Winnemucca produced sustained, specific, and often sympathetic coverage. She was well aware of newspapers' power, as demonstrated by the more than four hundred newspaper items by or about Winnemucca from her first public appearance in 1864 to her death in 1891 that form the basis of this essay. As the first section of this essay details, Winnemucca understood that newspapers had the power to shape public opinion locally and nationally. She struggled—and was often able—to control newspaper representations about herself, Northern Paiutes, and American Indians. Creating and controlling news coverage was key to her political strategy; she recognized that newspapers were sites wherein resistance had to take place. She was politically astute and rhetorically sophisticated, a savvy negotiator of the news media. [End Page 2] Yet the critical stories we hear most about Winnemucca's lecture in the Hotel Winthrop that May evening and in general emphasize not her media savvy but rather her performance as an Indian princess. Certainly, on that night and on other occasions, she presented herself as such. For example, the Evening Transcript reported: The princess . . . was richly and fantastically attired, her dress of buckskin, short-sleeved and of moderate length, being trimmed with an abundance of sparkling beads...

Playing the Indian Princess?:Sarah Winnemucca's Newspaper Career and Performance of American Indian Identities Carolyn Sorisio (bio) On May 2, 1883, the Northern Paiute educator, translator, author, and activist Sarah Winnemucca lectured at Boston's Hotel Winthrop, declaring: I can tell you how few of the Government supplies reach the Indians; how one little blanket was provided to shelter a family of six from the cold; how three blankets were supposed to be enough for fifteen Indians, when each of them should by right have had one; how, indeed they often have to buy the very supplies that the Government has promised to give them in exchange for their land. I have asked the agents why they did these wrong things. They have told me it was necessary for them to do so in order to get money enough to send to the Great Father at Washington to keep their position. I assure you that there is an Indian ring; that it is a corrupt ring, and that it has its head and shoulders in the treasury at Washington. ("Princess Winnemucca on the Treatment of Indians") Winnemucca had been lecturing for two months at the start of a northeastern lecture tour, speaking on behalf of "all the Indians who [were] afflicted with that terrible pest—the Indian Agent" ("Indian Agents"). Winnemucca commented that most people did not "know much about Indians," and thus many of her lectures promoted cultural as well as political awareness. Her immediate goals were to secure land rights for Northern Paiutes and to persuade the US government [End Page 1] to allow for the return of Northern Paiutes who had been unjustly removed to Yakima, Washington, after the Bannock War. She told audiences: I want to test the right of the Government to make and break treaties at pleasure. They gave my people that place of land, and I want to ask whether it is legal for them to sell it or not. And in this work I want your help. Will you give me your influence? My work must be done through Congress. Talk for me and help me talk, and all will be well. ("Appeal for Justice") To these ends, by fall 1883, Winnemucca published the book for which she is best known today, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims.1 Winnemucca's increased prominence—resulting from the news media's coverage of her lectures and book and assisted by the indefatigable promotional efforts of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody—earned her access to many influential reformers and politicians. By spring 1884, she testified before the US House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs. When she returned to Nevada, funds donated by eastern reformers allowed her to challenge US boarding school and English-only policies. Winnemucca's campaign would have been much harder, if not impossible, had she failed to garner newspaper coverage. In an age when American newspapers reported on US-Indian Relations in a sporadic and biased manner, Winnemucca produced sustained, specific, and often sympathetic coverage. She was well aware of newspapers' power, as demonstrated by the more than four hundred newspaper items by or about Winnemucca from her first public appearance in 1864 to her death in 1891 that form the basis of this essay. As the first section of this essay details, Winnemucca understood that newspapers had the power to shape public opinion locally and nationally. She struggled—and was often able—to control newspaper representations about herself, Northern Paiutes, and American Indians. Creating and controlling news coverage was key to her political strategy; she recognized that newspapers were sites wherein resistance had to take place. She was politically astute and rhetorically sophisticated, a savvy negotiator of the news media. [End Page 2] Yet the critical stories we hear most about Winnemucca's lecture in the Hotel Winthrop that May evening and in general emphasize not her media savvy but rather her performance as an Indian princess. Certainly, on that night and on other occasions, she presented herself as such. For example, the Evening Transcript reported: The princess . . . was richly and fantastically attired, her dress of buckskin, short-sleeved and of moderate length, being trimmed with an abundance of sparkling beads...

Cari M. Carpenter and Carolyn Sorisio The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkin's Campaign for American Rights, 1864-1891. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 329 pp.Newspapers have been an often underutilized source when recounting our frontier history. Official government reports provide general information, and diaries can provide personal insight. However, newspapers provide an unmatched daily or weekly record of events written by trained observers and crafted by some of the best writers of their day. Personal and cultural bias flourished in these newspapers, but they accurately reflected cultural opinions and mores of their time and place and provide us with rich insight.Carpenter and Sorisio's The Newspaper Warrior focuses on a nearly forgotten cultural activist, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. She is a truly remarkable figure. In a time when women were expected to stay in the background, Winnemucca Hopkins took center stage. She advocated for her Paiute nation and for all Native Americans. Her race and gender denied her access to most careers, to public office, and even the right to vote. Her ability to communicate, both verbally and through the written word, transcended those obstacles. Her skill and talent brought her to the attention of policy makers like Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes and helped her to influence far reaching legislation.Born in 1844 in what is now the state of Nevada, Sarah Winnemucca had to straddle two worlds: the traditional world of her ancestors and the new world of the encroaching White civilization. Almost two thirds of the Paiutes perished, through disease or war, during the first few decades of contacts with the Whites. Sarah was sent to live with a White family to be educated when she was 13. She became fluent in English, Spanish, and three native languages. In 1865, when Sarah was 21, her mother, baby brother, and other relatives were killed in the Mud Lake Massacre. Despite all of the cultural and personal losses, Sarah Winnemucca's family still favored peace and reconciliation with the Whites.She and her family began to perform in amateur theatricals in towns across the West in the mid-1860s. Their show was advertised as an authentic example of Indian life. It was merely a pantomime of what the White audience expected complete with feather headdresses and stereotypical clothing. They once even re-enacted the Pocahontas legend. Sarah Winnemucca used these stage appearances to plead for her people and their plight. Eventually she parleyed her stage reputation into a literary reputation.In a letter to then Commissioner, Ely Samuel Parker, she called for humane treatment of Native Americans. This launched her journalism career and she was soon writing editorials for newspapers across the country as well as giving lectures to packed houses.In 1878, Sarah Winnemucca served as a translator, guide, and scout for the Army during the short-lived Bannock War. Some northern Paiutes were removed 350 miles away from their homeland allegedly because of their role in the war. Nearly 20% of those removed perished during the trip. Sarah Winnemucca protested in public forums and eventually got the Government to investigate. She met with President Rutherford B. …

At first glance, Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago (1887) shares little in common with Sarah Winnemucca’s Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). The first work is a novel set in Cuba, featuring a New England heroine who observes both the horrors of slavery and a doomed romance between the beautiful title character and a wealthy planter’s son. In many ways, it is a sort of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), relocated to a more tropical environment and published about thirty years too late to make much of a splash. 1 The second work is the increasingly well-known autobiography of the Northern Paiute leader who served as interpreter between some American Indians and the encroaching and duplicitous government. 2 Hailed by critics today as the remarkable achievement of a female cultural broker, Winnemucca’s text has found a place of prominence in the growing Native American canon. There is, though, a clear connection between these two very different books: their authors. Mann served as editor of Winnemucca’s text, writing a preface, providing footnotes, assembling an enormous appendix of testimonials, and attaching a petition. Moreover, Winnemucca influenced Juanita, a text Mann only completed after her collaboration on Life among the Piutes. Winnemucca and Mann’s relationship surpasses that of editor and writer. In fact, their relationship was a model of productive, mutually beneficial, and mutually enriching collaboration between writers of different ethnicities. Just as Winnemucca and Mann both consciously shape Life among the Piutes to make its author and the Northern Paiute cause acceptable and important to white readers, so too does Winnemucca influence Mann’s worldview, stretching over to Juanita, where Mann echoes Life’s ethnographic scope and Winnemucca’s belief that white society has much to learn from oppressed peoples. 3 Finally, in their shared call for female leadership of reform movements, both writers invite their women readers to join the causes of equality and justice. While each writer had previously invoked ideas of such female-centered reform, it is only through their collaboration that they are able to imagine more fully those leaders stepping forward. In other words, each woman benefits from what the other brings to the collaboration, including an appreciative understanding of ethnic differences, and together they create something that would not have existed had they acted alone. There is a long history of critical commentary on relationships between Native authors and white editors, including

In her role as “the Piute Princess,” both onstage and in local and national political theaters, Sarah Winnemucca would present herself as the first feminine leader of the diverse bands of the Northern Paiutes. Sarah Winnemucca’s self-fashioning as a Paiute leader, language translator, military negotiator, political mediator, stage performer, literary author, and educator is well known, and yet she is rarely acknowledged for the extraordinary diversity of her different roles. "Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims" (1883) is far more than simply an appeal for political recognition of and economic aid to the Northern Paiutes; the book legitimates Sarah Winnemucca’s authority to speak both for her tribal community and to U.S. federal leaders. Yet in fabricating a “nation” from the scattered bands of the Northern Paiutes and in her own role as their hereditary leader, Sarah Winnemucca exemplifies a central problem of transnationalism and its study in the national period. By constituting her own community as a nation, which might negotiate with the U.S. government and military, she helps legitimate national values, including legal and property rights that would have devastating consequences for Indigenous people under the provisions of the Dawes Act (1887).

Americans are debating what it would take to redeem the Constitution’s promise of a “more Perfect Union” in a time of deep and stark disagreements about the nation’s future. Despite the partisan rancor, most Americans share a faith in the Constitution’s redemptive potential. Constitutional faith is the civic religion that shapes our constitutional law, theory, and politics and binds Americans as one nation, indivisible. This Essay is about something our faith forgets: The promise of a “more Perfect Union” of “We the People” is not redemptive for colonized peoples who did not consent to the Constitution but are subject to American power. It makes three contributions to constitutional law and theory by focusing upon the United States’ colonial relationships with American Indians and Alaska Natives. First, this Essay makes the case that American colonialism poses a fundamental challenge to our constitutional faith. It traces the convergence of American constitutionalism and American colonialism in the concept of government power as a public trust, which is the foundation of federal plenary power over American Indians and Alaska Natives. Second, this Essay argues that the trust conception of constitutional law cannot solve the problem of redeeming American colonialism. Instead, the constitutional trust has reinforced the very power relations and ideology that Indian Nations challenge when they claim a right to national self-determination. Third, this Essay offers a viable alternative for redressing the wrongs of American colonialism by revisiting the problem of redemption from a relational perspective, one that does not focus upon Indian Nations’ dependence upon the United States. In comparing trust with contract to develop this relational perspective, this Essay contributes to the emerging literature that reimagines constitutional law by reference to existing rules and norms from the common law.

Archival Sovereignty in LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings:An Indian Baseball Story Emily Lederman (bio) Ezol smoothes the hem of her dress. "Documents lie," she says casually. —Miko Kings 28 Contemporary American Indian texts engage with the materials of colonial US archives to highlight their complicity in the genocide and oppression of Indigenous peoples. Archival practices of documentation, including missionary records, the mapping of land, and the collecting or theft of artifacts and stories, are revealed as tools of settler colonialism mobilized to justify genocidal state practices. Yet these colonial archival materials may also serve as entry points to tribally specific histories. Since American Indians are both silenced and hypervisible within the colonial archive, working with the colonial archive's misrepresentations is an important part of destabilizing that archive. Well-read authors of the Native American Literary Renaissance, including N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), confront the limitations of the colonial archive and emphasize Indigenous modes of accessing, organizing, and preserving histories in their fictional texts. Contemporary American Indian novels continue to chart the violences of US colonial archives and offer a way out of a narrow historical lens. These novels open up historical possibilities and deepen historical understanding in part by repurposing colonial archival documents within Indigenous narratives and epistemologies. I focus on LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007) in this article because the text explicitly theorizes and models the construction of a decolonial archive using real and fictionalized documents. [End Page 64] Placing work of the interdisciplinary "archival turn" in conversation with the tribally specific, I call collections of document, story, object, and ephemera "archives" throughout this article in order to legitimize them as sources of historical knowledge and sites of knowledge production. Such collections are uniquely powerful because they occur outside of institutions; as feminist and queer archivists have demonstrated, calling personal collections and ephemera "archives" "remains a powerful authorizing act" (Eichhorn 15). Decolonial archives are mediums for preserving and accessing history that privilege Indigenous epistemologies and deauthorize the written document as the definitive record of what has past. The devaluation of American Indian forms of archiving was integral to the colonial project; as Diana Taylor has explained, "[P]art of the colonizing project throughout the Americas consisted in discrediting autochthonous ways of preserving and communicating historical understanding" (34). Therefore, to decolonize the archive requires both revealing the destructive nature of the colonial archive that continues to be employed to justify state violence (such as land and resource acquisition and a militarized US-Mexico border) and privileging Indigenous modes of preserving and accessing historical knowledge. Decolonial archives both enact Indigenous epistemologies and dismantle a narrow colonial historical lens characterized by Manifest Destiny and the erasure of Indigenous cultures and political systems. Formed outside of institutions, they redefine archival possibilities. The intentional inclusion of Indigenous narratives and epistemologies within institutions can also produce decolonial archives.1 My focus here is how literature creates decolonial archives by positioning the US colonial record within an Indigenous frame. Revealing the constructed nature of colonial historical narratives, American Indian contemporary texts tell tribally specific histories with the help of materials from the colonial archive. Both decentering and repurposing the materials of the colonial archive is a decolonizing archival practice, an act of what I call "archival sovereignty." Archival sovereignty is achieved in literature that takes control of both Indigenous histories and the colonial historical record. In addition to providing an alternative Indigenous archive, these texts decolonize the archive by intimately engaging with the colonial record. I choose the term "sovereignty" because of the work it does in marking the complex politics [End Page 65] of tribal struggles for self-determination within the context of US colonialism. Sovereignty points both to a history of tribal autonomy longer than the colonial gaze and to the necessity of working across borders, including with European American structures of power.2 I follow Jace Weaver's (Cherokee) formulation of sovereignty as both useful within colonial power structures and independent of their powers of bestowal. The archives I describe in this article are at once autonomous and in negotiation with the colonial archive. My use...

From the early 1920s through the mid-1950s the Partido Nacionalista Puertorriqueño (PNPR; Puerto Rican Nationalist Party) led the fight for an independent Puerto Rico. The PNPR began in 1922, when a group of middle-class men broke with the Partido Unión (Union Party) after it removed independence from its platform. During the 1920s the PNPR sought to defend Puerto Rican culture, advance its goal of achieving national sovereignty, and, simultaneously, maintain friendly relations with the United States. The PNPR promoted Puerto Rico’s reinsertion into Latin America. Puerto Rico shared a history, language, faith (Catholicism), and culture with the former Spanish colonies throughout the Americas. By emphasizing these similarities, the Nationalists hoped to encourage Puerto Ricans’ embrace of their Hispanic heritage and rejection of US rule. The Nationalists also understood that Puerto Rico needed the support of its “sister republics” across the Americas. To generate solidarity with their goals, the PNPR sent the party’s vice president, Pedro Albizu Campos, on a tour of Latin America from 1927 to 1930. In 1930 the PNPR elected Albizu Campos as its president. Under his leadership, the party adopted a more confrontational stance toward Washington. It also worked to broaden its base by forming various organizations for young men and women. The PNPR succeeded in attracting members from multiple classes, genders, and races. The party also established branches in New York City, the site of the largest diasporic Puerto Rican community in the United States. Public support of the Nationalist Party was highest during the 1930s, when soaring unemployment, low pay, and increased poverty caused by the Depression heightened many Puerto Ricans’ disappointment with US rule. Growing dissatisfaction with US colonialism and approval of the Nationalists convinced the US government to increase repressive measures against the pro-independence party. In 1937, Puerto Rican police, acting under the orders of the US-appointed governor, fired on peaceful Nationalist Party marchers, killing nineteen and wounding close to two hundred. The US government also imprisoned Nationalist Party leaders in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary between 1937 and 1943. During the 1940s and 1950s, support for the Nationalists declined. Luis Muñoz Marín, leader of the Popular Democratic Party, worked with the US government to ostensibly end US colonial rule in Puerto Rico through the archipelago’s transition to the status of Free Associated State. To alert the world that Puerto Rico remained a US colony, the PNPR launched an unsuccessful insurrection in Puerto Rico in 1950 and attempted to assassinate President Truman in Washington, DC. In 1954, four Nationalists attacked the US Congress to denounce US colonialism in Puerto Rico once again. Although the party still exists today, its adherents and influence are a shadow of what they were.

How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800. By Jonathan Scott. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 392. $35.00 hardcover, $16.99 Kindle).To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe. By Matthew Lockwood. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 506. $30.00 hardcover, $15.71 Kindle).WHEN future historians write the history of our own time, a major theme, it seems safe to say, will be the awareness that we live in a moment of disruption on a planetary scale. Exactly what the historians of tomorrow make of that fact is hard to say. As Jonathan Scott and Matthew Lockwood argue in the books under review here, two things seems clear. The disruptions of the twenty-first century did not begin yesterday, and the North American colonies that became the United States are an important part of the story.As the long title of How the Old World Ended suggests, Scott's focus is the early modern Netherlands and England, with North America playing an increasingly important role as the eighteenth century progressed. It was here, Scott maintains, in what he calls the “water world” of the North Sea and its Atlantic periphery, that Europeans first liberated themselves from the “production and demographic limits of pre-industrial agriculture” (3, 37). Key to this transformation was a shared Anglo-Dutch culture of commercial, agricultural, and industrial innovation, which allowed the two western European powers to feed populations far in excess of what their own farmers had been able to produce during the Middle Ages. Access to water mattered too, giving Dutch and English merchants, producers, and consumers the ability to buy and sell goods in markets elsewhere in Europe and, eventually, across the Atlantic and around the world. By the sixteenth century, the Dutch had already escaped the “Malthusian trap of finite resources,” and the English were not far behind (37).In the second of the book's three parts, Scott turns to the Calvinist-dominated Protestantism that England, Scotland, and the Netherlands all had in common. From the late sixteenth century, that shared culture opened the way for innovators in each country to exchange ideas in politics, theology, science, agriculture, manufacturing, banking, and commerce, sometimes doing so competitively but often acting in concert. During the second half of the seventeenth century, entanglements between the two powers triggered the Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674. As Scott correctly notes, all three were in important respects civil wars. Of even greater moment, in what Scott labels the Anglo-Dutch Revolution of 1649–1702, the same ties produced two political unions: the federated Anglo-Dutch Republic of 1649 to 1653 and the personal union that accompanied the accession of the Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1689.This Anglo-Dutch moment led to the consolidation of what, in the book's third and final section, Scott terms Britain's “maritime monarchy” (215). As its place in his tripartite structure suggests, Scott sees the eighteenth-century British Empire as an Anglo-Dutch creation, like its French and Spanish rivals a maritime dominion but with a cultural, economic, and political dynamism that the Bourbon powers lacked. Feeding that dynamism were Britain's North American and West Indian colonies, whose growing wealth and population played an enormously important role—thanks in no small part to the Navigation Laws first enacted during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the previous century—in the industrialization of England and Scotland. By the time of the American Revolution, the British Empire had become an “English-speaking empire of customers” (283). Although doomsayers predicted that the loss of the thirteen American colonies would be the empire's undoing, the commercial relations forged by more than a century of “supply and demand [were] sufficiently robust to survive independence” (275). Rather than destroying the British factory system and the global commercial dominance that was the result, the American Revolution ensured its success.As he makes his way through this narrative, Scott frequently notes the “eye-watering human cost of early modern European empires,” directing readers to Africa and the Americas in particular (161). Scott is also cognizant of industrialization's ecological and environmental toll (28). Ultimately, however, the story that he tells is one of individual liberation and empowerment. In the conclusion, he has this to say of the Industrial Revolution: Without it we would still be peasant farmers living in a village rather than inhabitants of a city. Our lives would still be governed by the seasonal agricultural calendar, and the constantly evolving daily cycle of light and darkness, rather than the never-ending flow of hourly work time, glow of electricity, and electronic devices which [sic] never sleep, accompanied by aircraft which fly us from one season to another (300).Scott does not ask his readers, even rhetorically, which world they would rather inhabit, the old or the new. But there seems to be little doubt how he thinks most would answer.If Scott makes the case for modernity, one way to read Matthew Lockwood's To Begin the World Over Again is as an extended brief against it, especially modernity as enshrined in the democratic principles of the American Revolution. Although Britain does not appear in the title, Lockwood's chief concern is the British reaction after the entry of France and Spain turned the Revolutionary War into a global struggle for imperial dominance and, many Britons feared, survival. The result, according to the book's title, “devastated the globe.” In thirteen chapters, Lockwood surveys the effects of this devastation, from the Gordon Riots that literally devastated London during the spring of 1780 to Ireland, Honduras, Peru, the Crimean Peninsula, Sierra Leone, India, Australia, and China. For readers versed in British and imperial history, some parts of this story will be familiar, others not so much. Regardless of the details, the outcome was the same. Wherever the effects of the American Revolution were felt, writes Lockwood, the ensuing turmoil inaugurated “an authoritarian counter-revolution that expanded Britain's empire while fatally weakening France and Spain” (7).Having written about Britain's counter-revolution myself, I am sympathetic with what Lockwood wants to do.1 There are, however, problems with attributing most of the agency for that reaction to the American Revolution. Although debunking the American founding has a long and distinguished pedigree, most such accounts focus on the costs that the revolution imposed in North America and its immediate vicinity. By expanding the revolution's costs to include actions that Britain took in India, Australia, and Asia, Lockwood asks his readers to accept a much more capacious litany of woe—one where a “revolution in favor of liberty in one corner of the map initiated a reactionary revolution in the wider world, inflicting new suffering and new restraints on people for whom freedom and independence were not available” (7). Because the American Revolution in the quoted passage is the subject, the thing that activates the British reaction in the predicate, the revolution is also what produces the suffering on the part of people who were neither free nor independent in the participle that follows. Britain, of course, was the power that inflicted most of the suffering—and much of the suffering that it inflicted occurred on the opposite side of the world—but the sentence's structure casts the British as supporting actors, who played the roles that they did because the revolution's American and pro-American dramatis personae gave them no choice. Is that really “how” the American Revolution devastated the globe?Similar questions of agency and causation arise from Lockwood's discussion of the Tupac Amaru revolt in Spanish Peru and the Russian annexation of Crimea. There is no question that both crises were devastating. The Tupac Amaru revolt claimed an estimated 100,000 Indigenous and 40,000 Creole lives (177). In neither case, however, were Britain and America directly involved, nor did the two crises have anything to do with the principles of the American Revolution—or for that matter with each other. Tupac Amaru's main grievance involved fiscal burdens imposed by the Spanish Bourbon reforms of the 1760s and 1770s, while the Crimean conquest of 1783 was one episode in the centuries-long rivalry between the Russian and Ottoman empires for control of the Black Sea. While Lockwood is aware of both sets of facts, what matters is that the two crises occurred during the War of American Independence. “Once more,” he writes of Crimea, “the American Revolution had played an important role” (232).What Lockwood hopes to achieve with this sprawling analysis is not entirely clear. In the introduction, he says that one of his goals is to move past the “idea of American exceptionalism, of the United States as a uniquely moral and chosen nation,” yet the American Revolution is at the center of his book's argument and title (4). The result is not so much a repudiation of the idea as a reworking, one that replaces exceptional triumph with exceptional catastrophe while keeping Americans in the leading roles and with most of the agency. In the book's final chapter, “The Dawn of the Century of Humiliation,” Lockwood retells the familiar story of Britain's forced opening of China during the 1780s and 1790s. Although Americans were sometimes present, notably during the 1784 Lady Hughes affair, when merchants from the East India Company and Imperial officials at Canton nearly came to blows after a Company ship accidentally killed a Chinese sailor during an artillery salute, the British were the ones who took the initiative and played the dominant role in shaping the outcome. Undaunted, Lockwood sees the Chinese humiliation that followed the Lady Hughes affair as yet another indication of how “the effects of the American Revolution … rippled out from the Atlantic, aiding the expansion of the British Empire, and undermining its imperial rivals” (480).When a book so obviously misses the mark, it is tempting to look for ways to improve it. One suggestion would be to replace the “devastation” in the title with something along the lines of “fragmentation” or “fracture.” During the half century after the revolution, the period covered by Lockwood's book, the United States lacked the capacity to project its power much beyond its own borders. Its democratic example extended farther, but there too the political challenge to Britain and Europe's other anciens régimes paled in comparison to the threat posed a decade later by the revolution in France. To say that the American Revolution caused devastation in either area on a global scale strains credibility. What the revolution did do was to fragment the world's leading maritime power, with the independent United States claiming perhaps a third of Britain's prewar merchant marine. The response of Britain and Europe's other colonial powers to that fragmentation most certainly did have global consequences, some of which, though by no means all—for example, the rise of antislavery in Britain and the United States—were devastating. Although not the book that Lockwood's title suggests, the apparent near death and subsequent recovery of the British Empire is closer to the storyline in the book that he has written.Ironically, despite his positive take on modernity, Jonathan Scott has the stronger case for the American Revolution as a globally devastating event. Whereas it would take nearly a century for the United States to rival and eventually surpass Britain as a world power, Scott's American empire of consumers played a role in the industrialization of Britain that was both immediate and direct. The origins of that pairing of supply and demand lay in the decades before the revolution, but the transatlantic relationship reached its zenith during the global Anglo-American “settler revolution” that began, according to James Belich, with the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 and lasted until the Second World War.2 It does not require much imagination to see a straightforward connection between the Industrial Revolution; the intensification of African slavery and the slave trade, both in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas; the dispossession of Indigenous peoples on a global scale; and the climate crisis of our own time.If there is one point on which Scott and Lockwood concur, it is that the world that the American Revolution created was indeed new. That new world is also, they would surely agree, the world that we inhabit today. What will future historians make of that fact? Will they emphasize the cultures of invention that loom so large in the final section of Scott's book, and will they say that industrial capitalism's restless spirit of innovation, which was what brought humanity to the brink of disaster, was also what pulled us back? Or will the costs, environmental as well as human, seem like the only things worth talking about? The answer, unfortunately, is terrifyingly difficult to predict. Only time will tell.

Confronting Public Health ImperialismA Transnational Feminist Analysis of Critical Nurse Responses to the National Smallpox Vaccination Program of 2002 Gwen D'Arcangelis (bio) small acts of resistance: gender and imperialism The juggernaut of US empire known as the "War on Terror" is by now a familiar, ubiquitous part of the twenty-first century. Less familiar to most is one of its early missteps, namely, the National Smallpox Vaccination Program (NSVP), a biodefense program that the Bush Administration devised to protect the US from a bioterror attack. From late 2002 to mid-2003, the federal government, arguing that a potential attack might occur from the likes of Al Qaeda or Iraq, attempted to recruit the health care field into a preemptive vaccination program against smallpox. Nurses were among the prominent occupational categories targeted, and more important, among the leading groups who challenged the program on the grounds of its health risks and role in the Iraq war. In this article I chronicle the multilayered intervention that US nurses made in the NSVP, specifically their reworking of hegemonic scientific and national security discourses. Nurse intervention into the NSVP is significant for two reasons. First, nurses reclaimed their centrality as decision makers in the NSVP, a prominent public health campaign that, as I show, exploited their labor and marginalized their medical expertise. Feminist scholars have analyzed nursing as a feminized labor domain long beset with the historical character of "women's work"—for example, low wages and devalued expertise.1 I demonstrate that nurses' defiance of the NSVP contributes significantly to a legacy of resistance to these conditions. Second, nurses challenged the NSVP based on its connection to the US program of aggression in Iraq and the War on Terror during a period of extreme "patriotism," when it was difficult to wage criticism of the US national security apparatus. Remarkably, US nurses linked their struggles for better safety and protections to a broader critique of US imperialism. In doing so, I argue, they enacted a model of transnational feminist praxis [End Page 95] wherein women in global north and imperial nations hold their governments accountable for perpetrating oppressive practices of imperialism and other forms of structural violence against less powerful nations in the global south. Transnational feminist theory builds on the intersectional analysis forwarded by feminist theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw2 and Patricia Hill Collins,3 who analyze women's struggles through a gendered lens that considers how race, class, nation, and other socio-structural positions determine gender relations and social power. Transnational feminist theorists focus on the intersection between gender and nation, noting that women across the globe are not only connected by their commonalities but also severely divided, particularly along the axis of colonialism and imperialism. They have noted that many feminist movements in imperial countries have been insufficiently critical of their government's expansionist foreign policy and imperialist practices globally, at times even joining forces to further them. Transnational feminist scholars have criticized the US-based Feminist Majority Foundation, for instance, for aligning itself with the US government's war on Afghanistan and its paternalistic rescue mission to save Afghani women, in the process marginalizing Afghani feminists' work and leadership.4 Transnational feminist theorists espouse that women in imperial nations should attend to their complicity in the actions of their governments. In the context of the most recent bouts of US imperialism targeting Afghanistan and Iraq, transnational feminist scholars such as Chandra Mohanty have challenged global north feminists to be self-reflexive about their political praxis (politically informed theory and action): What role have US feminists who supported the Bush administration's war in the name of "rescuing" Afghan and Iraqi women played in [the] narrative of empire and imperialism? This is one of the questions we need to pose to address the politics of complicity and dissent within contemporary feminist projects.5 In addition to calling for feminists in imperial and global north nations to reexamine their role in US imperial violence, she also highlights US imperialism as a key site for transnational feminist engagement: The militarized US State and its imperial projects are thus a crucial site of feminist struggle both in terms of the violence...

Growing up as she did in a contact zone, Sarah Winnemucca occupied social and geographical places that would come deeply to inform her rhetorical advocacy far-off plains of West and for Northern Paiute tribes (Life 207).1 While a rich body of scholarship lays out influence of Winnemucca's social place on her discursive strategies, influence of Winnemucca's physical place on her rhetorical practices has been consistently overlooked.' Yet, as this essay seeks to demonstrate, physical places and discourses that shape them are critical to Winnemucca's rhetorical choices and to ultimate success of her rhetoric. Born on western fringes of US territory just prior to Anglo--American settlement in region. Winnemucca found herself in midst of nationalist anxieties about expansion. As Carolyn Sorisio argues, imperialist mandate of Manifest Destiny defined and refined notions of nationhood, threatening a stable domestic identity even as it sought to expand nation's domestic reach. Native Americans found themselves caught up in riptides of both and imperialism: their representations by and to Anglo--Americans depended on their locations. Those Native Americans who were located firmly within US borders were represented as subjects for colonialism's project to assimilate and domesticate. Those along frontier (like Winnemucca) were viewed as foreign and therefore subject to imperialist conquest (36-41). Sorisio explains, Spatially, Winnemucca witnessed a shift from Northern Paiute's territory conceptualized as outside US to being incorporated within it, from imperialism to colonialism (37). This shift from foreign to domestic (ated) body became part of context Winnemucca negotiated in every rhetorical performance. Within this broader context, Winnemucca also navigated specific expectations of sites where she performed: lecture halls, reservation lands, military forts. In each place, she sought to create a space for persuasion, one that allowed her personal and tribal concerns to be heard by her Anglo--American audience. While most scholars focus on Winnemucca's public lectures and her 1883 autobiography, I focus here on some of her lesser-known rhetorical performances: disciplinary spaces of reservation and military fort. (3) By disciplinary space, here I mean any site that aims at Foucauldian discipline as explained in Discipline and Punish. Discipline is a mechanism that makes [the body] more obedient as it becomes more (138). Disciplinary spaces are particularly useful for analyzing spatial rhetorics, as discipline relies on distribution of individuals in space This occurs through enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself (141); partitioning, specification of a place for each individual (143); and rank, the place one occupies in a classification (145). For each space, I explore how that site both constrains and enables Winnemucca's rhetorical choices. I begin with a site analysis of each place, in terms of its physical layout (where known and applicable) and its framing ideology and spatial function. I then analyze ways that Winnemucca negotiates these spatial parameters in her rhetoric. Finally, I assess how her strategies in each space represent a search for shared rhetorical space--physical or cultural ground that provides basis for identification with her audience--that would enable her to make a persuasive argument on behalf of herself and Northern Paiutes.(4) DEFINING SPACE AND PLACE Most spatial theorists distinguish between space as an abstract or relational term and place as a concrete site (McDowell 32). Like other critical social factors, such as race, class, and gender, spaces and places are socially constructed and constructing. Cultural factors shape ways that we interpret particular places and landscapes, and these places and landscapes in turn influence social behaviors of individuals situated within them. …

Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2019. 250 pp.; 166 illustrations, index; clothbound, $37.95; eBook, $30.35. Farina King (Diné) Farina King (Diné) Northeastern State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2021) 43 (4): 132–134. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.4.132 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Farina King (Diné); Review: Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell. The Public Historian 1 November 2021; 43 (4): 132–134. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.4.132 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search Anthropologists Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell collaborated to reframe the Jesse H. Bratley Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, which led them on a journey to trace hundreds of pieces and glass-plate photographs and determine how Bratley gathered them from diverse Native American communities. According to the co-authors, the collection embodies “objects of survivance,” especially as “material memories” for Native American communities from which the objects originated, such as those of S’Klallam, Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Havasupai, Hopi, and Seminole peoples (30–31). While Montgomery and Colwell aim to align with Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s tenets of survivance in which “Native actors become the protagonists” (31) that not only survive but thrive, their book presents several missed opportunities.1 The “protagonist” of the book predominately remains Bratley, the white assimilationist instructor, rather than the Native American progenitors of the objects. Instead of focusing more on the relationships between... You do not currently have access to this content.

From 1775 to 1815, empire served as the most pressing foreign relationship problem for the United States. Would the new nation successfully break free from the British Empire? What would an American empire look like? How would it be treated by other empires? And could Americans hold their own against European superpowers? These questions dominated the United States’ first few decades of existence and shaped its interactions with American Indian, Haitian, Spanish, British, and French peoples. The US government—first the Continental Congress, then the Confederation Congress, and finally the federal administration under the new Constitution—grappled with five key issues. First, they sought international recognition of their independence and negotiated trade deals during the Revolutionary War to support the war effort. Second, they obtained access to the Mississippi River and Port of New Orleans from Spain and France to facilitate trade and western settlement. Third, they grappled with ongoing conflict with Indian nations over white settlement on Indian lands and demands from white communities for border security. Fourth, they defined and protected American neutrality, negotiated a trade policy that required European recognition of American independence, and denied recognition to Haiti. Lastly, they fought a quasi-war with France and real war with Great Britain in 1812.

First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. By Warren Zimmermann. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002. 562 pages. $30.00. Reviewed by Lance Betros, Department of History, US Military Academy. Anyone familiar with the historiography of US diplomacy knows there are many explanations for the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and the expansionist foreign policy that followed. Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power does an admirable job of synthesizing the literature, particularly for nonspecialists in US diplomatic history. book addresses the emergence of imperialism as the leitmotif of US foreign policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most responsible for shaping that policy were five men--Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Zimmermann calls them the of modern American This talented group worked in concert to mobilize public opinion, formulate policy, and upgrade the military to defend America's global interests. Mahan supplied the intellectual foundation, primarily through the ideas in seminal book, Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1798. Lodge mobilized congressional support as a member (later chairman) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as the Senate majority leader. Root and Hay advanced imperial policy within the War and State Departments. Roosevelt, the hands-down hero of the book, cohered the entire effort through boundless energy and enthusiasm; presidency marked the consolidation of the United States as a world power. One might question how Zimmermann's focus on five like-minded men could produce a balanced account of American foreign policy. He succeeds by combining biography with a rich synthesis of political, social, diplomatic, and military history. Part One of the book, The Music Makers, consists primarily of chapter-length biographies of the five who set the tune for American imperialism. Zimmerman relies exclusively on published sources for the biographical sketches, but the sources are well selected and treatment evenhanded. He skillfully identifies the most relevant aspects of the background and character of each of subjects, and he presents them in engaging, energetic prose. Part Two, America, takes the reader chronologically through the formative period of US imperialism--that is, from the Spanish-American War (the first great triumph) to the end of Roosevelt's second administration. Not surprisingly, the five fathers figure prominently in these pages, but so, too, do the other Jingoes who supported an imperial role for the United States, as well as the Goo-goos who opposed it. It is impossible to understand US foreign policy without acknowledging the influence of racism. On this score, Zimmermann's analysis is particularly strong. Imperial policy, he notes, was inherently racist, and the result was shoddy treatment of the peoples in the acquired territories. Making the situation worse were the quasi-scientific theories of social Darwinism, which helped justify Congress's refusal to grant full citizenship to the territorial inhabitants. Most educated Americans--imperialists and anti-imperialists alike--subscribed to racial stereotypes. Roosevelt was no exception, but his basic goodwill tempered the worst excesses of racial politics. In contrast to emphasis on racism, Zimmermann is unimpressed by the arguments of revisionist historians in explaining US imperial policy. He is particularly dismissive of the economic determinists who attribute American actions primarily to the power of big business and the lure of overseas markets. Business leaders were divided in their support of the impending war with Spain (fear of instability versus promise of economic exploitation); they became more supportive of US policy only after a favorable postwar outcome had been reached. …