American Colonial Period Research Articles

The malevolence of ‘benevolent assimilation’: cultural critique in early Philippine literature in English

Abstract: Two Filipino novels that were written in English during the American colonial period, Maximo Kalaw's The Filipino Rebel: A romance of the American colonization of the Philippines and Juan C. Laya's His Native Soil, are explicitly interested in analyzing American colonialism and its effects on the Philippines. Maximo Kalaw examines the political system of the colonial Philippines and lays bare the inherent corruption in a system that pretends to be democratic, while still under American control. Juan C. Laya questions American racial tolerance and the transformative power of capitalism. Though each comments on the colonization and explores issues of collaboration with and resistance to the American regime, they do not speak with one voice. Indeed, the debates that characterize the late twentieth‐century post‐colonial studies, particularly with regard to the potential for resistance in the colonial setting, are clearly evident in this early colonial fiction. The texts reveal strong differences as to whether resistance is at all possible and, if it is, how it operates and to what effect; however, what they share in common is a desire to expose the malice behind the American policy of ‘benevolent assimilation’.

The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America

The history of book studies for early Spanish America (1492-1820s) has followed a different path from that of northern Europe and the English-speaking world. Rather than stemming from the methods and concerns of the Annales school of social history in the 1950s and 1960s, modern approaches to the book in Spanish America can be traced to the 1930s, or perhaps earlier, when research into the institutional context of the transatlantic book trade altered prevailing conceptions of cultural life in the Spanish colonies. Since that time, most scholarship on the printed word for this period in the region has largely expanded on the findings of the modern founders of the discipline. With some notable exceptions, research into the social impact of printing or evolving trends in print culture has not been a major focus. Instead, the literature centers primarily on documenting the exportation of books from Spain to the New World and assessing the role of printed works in the dissemination of European ideas. In the past decade, new theoretical perspectives in the field of early Spanish American studies have generated a healthy critique of the cultural authority of the Western book in the New World. Alternate avenues of inquiry seek to capture more fully the range of printed and nonprinted forms of communication in colonial Spanish America, including those of native origin. [End Page 277] The purpose of this essay is to survey recent scholarship on the book for early Spanish America while sketching out some historical contours for understanding the present state of the discipline. I. Historical Contours and Foundations When considering book studies for the region as a whole, some preliminary observations on the establishment of printing and the nature of print culture during the Spanish American colonial period are in order. Printing was established in different parts of the region over the course of four centuries. The printing press was brought first to Mexico City (1539) and then to Lima (1581), which remained the only two printing centers in the Spanish territories of the New World until one hundred years later, when the first presses were brought to Puebla (1640) and Guatemala (1660). 1 The rest of the region did not have printing presses until the eighteenth century: in the remote Jesuit missions of Paraguay, printing began in 1700, when a press was constructed with local materials by native Guaraní laborers who had converted to Christianity. The first Havana imprint is from 1707, and in Santafé de Bogotá printing did not begin until 1736, exactly two hundred years after the city was founded. Most Spanish colonial cities, such as Quito(1759) and Buenos Aires (1780), did not have presses until the latter half of the eighteenth century. Printing began in Caracas (1808) in the early nineteenth century; a press functioned briefly in 1776 in Santiago de Chile but, like San José and most Central American cities, printing was not established permanently until after independence from Spain. Thus the bulk of researchon colonial books concerns sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City and Lima, the two cities with the longest typographical traditions. 2 As the cultural and political epicenters of the Spanish empire in the Americas until the mid-eighteenth century, Mexico and Lima were also the major distribution points for imported European books. 3 Very few studies have focused on the social history of print in the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century on the eve of independence, as we shall see below. In the colonies, the printing press served the ideological, political, and administrative purposes of Spain. The first presses were brought to Mexico City and Lima for the explicit purpose of aiding missionaries in the Christianization of native populations. Thus multilingual catechisms, instructional religious tracts, grammars, and vocabularies of Amerindian languages were the main products of early colonial presses. As the sixteenth century wore on, the Crown's initial preoccupation with the moral and spiritual welfare of...

Engineering the Philippine uplands: Gender, ethnicity, and scientific forestry in the American colonial period

The policy discourses and “technologies of rule” of the U.S. colonial state in the Philippines (1898–1946) rationalized people, territories, and natural resources in a way that conveyed implicit gender and ethnic biases. Through its ethnological surveys, the colonial government firmed up boundaries of ethnic identities and habitats by classifying people into ethnic categories and partitioning their territories into officially recognized administrative units. The Kalanguya, an upland group living in southern portions of the Cordillera region, have not been “pulled out” of anonymity by these surveys or state-sponsored ethnological studies. Thus, they have not benefitted from state-allocated resources such as protected reserves nor have they been granted seats in public office like other upland groups. For their part, upland women were seen as belonging to the private sphere of domesticity, despite their contributions to upland livelihoods and subsistence, while upland men were centrally located within the orbit of public state transactions. As a result, upland women were never recognized by forestry officials as resource managers in their own right, nor were they treated as capable political subjects with rights to own and make claims to resources in the uplands. Forestry agents also classified and determined which varieties of forest resources were suitable for commerce and they delineated certain spaces for private disposition and others, especially the forest and uplands, as falling under state control. The U.S. colonial state's social engineering in the uplands privileged men over women as gatekeepers of resources by defining how resources would be used and by rendering particular groups like the Kalanguya as anonymous in the ethnographic landscape.

Islam and Muslims in the Southern Territories of the Philippine Islands During the American Colonial Period (1898 to 1946)

The United States gained authority over the Philippine Islands as a result of the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Treaty of Paris (1899), which recognized American wartime territorial gains. Prior to that time the Spanish had general authority over the northern region of the Islands down to the Visayas, which they had ruled from their capital at Manila on Luzon for nearly three hundred years. The population in that Spanish zone was Christianized as a product of deliberate Spanish policy during that time frame. The area to the south, encompassing much of the island of Mindanao and all of the Sulu Archipelago, was under Spanish military control at the time of the Spanish American War (1898), having been taken over in the previous fifteen years by a protracted military campaign. This southern territory was held by the presence of Spanish military units in a series of strong forts located throughout the settled areas, but clear control over the society was quite weak and, in fact, collapsed after the American naval victory at Manila Bay. The United States did not establish its own presence in much of the southern region until 1902. It based its claim over the region on the treaty with the Spanish, and other colonial powers recognized that claim as legitimate.

The agricultural loans policy of the Philippine National Bank during the American colonial period as a mechanism for the protection of the economic interests of local landlords

The agricultural loans policy of the Philippine National Bank during the American colonial period as a mechanism for the protection of the economic interests of local landlords

Extraction of Opal Phytoliths from Herbivore Dental Calculus

Opal phytoliths can easily be extracted from herbivore dental calculus and examined to gain data for the reconstruction of prehistoric herbivore diet. The extraction process is a simple, quick and inexpensive three-step procedure. It consists of one or two distilled water washes to control and assess contamination and a final wash with dilute hydrochloric acid. A pilot study conducted on barnyard animals (cow, sheep and pig) from the American Colonial period site of Hampton, Virginia, demonstrates that dental calculus phytolith assemblages can provide data on herbivore diet that can be used to reconstruct livestock management practices and ecological change.

American Colonial Disturbances as Political Theatre

To view street actions of the American colonial period as theatrical events is nothing new. As Jeffrey Richards has shown in his much-admired book of 1991, writers of the colonial period—even in towns where “official” theatre performances were strictly prohibited—preferred the metaphors of theatre over any others in describing the actions of individuals and crowds upon what these writers saw as the “world stage.”

Spanish American Elementary Education Before Independence: Continuity and Change in a Colonial Environment

The historiography dealing with the evolution of elementary education in the Spanish American colonial period is relatively abundant. However, a great part of the literature has a regional or national scope, and in general does not give an idea of tendencies or the scale of education, which makes a general evaluation difficult. This paper tries to present such an evaluation based on the available secondary sources, and covers the whole of Spanish America during the century prior to Independence. It attempts to describe concisely both the consolidation of the institutions which had been evolving since the Conquest, and the series of changes which, it concludes, anticipate the educational transformations of the nineteenth century.

A History of Metals in Colonial America

The story of the introduction and growth of the technology of metals in the North American colonial period entails significant developments beyond the transfer of the technology from the Old World to the New. In the struggle to create an indigenous industry, in the efforts to encourage and support the work of metals craftsmen, in the defiance of British attempts to regulate manufacturing of metals, the colonial society developed a metals technology that became the basis for future industrial growth. The author traces colonial industrial development from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in nine chapters: Before Jamestown, Metals in the Early Colonies, Copper in the Colonies, Colonial Iron: The Birth of an Industry, Metals Manufacture in the Colonial Period, Colonial Iron: Regulation and Rebellion, Metals and the Revolution, The Critical Years, and Reflections on the End of an Era.

White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America

The role of white servitude evolved in a similar way during the American colonial period in those West Indian and southern mainland colonies where slavery became quantitatively important. The change from primary reliance on bound white labor to the use of slaves occurred in two steps, with an initial transition from servants to slaves in unskilled field work, followed some time later by widespread training of blacks and substitution of slaves for servants in skilled occupations. The timing of the two steps can be explained as a function of the changing relative costs of indentured and slave labor in the markets for unskilled and skilled labor.

A Perspective on Two Centuries of Progress in Soil Fertility and Plant Nutrition

AbstractIn the American colonial period soil fertility management depended on the empirical practices learned on similar soils in Western Europe, many of them known since Roman times. There were no experiment stations, colleges of agriculture, or known principles on which to build better practices. Advances in chemistry, physics and plant physiology starting very late in the 18th century catalyzed the beginnings of soil science in the late 1890's and early 1900's.The most rapid advances in discovery of principles and putting them into practice have occurred since World War II aided by new electronic instrumentation, development of statistical theory and designs for field research, and new fertilizer and pest control materials. Among the developments put to practical use have been extension of the list of essential elements, soil and plant tissue testing for better guidance of fertilizer useage, and theories on ion transport from the solid phase to the root surface, which help to explain fertilizer placement effects, “fixation,” residual availability, and fertilizer efficiency.Our present high‐yielding agriculture depended on the development of systems with the timely combination of the best cultivars; soil, water and plant management alternatives; and plant protection. Soil fertility specialists have had a leading role in the development of these systems.Although progress in development of soil fertility theory appears to have slowed, great challenges exist for making further progress using modern developments from engineering and other sciences. Among the problems are an ever‐growing need for more food and natural fiber. This need involves further intensification for higher yields and the expansion of agriculture onto kinds of soils having unprecedented soil fertility problems. The conservation of fossil fuel energy; the management of nitrogen to improve efficiency of uptake, and to minimize denitrification and ground water pollution; and finally the development of cultivars that tolerate adverse soil conditions uncorrectable economically with traditional fertilizers and amendments are also necessary developments. To apply with selectivity all of the knowledge now available from diverse sciences will require broader training of individuals and more refined field measurements of significant variables affecting plant growth during the season.

The Philippine Legislature Trade Mission to Japan, 1933. A Reassessment

B EFORE World War II the overall economic stake of Japan in Philippine trade and investment was comparatively limited. However, as the desire of the Japanese to expand their overseas markets increased after World War I, and as the possibility of Philippine independence became more real, the opportunities for greater PhilippineJapanese economic interaction were mutually apparent and mutually attractive. After the Japanese attack on Manchuria in I93I and Japan's subsequent withdrawal from the League of Nations, Japanese diplomats and businessmen in the Philippines appeared more assertive than they had been during the earlier American colonial period. Concurrently favorable Filipino responses to these more overt manifestations of Japan's efforts to participate more fully in Philippine economic life were evident. Although the volume of trade between Japan and the Philippines had generally been extremely low,1 it was believed by manyJapanese and Filipinos that the preferential tariff relationship between the United States and the Philippines had been solely responsible for keeping these figures down.2 Therefore, with the greater likelihood of independence and an anticipated diminution of the free trade between the former colonial master and its soon to be independent offspring, the prospects for increased Japanese-

“E Pluribus Unum”

(1965). “E Pluribus Unum”. Archives of Environmental Health: An International Journal: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 261-262.

Medical almanacs of the American Colonial period.

Medical almanacs of the American Colonial period.

Law and Colonial Society

IT HAS been observed that if we are ever to have a competent legal history of the American colonial period, way will have to be found for getting scholars and colonial court archives together.' It may also be observed that some way must be found to familiarize historians with the nature and function of in particular colonial societies. These two objectives are the subject matter of the present paper, which is essentially a plea for more attention to colonial by historians and their students. Certainly the time for an artistically balanced picture of colonial has not yet come, and it seems unlikely that that time will come until historians, economists and sociologists have given us the benefit of their techniques and special skills in the preparation of studies which are an essential prerequisite to the writing of a history of American law. Although it is obvious that some knowledge of law is necessary on the part of such social scientists, a formal education in is not required. Some of the most valued contributions to American, as well as to English, legal history have been made by scholars who received no formal training in the law. The importance of legal records in understanding colonial society is clear, and the point requires no extended comment. It is no longer possible to say, as Herbert Osgood did in 1904, that colonial legal records are fragmentary and not easily accessible.2 Increasingly, with the compilation of bibliographies and the publication of court and other legal records, the

Astrology in Colonial America: An Extended Query

IT has become a truism, indeed almost a cliche, that much of colonial America's intellectual endeavor was a reflection of similar developments across the seas in England and, to a lesser extent, on the Continent. If for no other reason than to verify a cliche, or to destroy its validity in at least one area, an examination of a relatively unexplored and fairly narrowly defined field of human activity could be productive of interesting results. Such, I believe, would be the case if one were to investigate the role of astrology in colonial America. This is a particularly good field for comparison of English and colonial activity, because the changes which occurred in the acceptance of astrology in England are quite marked during the American colonial period. As the accompanying table indicates, while the published books on astrology were perhaps not overly numerous, the seventeenth century saw many more of them than did the eighteenth century. Then, in the nineteenth century, astrological publications again increased. While this is only a partial index to the shifts and changes in the acceptance of astrology in England, it does give us a profile against which American interest can be measured. Before suggesting lines of inquiry in America which could determine the extent and seriousness of the use of astrology, a few suggestions about its general background are perhaps in order. Present-day scholarship usually relegates astrology to the history of human error. Yet no one seriously doubts its sociological role in the formation of the present-day world, nor its influence on many human activities, including astronomy, meteorology, medicine, religion, and literature.1 As one of several determinants of a particular cultural matrix, astrology is often touched upon by scholars seeking to weigh its importance relative to larger historical problems. Even modern history must take into account a large number of people who, wittingly or not, glance at their stars in

An Account of the Weather and Disease of South Carolina

Lionel Chalmers of Charleston, South Carolina, came nearer to being a pediatric specialist than any other physician of the American colonial period. Although Douglass had written on scarlet fever, Bard on diphtheria, and Rush on infantile diarrhea, Chalmers not only published his observations on these diseases but also covered a much wider range of pediatric subjects. He appears to have been among the first in this country to appreciate that rickets did not include all bony deformities, that "nine-day fits" of infants was the same disease as tetanus of adults, and that thrush was not usually a primary cause of death. He also wrote on infant feeding, weaning, teething, worms, convulsions, impetigo and obstructive laryngitis. He was most original and perhaps at his best in his descriptions of whooping cough and mumps.