Colonial America Research Articles

A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America

A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America

Entangled Sainthood: Imperial Canonisations and the Invention of Saints in Colonial Latin America

This article examines the impact of canonisation trials on the promotion of new saints across the Spanish Empire. Focusing on New Spain and Peru, it demonstrates that the physical arrival of copies and summaries of a canonisation trial or hagiographies of a saintly candidate supported by the Spanish crown in Colonial America served as a catalyst for revitalising pre-existing devotions and even inspiring the creation of new ones. By examining the start of the canonisations of Fray Sebastián de Aparicio in Puebla (Mexico) and Toribio of Mogrovejo in Lima (Peru), the work provides an introduction to an often neglected phenomenon: the entanglement between religious, political and cultural forces in the formation of Latin American sainthood, mainly in four ways: causality, opposition, dialecticism and affiliation. *

Current Themes in (Somewhat) Early American History

Current Themes in (Somewhat) Early American History

Labor, gender, and intercultural diplomacy: the emergence of Madame Montour as a professional interpreter in colonial North America

ABSTRACT Madame Montour, the child of a union forged by an Algonquin woman and French settler, leveraged her fluency in multiple indigenous and European languages to emerge as one of the most prominent interpreters in colonial New York and Pennsylvania. As the fur trade developed and new material culture was introduced in colonial North America, the labor of intercultural interpreters was invaluable as the interactions of diverse peoples, both settler and indigenous, intensified. This paper examines the distinguished career of Madame Montour as an interpreter engaged in intercultural diplomacy during an increasingly tumultuous and violent time that was marked by shifts in the relationship between gender and labor identity. I consider how payments in the form of cash, cloth, and clothing were entwined in the negotiation of an emerging colonial identity and how Madame Montour advocated to be recognized for her labor and to receive timely compensation for her skilled work.

The Colonial Spirit: Rum, its Rise and Decline

This paper aims to explore the rise of rum in colonial North America: its commodification and use in trade as currency, its prevalence in everyday life, and its eventual decline and supplementation by whiskey. Although rum, for a time, was the spirit of colonial North America, cultural shifts in North America, and the improved feasibility of whiskey production through technological advancements led to a decline in the consumption of rum.

Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America by Ana Schwartz (review)

Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America by Ana Schwartz (review)

Research for teaching’s sake: Preparing public affairs students for the fight over social equity, reflections from a PATNet roundtable

The social movements of the last few years have highlighted the continued institutional inequities that exist in the United States. They have reinvigorated policy and administrative practices and programs that support DEIJ. They have also reawakened in earnest a battle that has been waged since colonial America, one in which people in power work to pass policies and promote institutions that undo social equity and uphold oppression. As public administration scholars and teachers, it is critical for us to give our students the tools, language, and skills necessary to fight against oppression. In this dialogue, I present advice from social equity scholars on how to accomplish this by highlighting conversations from a roundtable discussion held at PATNet 2023. Themes include overall feelings about teaching social equity, discussing positionality, incorporating interdisciplinary theory, linking theory to practice, and teaching under censorship.

Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America

Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America

Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America by Ana Schwartz (review)

Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America by Ana Schwartz (review)

Editorial — Across Borders: Questions, Practices and Performances

The relationship between architecture and border studies is, rightly, at the forefront of many architectural scholars' minds, and has seen the inception of other publications, most notably  Angeliki Sioli, Nishat Awan and Kristopher Palagi’s edited collection Architecture of Resistance: Negotiating Borders through Spatial Practices (KU Leuven, forthcoming) and a special issue of Architecture and Culture, ‘Border Fictions’ edited by Mohamad Hafeda and Samuel Vardy (again forthcoming). We started putting together this issue of field on borders,  ‘Across Borders: Questions, Practices and Performances’, the first full collection on architecture and borders to be published, number by defining what we specifically meant by the notion of border. The conventional meaning, as the delineation of territory, has shaped our individual lives: the three of us have moved across borders, territories, communities and languages several times; we have crisscrossed our identities from the colonised Global South, the so called commonwealth colonised antipodes, the settler colonial North America, the (post)communist East of Europe.  We have experienced bBorders, as Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr tell us, are not as neutral separation lines: but thethey creatione ofa distinction between centre and periphery, normal and exceptional, belonging and not belonging. Borders enact biopolitics, demarcating (and othering) not only identity but creating zones of exception, a jurisdictions in which bodies (racialised, gendered) can be disciplined and made to conform and cohere. We realised, as we continued our attempt tos of definedefining borders, that any understanding of the bordersthey  are is always entangled with other political concepts. The border is the logical consequence of the notion of the utopia that underlies the nation state. An ideal place can only be created if it is set against the other, or its dystopia; the creation of, if there are  boundaries, physical or artificial, which make sure that the conditions for the ideal (and the non) place are maintained. Borders, are at once whether material and metaphorical, ; are always at once utopian, colonial, patriarchal, capitalist and hegemonic, 

Editor's Note

Back in our Fiske Hall home, this issue of "The Folio" showcases a variety of scholarship. Each volumeof the journal often reflects the seminar and course classes offered in the previous year. The articles in volume19 are uniquely limited to American history topics. While the location of the topics is focused on one country,they range widely chronologically. From colonial America to the 1920s, these papers reflect on serious issuesfacing daily life. Both Amanda Underwood and Rhenee Clark Swink showcase the lives of women in eighteenthcentury America. Logan Dougherty addresses the connection between politics and men's facial hair at the turnof the twentieth century. The personal relationships of Cherokee political families, and the issues which drovethem to disagreement are analyzed and reflected upon in Erik Ferguson's article. We end the issue with JoshuaMackey's recreation of the decades long effort to tell the tale of the Tulsa race riots. Taken together thesearticles tell us much about the lives and issues facing Americans.Thanks are due to the faculty of the Department of History who give of their time, expertise, andguidance throughout the process. Faculty provide invaluable support from the development of paper topicsand sources of information in preparation of class papers, to guidance through the final revisions prior topublication. A board consisting of faculty chooses the papers to publish.On behalf of the students and faculty who made this edition possible, we hope that you will enjoy theirwork. Dr. Helen HundleyFaculty Editor

‘천사적 결합(Angelical Conjunction)’: 17세기 뉴잉글랜드 식민지 사역자-의사(ministerphysicians) 의 의료 활동에 대한 고찰, 1620-1720

Many ministers in early colonial America served concurrently as physicians. Drawing primarily on surviving medical literature, this study examines the medical theories and practices upon which minister–physicians in the New England colonies relied. While the vast majority of minister–physicians were “unauthorized” and had not undergone “orthodox” or “regular” medical training, their “angelical conjunction” as minister– physicians played a significant social role and filled a health care void in the colony. In seventeenth-century New England, both Galenic and Paracelsian medical theories and treatments coexisted and converged, competing with one another and influencing both physicians and the general public. These two philosophies not only provided a theoretical background for understanding disease and medical practices but also encompassed religious discourse. New England colonists regarded disease as manifestations of God’s “divine judgment” and, as such, believed that caring for the soul as well as the body was the key to preventing and remedying physical ailments. In addition to scripture, minister–physicians relied on supernatural practices such as astrology, witchcraft, and magic to determine pathological causes and select appropriate medical treatments. They also tended to practice herbal medicine rather than surgery for healing. During the English Civil Wars (1642–1651), medicine served as an alternative income for some unsettled British ministers whose lives had been rocked by religious and political strife. Medical practitioners were in short supply in the New England colonies; therefore, it did not matter whether physicians had undergone formal or “orthodox/regular” medical training. At the patient’s bedside, neither medical expertise nor religious sincerity was more important than the ardent social desire to alleviate both spiritual and physical suffering.

Environment, Slavery and Agency in Colonial Uruguay, 1750–1810

Abstract In colonial Uruguay black slaves could supervise the work of white creoles and even hold the power to have their wages docked. To most historians this might seem puzzling and almost fictional in the context of the colonial Americas. This article makes sense of the puzzle by examining interactions between the economy and the environment on the Río de la Plata frontier. It argues that the natural world (soils, topography, climate, crops and animals) contributes to explain why this labour system existed, and also why it was efficient, contrary to the historiographical commonplace that enslaved workers would be unable to oversee free labourers effectively. Looking at the experience of both women and men through the lens of gender uncovers the parallels between the authority of these enslaved foremen over free male workers on the open range and their domestic authority over free women, whom they could marry. Their stories invite historians of other places and periods to foreground the environment in the set of structures that can either limit workers’ autonomy or give them strength.

How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History


 This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.

Encyclopaedias in newspapers in British colonial America and the early United States

Encyclopaedias in newspapers in British colonial America and the early United States

Early Colonial Urban History - A Tale of Two Granadas. Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668. By Max Deardoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 373. $130 cloth, $130 e-book.

Early Colonial Urban History - A Tale of Two Granadas. Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568<i>–</i>1668. By Max Deardoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 373. $130 cloth, $130 e-book.

Multiethnic Slavery and the African Diaspora in Macau: The Search for the Geographic Limits of Vast Early America

Abstract: The geographic limits of early American history are continuously being debated. Recently, this has culminated in the popular adoption of the expression "vast early America," which looks beyond the previously dominant Atlantic paradigm to embrace hemispheric perspectives while underlining the need to delve more into continental Africa, the Mediterranean, Eurasia, and the Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds. But what are the limits of this widening historical panorama in the case of the history of slavery? A hitherto-unstudied set of mid-eighteenth-century baptismal records from the Portuguese enclave of Macau, which noted the birth, ethnicity, and parentage of dozens of African and other enslaved people, offers evidence that the transatlantic slave trade was part of a larger trade in people of African descent (and others) that was geographically uneven and regionally segmented but global in extent, reaching as far as China. Placing this unique new dataset within the context of other contemporary Portuguese- and Chinese-language sources reveals that the presence of "Black slaves" (黑 奴, heinu ) in this port city was shaped by many of the same imperial and missionary projects as in the Atlantic, as well as racialized in ways highly reminiscent of the Western Hemisphere by both European and Chinese observers. The increasingly racialized slave trade of vast early America was thus horrifyingly "vast."

Cotton Mather’s Biblical Enlightenment: Critical Interrogations of the Canon and Revisions of the Common Translation in the Biblia Americana (1693–1728)

Abstract While there exists a robust scholarship on the cultural influences and public uses of the Bible in early American history, the historical development of biblical scholarship in America remains relatively understudied. The prevalent view suggests that biblical scholarship in America had its critical awakening with the importation of German Higher Criticism to northeastern divinity schools in the nineteenth century. This essay makes a corrective intervention by looking at Cotton Mather’s unpublished Biblia Americana (1693–1728), the first comprehensive Bible commentary to be authored in British North America. More specifically, the essay examines Mather’s response to critical interrogation of the canon and the Biblia’s numerous revisions of King James translation in light of recent philological scholarship. What connects these two issues is that they both concern the “givenness” of the Bible, which, in Mather’s day, was being fundamentally challenged. Behind the discussions about the canonicity of diverse books and over how to render the Hebrew and Greek texts into modern languages always lurked fundamental questions regarding the divine authority, integrity, and perspicuity of the Bible. Examining a broad range of examples from across the Biblia, the essay demonstrates how Mather’s work defies clear-cut categorization as either precritical or critical. In response to the intellectual currents of the early Enlightenment, Mather pioneered a new type of deeply learned, historically conscious but apologetically-oriented biblical criticism in America. The Biblia clearly reflects the challenges brought on by the deepening historicization of Scripture and the destabilization of texts and meanings through a new type of criticism. More widely read in current European scholarship and in many ways more curious and daring than any other early American exegete, Mather joined the infinitely complex and open-ended quest for better translations. Moreover, he was the first in New England to seriously address hard questions about the canon of the Bible and its historical development. But he always did so with the aim of providing constructive answers to these debates that would ultimately shore up the authority of Scripture, stabilize the scriptural foundation for what Mather regarded as the core of Reformed orthodox theological beliefs, and offer improved interpretations of the biblical texts, which would lend themselves even better to devotion and illuminate for Christians, with the help of the most up-to-date scholarship, the full riches of God’s Word.

The Declaration of Independence and the Language of Slavery

Abstract: It is often noted that the word “slavery” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, but it is rarely noted that it also does not appear in the Declaration of Independence. This is surprising since the idea that the American colonists were being “enslaved” by Great Britain was a consistent theme of patriot rhetoric in the months leading up to the outbreak of the war. This article describes how during the process of writing, editing, and revising by Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and the Continental Congress virtually all mentions of slavery disappeared from the final document. These deletions of specific references to slavery elevated the Declaration from being a document merely reflecting the specific and particular moment of its creation to a document espousing abstract, universal values.

A Moderate Proposal: Jonathan Dickinson and Benjamin Franklin Debate Freedom, Conscience, and Consensus

In matters of twenty-first century public policy, age-old questions surrounding freedom of conscience and both personal and civic liberties remain in perennial tension with the necessary demands for civic conformity, custom, and consensus. These questions were also of critical importance in early eighteenth-century colonial America. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a hotbed of religious, intellectual, and cultural diversity was fomenting considerable conflict in Philadelphia, setting the stage for a vital debate over the nature and parameters of religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the colonies. Within this context of the eighteenth-century religious and cultural landscape of colonial Philadelphia, this article will examine a debate between Jonathan Dickinson and Benjamin Franklin whereby two distinctly different interpretations of religious liberty and freedom of conscience were established. Left to themselves, these two interpretations lead to sharply divergent trajectories. Nonetheless, by considering these two viewpoints in dialogue with one another, the Franklin–Dickinson pamphlet debate can serve as a useful tool for conceptualizing twenty-first century public policy issues related to freedom of conscience: policies that preserve the essential aspects of what constitutes each person’s humanity while simultaneously respecting the broader exigencies for public order and responsible policy in the aggregate.