Colonial America Research Articles

Europeans in British Administered East Africa, A Biographical Listing 1888–1910, 4th Edition

With the interest and passion of a collector and through the methods of archival investigation, North presents the results of several decades of enquiry into the written material and photographs that identified and placed Europeans who came in contact with the lands of eastern Africa administered by Britain. Since the 3rd edition (North, 2005), the 4th edition presents over 300 additional pages and is spread across two hardback volumes that totals over 8000 biographical entries of Europeans present in primary historical sources. The author begins with an overview of the early colonial history and key archival sources of documented names and biographical details of European settlers, travellers and employees across tropical eastern Africa — from the Indian Ocean coast inland to the lakes and from Zanzibar. The author describes his journey from initial interest during the 1960s in Nairobi to delving into archives in East Africa and Britain, travels to cemeteries, and later online research, to build biographies and source new material. Biographical entries contain names and known aliases, nationalities, and employment roles; and listing of dates, locations, sources, and recorded activities of the individuals. Black and white bust and head shot photographs of individuals are reproduced when possible. One limitation is that not all the photographs are referenced to the original source(s) or format(s). Names of companion Europeans are also cross-referenced in bold font if there is a corresponding entry in the volumes. The author acknowledges previous efforts to catalogue many of the Europeans present across the region, such as the East Africa Hand Book and Dictionary of East African Biography, as well as online resources. The history of these products and the dispersed nature of cited sources are listed by North for future researchers.

:Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History

:<i>Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History</i>

The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell (review)

Reviewed by: The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell William D. Adler (bio) Keywords State-building, Early national state, Role of Government The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920. By Ballard C. Campbell. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 392. Paper, $34.95.) Scholars of the early U.S. have long been interested in how state-building occurred, but a massive revival of attention to the subject in the past twenty years has produced a wave of important research. The Paradox of Power enters this conversation with an impressive contribution to our understanding of the early national state through a synthetic analysis of how [End Page 340] government grew, not only nationally but at the local and state levels as well. Ballard Campbell argues in this book that American state-building has been characterized by a paradox between theory and action: a strong commitment to anti-statist values on the one hand, with a practical necessity for enhanced state action on the other. Those immediate needs, such as physical infrastructure, security, education, and others, led over time to increased state capacity as an administrative apparatus was built to handle these various functions, he argues. The anti-statist values continued apace in our culture but ultimately could not arrest the growth of government. Campbell traces these shifts from the colonial period all the way through the early twentieth century, covering well-trodden soil on how government expanded at the local, state, and national levels. The book contains a wealth of information on what government did and how it did it, including an original collection of state-level actions (contained in the Appendix) that will be of much use to scholars. The greatest contribution of this work will be for those looking for a general treatment of the subject material, as it covers a wide range of time and a similarly wide range of governmental activities. Students in advanced undergraduate courses or graduate students who need an overview of state-building throughout early American history will benefit from reading this work. As for its contributions to the scholarly literature, since it is a work of synthesis, scholars will most benefit from the above mentioned dataset on state actions as well as wrestling with its argument about the "paradox" of American state-building, although even this is familiar to students of these questions. For example, in his work Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 2015), Gary Gerstle makes a similar contention about the tension in the Constitution between personal liberties and limited government on the one hand, versus the notion of "the public good" that was more prevalent at the state level. In the field of American political development, political scientists have long debated these questions as well; most recently, in Stephen Skrowronek's Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (Oxford, UK, 2021), the authors home in on the noteworthy friction between the "unity" in executive strength within the constitutional framework as compared to the large administrative apparatus that undermines that theoretical unity. No doubt, Campbell's thesis must be situated alongside these others and is one scholars must contend with. [End Page 341] Campbell has produced an important work that should be read by scholars of the early republic who are interested in continuing to explore these fundamental debates. In particular, Chapters 3–6 will be worthwhile for readers of this journal as Campbell moves from the founding of the republic through to the cusp of the Civil War. We will likely continue debating the nature of state-building in early America for many years to come. William D. Adler William D. Adler is associate professor of political science at Northeastern Illinois University. He is the author of Engineering Expansion: The U.S. Army and Economic Development, 1787–1860 (Philadelphia, 2021) as well as articles on the early United States, the American presidency, and American political development. Copyright © 2023 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

The people of West Nottinghamshire and the English Revolution

ABSTRACT Contrary to the recent tendency to obscure the English Revolution behind a nebulous ‘British’ dimension, we reassert the convention that the central issue related essentially to England. No causative part could be played by Ireland, since it lacked a central government, and was dominated by English colonists. Scotland’s priority was to extend the influence of the Kirk, tending towards a theocratic polity. England, by contrast, was becoming a fully politicised nation-state, and this was the context pf parliament’s challenge to the crown. The most obvious causes were distinctively English in character and contained within a unifying trend. We see how these emerging patterns of unity applied in the parliamentary stronghold of West Nottinghamshire. This is reflected in the uniquely coordinated economic and political structures through which the practical imperatives of parliamentarians were formed, and in the specific statements of motivation and public principle made by activists.

From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History ed. by Douglas Bradburn and Christopher R. Pearl

Reviewed by: From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History ed. by Douglas Bradburn and Christopher R. Pearl Mark Boonshoft From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History. Edited by Douglas Bradburn and Christopher R. Pearl. Early American Histories. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. x, 274. Paper, $34.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4742-6; cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4741-9.) Since the publication in 1888 of John Fiske’s The Critical Period of American History, 1783–1789, historians have debated whether the period between the conclusion of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution was actually critical. Fiske said yes, crediting the Framers with rescuing the United States from a crisis. Others, in the Progressive and neo-Progressive vein, have claimed the 1780s crisis narrative was contrived by elites to forward counterrevolutionary policies. Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969) splits the difference. Describing the 1780s as a period of crisis in republican thinking, Wood affirms the critical period framework and reinforces the Progressive view that the Constitution was part of an elite counterrevolution. The editors and contributors to this volume situate their work firmly within this long-standing historiographical debate. Yet the volume is almost agnostic on the central question: was this period critical? In the epilogue, Johann N. Neem argues that this volume’s unifying theme is that all the contributors explain practical efforts Americans made to explain and address the economic and political challenges of the 1780s. How so? Dael A. Norwood argues that the 1780s dashed commercial elites’ hopes for post-Revolutionary prosperity and stability. Those commercial men blamed the Articles of Confederation, which bolstered the narrative that the United States faced a crisis and needed to create a new government to serve as a “customs union” (p. 46). Hannah Farber tackles the question of fiscal reforms, particular the issuance of paper money. Farber casts the efforts of both the financier Robert Morris and the various state legislatures as practical responses to fiscal issues, grounded in existing networks and practices. Other essayists examine the centrifugal political forces at work during the 1780s. Douglas Bradburn explains how Mount Vernon became a symbol of the American nation and, in a polity that lacked a true power center, a national court from which George Washington could help reform the Union. Susan Gaunt Stearns turns to the trans-Appalachian West to show how white colonizers relied on Congress to manage foreign and Indian relations. Westerners’ sense that the Confederation Congress had failed them added to the overall sense of crisis that the Constitution’s advocates purported to solve. Nicholas P. Wood makes a novel contribution to the major historiographical debate about whether the Constitution was a proslavery document. Wood argues that the Articles of Confederation frustrated antislavery advocates, especially Quakers, who found Congress under the U.S. Constitution to be more responsive to antislavery agitation. [End Page 342] Christopher R. Pearl takes a long view of the Revolutionary-era crisis, deemphasizing the importance of the Constitution. During the 1760s, American colonists came to see their provincial governments as inadequate, a problem not solved until the 1780s and 1790s, when new and stable state governments finally proved adequate. Finally, Kevin Butterfield tackles the kerfuffle over the Society of the Cincinnati in the mid-1780s. The denouement of that debate assuaged fears that the United States would be taken over by a homegrown aristocracy and, therefore, undercut some Anti-Federalist arguments against ratification. By defining the critical period in terms that would make sense to Fiske, the volume leaves out important insights from recent works on the 1780s. Aside from Bradburn’s analysis of Mount Vernon, cultural history is largely absent from the volume. But the sense of crisis in the 1780s was framed by poetry (by the Connecticut Wits, for example) and by anxiety about the lack of a national language, educational system, history, and understanding of American geography. Nevertheless, From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History is the most important book on the...

Black Resettlement and the American Civil War

Perhaps no subject in early American history has undergone as thorough an interpretive overhaul recently as the colonization movement. Once mostly derided as the self-serving ruse of proslavery southerners and the chimerical fantasy of white American racists, a bevy of studies have now taken colonization seriously, providing a multidimensional understanding of the many and long-standing efforts to remove Black Americans from the land of their birth—a goal that, at its core, remains inscrutable to our modern sensibilities.Into this increasingly crowded field steps Sebastian Page, whose Black Resettlement and the American Civil War provides readers with an encyclopedic analysis of the “embarrassment of projects aimed at removing African Americans from the United States” (12). To cast his interpretive net as widely as possible, Page employs the term “resettlement” rather than colonization—the designation normally assigned to white-guided initiatives of Black repatriation to Africa—or emigration—the word used for the periodic, Black-led undertakings to urge at least some of their compatriots to leave the United States. Using resettlement as his lens allows Page to adopt a kaleidoscopic view that is inclusive of a host of removal schemes: from the more conventionally studied destination of Liberia to the far less scrutinized proposal to relocate freed people on territory within the former Confederacy that remained in Union hands in the aftermath of the Civil War.Page's book covers much more ground than its title implies; it begins in the antebellum era and ends with President Ulysses S. Grant's bid at pairing Black emigration with the annexation of the Dominican Republic. The first two chapters contextualize the birth and growth of Black resettlement and include a nuanced and incisive account of several Black-initiated emigration programs prior to the 1860s. But it is really in chapter 3 that the crux of this monograph begins to emerge. Page chronicles the rise of African American resettlement to, as he sees it, a central place on the Republican Party's agenda. Throughout succeeding chapters Page shows the enduring quest to relocate Black Americans outside the bounds of the American republic during the Civil War and immediate postwar years. From Latin America to the British West Indies to the American South, he illustrates how a motley group of reformers, adventurers, charlatans, visionaries, and prominent politicians—including, as Page painstakingly demonstrates, Abraham Lincoln himself—held on far longer and more sincerely to Black resettlement than historians have heretofore recognized. Even amid one of the United States' most celebrated hours of racial progressivism—when the Emancipation Proclamation recast the republic as a nation of universal human liberty and people of color fought by the thousands to preserve the Union—there remained endeavors to expatriate African Americans.Prodigiously researched and written in lively and clever prose, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War achieves the author's objective to “chronicle the full geographic and institutional range of the drive for black resettlement” (1). This book is now the fullest account we have of the persistent efforts to resettle Black Americans during the Civil War era.But Page is less successful in establishing the greater import of the impressive research he has compiled for the history of race, liberty, and African American rights in the nineteenth century. He conflates the staying power of Black resettlement plans with their significance. And he overreaches several times in the text by making claims about colonization's relevance that outstrip his evidence. For example, a handful of Republican advocates of Black resettlement, who hardly represented the mainstream position of their own party on African American citizenship, are, for Page, indicative of the views of “white Americans” as a whole. Ultimately, there is an expansive difference between the endurance of colonization and resettlement proposals, on the one hand, and their centrality, or even relative importance, to the larger national debate over Black freedom, race, and rights, on the other.By nearly the same time period that Black Resettlement and the American Civil War ends its narrative, a critical mass of the white American electorate had endorsed the abolition of slavery, approved of the incorporation of African Americans into the republic as citizens, and signed off on the constitutional right of Black men to suffrage. We all know how the retreat from Reconstruction and the nationalization of white supremacy made a mockery of much of these accomplishments by the Jim Crow years. And yet during the Civil War era they still seem more noteworthy facts than the fanciful and abortive racially exclusionary schemes of a relatively small number of individuals.

Impacts of Puritan Society on the New England Witchcraft Trials

One of the most popularized events of early colonial America is that of the witchcraft trials in New England. Puritans fleeing the English Reformation settled in New England in the seventeenth century, bringing aspects of English tradition and culture with them. As a result, English ideas of witchcraft became entwined with New England culture. This paper seeks to identify and explain the correlation between Puritan society in New England and the witchcraft accusations of the seventeenth century using both primary and secondary sources. The role of femininity, as outlined by Puritan society, is considered for its relationship to witchery. This paper will first outline the process of witchcraft accusations in Puritan society. The broad and specific characteristics of women accused of witchcraft will also be examined in this paper, along with the realities of execution.

The Feral Animal Question: Implications for Recognizing Europe's First Farmers

The presence of domestic animals is a key feature of the Neolithic. Their earliest presence in archaeological contexts across the European continent is often interpreted as reflecting farming practices. However, domestic animals often escape, survive, and become feral. Using the comparative example of colonial North America, this article's aim is to illustrate what happens when livestock are introduced to a new, continental temperate environment. Taking a dual historical and archaeological perspective, the author reiterates and elaborates on the suggestion that feral animals were almost certainly a feature of the European Neolithization process.

Polygamy: An Early American History by Sarah M. S. Pearsall

Reviewed by: Polygamy: An Early American History by Sarah M. S. Pearsall Lindsay M. Keiter Polygamy: An Early American History. By Sarah M. S. Pearsall. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. 415 pages. Cloth, ebook. Sarah M. S. Pearsall's sweeping analysis of plural marriages, Polygamy: An Early American History, digs deep into conflicts over marital practices throughout the North American continent and the British Atlantic from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Polygamy, she shows, has long been misconstrued in the past and present as being about lust and sex. Like any form of marriage, polygamy was about power, both public and private, giving intimate decisions and behaviors political significance. She argues that in a variety of contexts, "plural unions marked status for men, and to a lesser degree [the] wives in them, and women's work palpably supported and augmented men's status" (140). She demonstrates how theological and intellectual conflicts over polygamy, well before the emergence of Mormonism, were central to debates about the structure and strength of both righteous households and enlightened nations. Her diverse examples of plural marriage practices in early America collectively demonstrate how the imposition of monogamy was—and is—a legacy of colonialism. This is a remarkable work of synthesis, encompassing an enormous geographic and chronological sweep. Pearsall makes creative use of a wide variety of sources to flesh out the stories of people whose voices were recorded in fragments, if at all, thereby centering the perspectives and experiences of the women and men deliberately marginalized in the historical record. Pearsall often compensates for the scarcity of direct testimony by creatively mining other sources, as when she devotes multiple pages to analyzing phrases about love and lust in Algonquin dictionaries to contextualize what polygamy may have meant for Makheabichtichiou, an Algonquian leader, and his three wives. As a whole, Pearsall's effort to question the "inherited and too often unquestioned structures of marriage, gender, and sexuality," as well as "notions of simple progress" (294), results in a beautifully and sensitively written book. The first three chapters explore conflicts between Indigenous people and European colonizers in the seventeenth century. Ironically, the effects of colonialism—labor reorganization and demographic disaster—made plural marriages more important as symbol and strategy for Indigenous political elites. Pearsall begins in New Spain, considering how plural marriage "was a symbol, a practice, and a rallying cry" (23) in both the 1597 Guale Rebellion in Florida and the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico. In the 1630s, she then travels to the chillier climes of French Canada, where, to the delight of Jesuits, Makheabichtichiou—"'capitaine' of la Petite Nation" [End Page 418] (50)—enthusiastically embraced Christianity, renouncing the customs the Jesuits condemned, save one. The missionaries' hopes were blasted by Makheabichtichiou's refusal—or inability—to renounce two of his three wives. Though polygyny was a political choice that enhanced men's power, Pearsall argues that Makheabichtichiou's hands were tied when two of his wives refused to be baptized or to leave his household, revealing how "even a powerful leader was still constrained by larger structures of households, economies, and kinship" (71). Pearsall next moves eastward to consider how, amid the upheaval of King Philip's War, Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative offers "a remarkable window onto Native practices of plural marriage and domestic life" (104). Rowlandson's captor Weetamoo (sachem of the Pocasset) was the third wife of the Narragansett sachem—a choice that "suggests a level of diplomatic desperation, as well as a possible willingness to sacrifice herself for her people" (105). Weetamoo was a critical ally of Metacom, also known as King Philip, and she was his sister-in-law twice over (Weetamoo's first husband was Metacom's brother, and Metacom married Weetamoo's sister). Within this context, polygamy emerges as a tactic of political alliance and survival in a society under enormous strain, and "Weetamoo's flashpoints of fury [toward Rowlandson] illuminate the cracks that threaten to split her world apart" (105). Thus, in these very different contexts, Pearsall argues convincingly that polygamy was not a static practice but was instead shaped by the demographic disaster and labor reorganization that resulted...

Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History

Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History

An Accidental Historian

An Accidental Historian

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Joshua Piker This issue of the William and Mary Quarterly is entitled "Colonial Roots/Routes in North America and Latin America" and is jointly published with the Hispanic American Historical Review. The joint issue consists of an introductory essay by Camilla Townsend and eight articles, three of which are published in HAHR and five in WMQ. The introduction appears in both journals. More specifically, in this issue, you will find articles by Jack Bouchard, Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, Margaret Ellen Newell, Matt D. Childs, and Nancy E. van Deusen, along with Townsend's introductory essay. The other articles will appear in May 2023's issue of HAHR (volume 103, number 2): The Echo of Voices after the Fall of the Aztec Empire Alex Hidalgo Two Bigamists in Tehuantepec: Global(ized) Itineraries in Southern Mesoamerica, circa 1600 Laura Matthew "Betwixt Ye Two Rivers": Trafficking and Colonization in Early Seventeenth-Century Saint Christopher Casey Schmitt I am grateful to the participants in the joint issue for their commitment to this project, which began before COVID-19, was powerfully shaped by the pandemic, and is being published two years later than anyone involved initially envisioned. I thank the authors for their patience and hard work in difficult circumstances, and I thank the peer reviewers for taking on assignments at a moment when no one needed another thing to worry about. I am particularly grateful to Martha Few and her colleagues at HAHR, for being such exemplary partners in this project; to Ryan Kashanipour, for insisting that Martha and I would have a lot to talk about and setting up a meeting for us at the 2017 Southwest Seminar; and to the organizers of the 2019 American Society for Ethnohistory Annual Meeting at Pennsylvania State University, for allowing us to devote three linked panels to the conversation that became this joint issue. [End Page 205] Joshua Piker William and Mary Quarterly Copyright © 2023 Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture

At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject by Jacob Selwood

Reviewed by: At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject by Jacob Selwood Christian J. Koot At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject. By Jacob Selwood. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022. 252 pages. Cloth, ebook. In 1707, Jeronimy Clifford, a former Suriname plantation owner, produced an extraordinary appeal for compensation from the English government. Including transcriptions of original documents and Clifford's own interpretations of them, this two-volume manuscript traces the travails of one of many early modern individuals who moved between empires. Only a child when the Dutch conquered English Suriname in 1667, Clifford came of age as an Englishman living in a Dutch colony. As a foreigner, his efforts to maintain his English subjecthood ultimately left him vulnerable to Dutch authorities. By 1691, he was imprisoned, and after his release, he fled the colony, abandoning his property. In At Kingdom's Edge, Jacob Selwood uses Clifford and his petition to examine how "an array of extralegal factors" including warfare, disease, and the social and economic makeup of colonies "shaped subjecthood" (2)—that is, the bond between an individual and their monarch, and the rights and privileges that followed. In this tightly focused study of Clifford, Selwood argues that English subjecthood was constructed not by metropolitan legal discourse and treaty language but instead through daily life at the imperial periphery. In relating the early colonial history of Suriname and Clifford's role in it, Selwood demonstrates that, beginning in the initial days of colonization, the difficulty and deadliness of Suriname's environment meant English settlers adhered to expansive ideas of subjecthood that deviated from metropolitan norms. Barbadian sugar magnates looking to expand and smaller planters looking for cheaper land founded Suriname in the 1650s. When Clifford's family arrived there a decade later, sugar had transformed the colony and more than three thousand enslaved workers were laboring on roughly five hundred plantations. Mortality was high, as those of both European and African ancestry struggled to adapt to the disease environment. Ideas about English subjecthood in Suriname were shaped by local concerns about both the establishment of a slave society and the realities of high mortality. Following the example of their close neighbors on Barbados, the English denied subjecthood to the enslaved to enforce the boundaries of a slave society, even as they departed from English practice and welcomed Sephardic Jews, a decision prompted by the high mortality rate. Their willingness to recognize the subjecthood of Sephardic Jews and to offer religious toleration was tied to the precarious nature of settlement, which prompted [End Page 423] governors to innovate. As Selwood argues, "The result was a peculiarly broad articulation of English subjecthood" (41). When the Dutch conquered Suriname, Clifford's family made the same decision as many Euro-settlers around the Atlantic in this period: they remained under foreign rule so as to best protect their local economic interests. The Dutch conquerors extended generous terms to the English who remained, allowing them to retain their property and dispose of it as they wished. Within a decade, however, most English families had departed, leaving Clifford and roughly fourteen other English residents to grapple with how to maintain their Englishness in a Dutch colony. At first Clifford prospered. As Suriname became more stable and economically successful under Dutch rule, he and his family accrued wealth, and he married advantageously to become the owner of reputedly the "finest" (148) plantation in Suriname.1 Over time, though, consolidating Dutch rule made Clifford and his claims to English subjecthood increasingly precarious. These claims came to a head in a property dispute with his wife, Dorothy Matson, regarding ownership of the plantation, Corcabo, that she brought to their marriage. The dispute over Corcabo was shaped by questions about whether Matson was Dutch or English, as well as if she and Clifford had gotten married in England. Under the English legal concept of coverture, Clifford claimed Corcabo for himself, but Matson resisted, citing the Dutch practice of "joint ownership of marital assets" (165). As Selwood shows, the legal battle that followed, though on its surface about property, was really about subjecthood. Clifford argued...

Slavery, Testimony, Archives (or, Should We Listen When the Subaltern Speak?)

Abstract In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men was meticulously recorded and preserved, down to the inclusion of dialogue, of turns of speech, of metaphors, sometimes even passages in Creole. Interrogated in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses, they moved beyond the questions posed and answered instead with stories about themselves, their words creating riveting narratives that constitute a precious repository of voices of enslaved individuals in colonial America. Though this archive is problematic, their testimony was anchored in the deponents’ own experiences and ways of knowing, prompting the question of whether we can use this material, and most importantly: if and when they did speak in court, should we listen?

"Canoes of Great Swiftness": Rivercraft and War in the Northeast

The Wabanakis of northern New England were much more successful than their Algonquian peers in resisting the advance of settler colonialism into their homeland. This article argues that the key to that success was the birchbark canoe; a technology that gave Wabanakis a decisive military advantage during several conflicts with the British Empire. The incredibly light weight birchbark canoe allowed Wabanakis to portage around New England's many waterfalls and across the region's many river valleys with relative ease. Although Europeans admired the birchbark canoe, they failed to reproduce that technology for their own use. The article also explores how colonists such as Benjamin Church vainly attempted to adapt whaleboats in order to match the sophistication of indigenous nautical technology. This piece troubles the assumption of European technological superiority in their interactions with Native Americans. It also points to the importance of waterways and the nature of transportation in understanding how historical subjects conceived space and experienced encounters in colonial America.

Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, Their Arabic Letters, &amp; an American President by Jeffrey Einboden

Reviewed by: Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, Their Arabic Letters, & an American President by Jeffrey Einboden Kambiz GhaneaBassiri (bio) Islam, Thomas Jefferson, Slavery, North Africa Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, Their Arabic Letters, & an American President. By Jeffrey Einboden. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. Cloth, $29.95.) Did Thomas Jefferson have knowledge of the presence of Muslims in the territories over which he presided? Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives is an admirable attempt to decisively answer this question with a "Yes." While digging in various archives for Arabic writings from antebellum America, Einboden discovered two Arabic manuscripts that had been written by "runaway" slaves detained in rural Kentucky. A "frontier pioneer" named Ira P. Nash carried the manuscripts to Washington and handed them to the president on October 4, 1804. Based on his communications with Nash, Jefferson thought that these manuscripts "'contained' the Africans' own 'history, as stated by themselves'" (178). He thus sought to have them translated so that "if practicable," he "may procure the release of the men if proper" (156). Unfortunately, the specialists who were consulted on Jefferson's behalf were not able to decipher the Arabic writings in these manuscripts. Einboden reads one of them as Surat al-Nas, the last chapter of the Qur'an, and the other he identifies as illegible but likely to contain "verses from [End Page 184] discrete chapters of the Qur'an" (305, n13). He argues that their exact content is not as significant as their context. They "represent intentional acts of authorship, embodying a deep 'history,' while also seeming to articulate anxieties particular to . . . their [authors'] present enslavement" (178). Much of Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives aims to narrate this deep history of Jefferson and other American elites' interactions with Islam by tethering their biographies to the unpublished Arabic writings that Einboden discovered in the course of his years of research. This resulting story is significant for Einboden because it challenges the widespread assumption that the presence of enslaved Muslim Africans was invisible to the Founders. The question that Einboden sets out to answer, "How could these two pages—authored in Arabic by fugitive West Africans—have stayed submerged for more than two centuries?" (6), is all the more perplexing given that nearly every week of Jefferson's political life has been documented and analyzed. By bringing Jefferson's biography into conversation with contemporary Arabic writings, Einboden hopes to expand the canon of early American history and to integrate Muslims into how we imagine the political formation of the United States today. While I wholeheartedly applaud Einboden's aim, Jefferson's Fugitive Muslims falls short of realizing it in a compelling way. It is overwritten and under-theorized. For example, in a chapter discussing the signing of a treaty between Morocco and the United States, Einboden writes, Instead of December 1786, Jefferson waited until January 1, 1787, to trace his signature on the treaty. Mirroring the Ramadan autograph of Morocco's emperor—who had ratified the treaty on the first day of Islam's holiest month—Jefferson signaled his own approval on New Year's Day. Not a season of fasting in Paris, but a feast (32). One wishes that rather than resorting to such rhetorical associations between Jefferson and the Arabic documents he encountered, Einboden would have spent more time exploring the theoretical and historical ramifications of translating such emerging political concepts as "Citizens of the United States" into Arabic. What does this written exchange tell us about how citizenship in a nation–state was understood by Americans and Moroccans at this time, and how was it projected to shape international and diplomatic relations? Elsewhere, while discussing Jefferson's efforts to have the abovementioned manuscripts translated, Einboden writes, [End Page 185] Twenty-two years before, in 1785, O'Brien had petitioned Jefferson's help to save him from Muslim imprisonment [in North Africa]; now in 1807, Jefferson was petitioning O'Brien to help save two Muslims from American incarceration [by translating their Arabic writings]. In 1785, Jefferson had advised O'Brien to keep quiet and discreet in Muslim lands; now, Jefferson was asking O'Brien to divulge...

Justifying Revolution: The American Clergy’s Argument for Political Resistance, 1750–1776, by Gary L. Steward

Jonathan Mayhew was not a popular man among the clergy of Boston in the 1750s and 1760s. The British clergyman who most clearly articulated a Protestant justification for political resistance—one heralded by John Adams as of ‘great influence on the commencement of the Revolution’, and ‘read by everyone’—was excluded from the community of Boston pastors for his heterodox views on core Calvinist tenets (p. 9). In truth, both his politics and his theology were controversial in significant circles; why and for whom depends on what is under examination. Mayhew’s complex example is one of many. The uncomfortable fact that clerical political positions on the dispute between the British Parliament and their American colonists did not map neatly onto either theological perspectives or community boundaries has long bedevilled scholars who wish to outline the connections between political theology and the American Revolution. The messiness of the historical record has made it possible, over literally hundreds of years, for historians to argue that the religious spirit of the revolution was animated by Enlightenment thought, by various sub-strains of Enlightenment thought, by the spirit of the awakening movement later associated with evangelicalism, by the thought of transatlantic British religious dissent, or by feuds between dissenters and their Anglican counterparts. The most successful such works place many of these strands in conversation, and thus account for both the divisiveness of the political moment and the choices people and communities made during the conflict.

Review: Shaker Fever: America’s Twentieth-Century Fascination with a Communitarian Sect, by William D. Moore

Review: <i>Shaker Fever: America’s Twentieth-Century Fascination with a Communitarian Sect</i>, by William D. Moore

Editor’s Corner

Editor’s Corner

Sean D. Moore. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814.

In his deeply researched and persuasively argued new book, Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814, Sean D. Moore reveals that the earliest libraries established in what became the United States built their collections using funds derived from the Atlantic slave trade. Moore focuses on the institutional histories of the libraries themselves while also paying close attention to the borrowing practices of patrons over the course of the eighteenth century, leading up to American independence. The libraries at the heart of this book also helped cultivate sophisticated “reading networks” that functioned like social networks “for their members and for their communities at large” (viii). Not only did the era of the American Revolution witness a dynamic shift in ideology but Moore insists that the role of books and literature in American civic life were altered as well. Each chapter is a case study of a particular library, as Moore hones in on the Salem Social Library, Newport’s Redwood Library, the New York Society Library, the Charleston Library Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Beyond the subtleties of each library’s unique history, Moore also engages in close readings of important literary works that would have been available for patrons to borrow. Ultimately, Moore asks “how British books were received and adapted to the needs of colonial communities in the era of the American Revolution, how they influenced thinking about abolition, and how libraries helped enable civic engagement concerning these issues” (3). While Moore maintains throughout Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries that slavery and the transatlantic slave trade played an important role in the creation and stocking of these libraries, he also suggests, rather convincingly, that “antislavery sentiment” in colonial North America and the early American Republic “arose, paradoxically, on the foundation of slavery-created spaces of reading and the books within them” (34).