American Colonization Research Articles

MacLeish/Oppenheimer, Trump, and the Conquest of America

Archibald MacLeish (Pulitzer prize-winning poet/playwright) published his highly acclaimed essay “The Conquest of America” in the August 1949 Atlantic Monthly. His essay focused on an American crisis of national purpose, and central to his account is the importance of a national image for America. In particular, he called for a redeclaration of American purpose by appealing to a Jeffersonian “Revolution of the Individual.” MacLeish’s friend Robert Oppenheimer responded to his essay with high praise but also criticism. In this article, we use the MacLeish/ Oppenheimer exchange as a springboard for a discussion of the crisis of American democracy today exemplified by the election of Donald Trump. We take a synthetic approach, relying not simply on MacLeish/Oppenheimer but more importantly on contemporary scholars. We attempt to construct an American image with a realistic meaning for today. The image includes three interweaving political components—Liberal Democracy, Liberal Nationalism, Liberal Internationalism—complemented by America’s historical role as Democracy’s Vital Center. After sketching this national image, we discuss each component, touching on several contemporary issues as well as the general nature of the image in light of Trump and the current crisis of American democracy.

The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660, by Misha Ewen

The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660, by Misha Ewen

Phases of Filipino Proletarianism in the 20th Century Dagling Tagalog: A Critique Using Pierre Macherey’s Theory of Gaps and Silences

Self-image is deeply rooted in one’s place in society, as manifested in one’s involvement in its facets and realities which are spoken of in literature, and yet it is the “unspoken” or the “unsaid”– the gaps and silences in the texts– that exposes the ‘unconscious’ of the work where lies a text’s repressed historical narrative and discourse. Accordingly, this study was targeted toward the deep understanding of how Filipinos see themselves and each other as Filipinos (self-image and self-identity) during the American colonization in the Philippines in the 20th century, specifically as proletarians, through the examination of the textual gaps and silences in dagling Tagalog texts written and published in the early 20th century. Using the post-structuralist Marxist theory of gaps and silences by Pierre Macherey, this paper discusses the subject formation of Filipino characters into the image of a proletarian and the phases of Filipino proletarianism. The results indicate that there are three phases to which Filipino proletarians are subjected: from False Consciousness to Recognition of Oppression, and finally to Revolution or Self-emancipation through carrying the “duty.” The study concludes that the texts are propagandist literature, with anti-government, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial sentiments hiding behind the mask of fiction and satire, emerging through the gaps and silences. Additionally, the portrayal of the Filipino proletariat in the texts is shaped by Marxist ideals of revolution, hence the inclination of the literary production of the texts towards the communist ideology.

Subjugated to Free Independent States of America, Boston Tea Party by Sons of Liberty and Declaration of Independence

This article explores how Native Americans and Africans have historically been treated by Europeans, with a particular emphasis on how both groups have been portrayed as barbaric and primitive in a variety of media, including literature, minstrel shows, newspapers, and advertisements. We'll talk about Native Americans' difficulties and how they gained their independence in this section. European colonization of North America resulted in the displacement of these tribes, who were then forced into reservations and subjected to assimilation strategies that were often violent and betrayed treaties. European assimilation efforts aimed to erase Native American culture, history, and identity through the establishment of boarding schools that forced Native American children to adopt European habits, attire, and language. The method was intended to "kill the Indian, save the man," as institutions such as the Carlisle Indian School illustrated. Despite the hardships and cultural loss inflicted on Native Americans, their experience in boarding schools was critical in developing future Native American leaders and building a sense of pan-Indian identity, thereby refuting the notion of them as a dying race. The article also delves into the influence of British colonial rule on Native Americans, as well as the imposition of taxes without representation, which sparked riots such as the Boston Tea Party. The Continental Congress and the following Declaration of Independence were watershed points in the American Revolution. Furthermore, the Coercive Acts meant to punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party, stoked colonial discontent and aided in the commencement of the American Revolutionary War. The article finishes by underlining the significance of these historical events in establishing the identity of the United States and the ongoing struggle for Native Americans' rights and acknowledgment. This in-depth examination of historical events and their interconnectivity sheds light on the complicated and often brutal interactions between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, which ultimately influenced the establishment of the United States and its values (Volo, 2003).

INDIAN MYTHS AS THE BASIS OF HART CRANE’S MYTHMAKING

The article focuses on the specific significance of the myths of the indigenous peoples of North and South America for the formation of a special artistic creation of Crane’s “myth to God” (the definition of the poet). The purpose of the research is to identify and analyze the ancient mythologies used by Hart Crane to construct the future of America, which will be inspired by the new myth. This new myth, according to Crane, will emerge from the synthesis of all mythologies existing on the American continent, the achievements of all cultures whose peoples participated in the discovery and development of the New World, and the incredible success in the development of civilization that the Americans achieved. Crane’s poetry space is homogeneous. Probably somewhat eclectic, but homogeneity is achieved by a purposeful orientation to the subordination of all components to the American idea, that is, Crane’s space is a poetic melting pot. In accordance with the indicated homogeneity, in conducting the research the synergy of literary methods is used: biographical, which made it possible to follow the works from the initial idea to their creation; cultural-historical, due to which the characteristic features of the era of modernism are identified in the poet’s works; comparative, which makes it possible to compare the elements of work of different poets (not only modernists, but also remotely distant literary periods); ritual-mythological, intended for direct analysis of the paradigm of Indian myths; historical-functional, which made it possible to identify the reception of Crane’s works from total non-acceptance to the granting of program status; systemic-holistic, to which all the above-mentioned methods are subordinated, because it helps to highlight the main core (idea) of works (Crane’s “myth to God”), to which all other images, motives, plots, etc. are subordinated. In Hart Crane’s works, almost every word holds a mythological potential, it always functions in its original meaning, based on which the mythical context prevails. It can be the name of Pocahontas or the name of Atlantis, stirring up myths about the Indians and the conquest of America by the whites, or about the love of Pocahontas and Captain Smith, about Plato’s mythological Atlantis and the migration of the first settlers across the Atlantic, which in Crane’s time had also become a myth. Or maybe the seagull is one of Crane’s favorite images: an ordinary bird that circles over the Brooklyn Bridge and a permanent character in Native American mythology, in which the boundlessness of freedom and the ingenious mind of a trickster are combined. That is one verbal marker of Crane – the seagull – holds and simultaneously produces several meanings, from concreteness to the symbolism of the myth, as the majestic image of the Brooklyn Bridge, which removed the mythological dimension, became the new myth created by Hart Crane.

Adaptation and the Geographic Spread of Crop Species.

Crops are plant species that were domesticated starting about 11,000 years ago from several centers of origin, most prominently the Fertile Crescent, East Asia, and Mesoamerica. From their domestication centers, these crops spread across the globe and had to adapt to differing environments as a result of this dispersal. We discuss broad patterns of crop spread, including the early diffusion of crops associated with the rise and spread of agriculture, the later movement via ancient trading networks, and the exchange between the Old and New Worlds over the last ∼550 years after the European colonization of the Americas. We also examine the various genetic mechanisms associated with the evolutionary adaptation of crops to their new environments after dispersal, most prominently seasonal adaptation associated with movement across latitudes, as well as altitudinal, temperature, and other environmental factors.

Phylogeny and paleobiogeography of the enigmatic North American primate Ekgmowechashala illuminated by new fossils from Nebraska (USA) and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (China)

Ekgmowechashala is a poorly documented but very distinctive primate known only from the late early Oligocene (early Arikareean) of western North America. Because of its highly autapomorphous dentition and spatiotemporal isolation, the phylogenetic and biogeographic affinities of Ekgmowechashala have long been debated. Here, we describe the oldest known fossils of Ekgmowechashala from the Brown Siltstone Beds of the Brule Formation, White River Group of western Nebraska. We also describe a new ekgmowechashaline taxon from the Nadu Formation (late Eocene) in the Baise Basin of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. Phylogenetic analysis suggests that North American Ekgmowechashala and the new Chinese taxon are sister taxa that are nested within a radiation of southern Asian adapiforms that also includes Gatanthropus, Muangthanhinius, and Bugtilemur. The new Chinese ekgmowechashaline helps fill the considerable disparity in dental morphology between Ekgmowechashala and more primitive ekgmowechashalids known from southern Asia. Our study underscores the fundamental role of southern Asia as a refugium for multiple primate clades during the cooler and drier climatic regime that prevailed after the Eocene–Oligocene transition. The colonization of North America by Ekgmowechashala helps define the beginning of the Arikareean Land Mammal Age and corresponds to an example of the Lazarus effect, whereby a taxon (in this case, the order Primates) reappears suddenly in the fossil record after a lengthy hiatus.

Collections of Spanish paremias of the XVI century and their influenceon the development of folklore tradition

The article examines the works of folklore scientists who laid the foundations of Spanish paremiology. The subject of the study are collections of proverbs, sayings and other small genre forms published in Spain in the XVI century. The focus of attention is the famous apophthegmata of Melchor de Santa Cruz "Floresta española de apotegmas o sentencias, sabia y graciosamente dichas, de algunos españoles" (1574), which collected about a thousand texts and covers all aspects of the life of Spanish society. Along with other famous folklore collections of the XVI century by such authors as Juan de Timoneda, Juan de Mal Lara, Pedro Mejía, the work of Melchor de Santa Cruz influenced the formation of a scientific approach in Spanish folklore studies. The article provides a comparative analysis of collections of folklore texts of this period and emphasizes their influence on the development of Spanish folklore studies of subsequent centuries. The XVI century caused in Spain the rise of national consciousness, which is accompanied by an increase in scientific interest in the Spanish language, its lexical richness and grammatical system. Following the discovery of the New World, Spain is experiencing not only the rapid development of the science of folklore, but also the flowering of linguistic thought, based on the small genres of folklore in the issue of exemplification. The combination of short form and capacious content makes this group of genres attractive to linguists, folklorists, and Spanish writers of the Golden Age.

The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660 by Misha Ewen (review)

The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660 by Misha Ewen (review)

Up the river, into the dark: textual play and dystopian gloom in Joca Reiners Terron’s A morte e o meteoro

The dystopian character of Joca Reiners Terron’s A morte e o meteoro (2019) is indissociable from its critique of colonialism. But while the novel makes frequent references to the violent methods of exploitation that characterized American colonization, it mostly relies on allusions to different literary traditions—including gothic fiction, the adventure novel, and science fiction—in its depiction of colonialism. The dialogue with Heart of Darkness plays a significant role in A morte e o meteoro, which to a large extent is a critical rereading of Conrad’s novella. This article examines how this appropriation of textual and cultural paradigms shapes the dystopian outlook of the novel, while also offering alternatives to the hopelessness that defines its fictional world.

Contemporary wildfires are more severe compared to the historical reference period in western US dry conifer forests

Dry conifer forests in the western US historically experienced frequent fire prior to European American colonization. Mean fire return interval ranged from about 5–35 years, with the majority of fires burning at low-to-moderate severity. The arrival of European Americans initiated notable reductions in fire frequency through the cessation of Indigenous burning, livestock grazing, and fire suppression. These activities effectively excluded fire from most dry conifer forests, thereby allowing live and dead fuels to accumulate. There are concerns that this fuel accumulation is causing contemporary fires (since 1985) to burn more severely compared to pre-colonization time periods, thereby increasing potential for enduring fire-catalyzed conversions to non-forest. Here, we used satellite-derived fire severity data to characterize the prevalence of contemporary (1985–2020) stand-replacing fire in dry conifer forests within four broad ecoregions for all fires, non-wilderness fires, wilderness fires, and prescribed fires. Our results indicate, that as a proportion of area burned, contemporary fires experienced 2.9 to 13.6 times more stand-replacing fire (depending on the ecoregion) compared to the pre-colonization period. Non-wilderness areas exhibit somewhat higher prevalence of stand-replacing fire, relative to the historical fire regime, than wilderness areas (where logging is prohibited). The relatively small difference between non-wilderness and wilderness suggests that fuel accumulation resulting from fire exclusion has played a larger role than historical logging activities on the prevalence of contemporary stand-replacing fire. Prescribed fires do not exhibit a higher prevalence of stand-replacing fire compared to the historical fire regime. We conducted a parallel analysis in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, USA, is it is arguably the best example of an unrestrained fire regime (many fires are not suppressed) in western US dry conifer forests. The Gila Wilderness proportionally experienced only 1.8 times more stand-replacing fire compared to the historical reference period; in contrast, the southwest ecoregion experienced 5.9 times more stand-replacing fire. Fire will inevitably burn a given forest no matter how much money and personnel we commit to fire prevention and suppression, and because of the high prevalence of stand-replacing fire, the long-term persistence of dry conifer forests is jeopardized. Unless forest managers are provided the social license and enabling conditions to substantially accelerate efforts to restore conditions resistant to stand-replacing fire, we anticipate that the extent of dry conifer forests will continue to erode as fire-catalyzed conversions increasingly unfold across the western US.

Sharing biological information across generations: Parallels between indigenous knowledge and genetics for fisheries recovery in the Columbia River Basin

AbstractIndigenous tribes of the interior Columbia River have developed a mutual relationship with native fishes since time immemorial. However, extensive disruption to the natural ecosystem has occurred as European settlement of North America extended westward to utilize abundant natural resources in ways that conflicted with millennia of indigenous protection. This anthropogenic disturbance has led to dramatic declines in native fish species that are central to tribal cultures, but efforts are underway to enable these fishes and the people that rely upon them to persist for future generations. Here, we describe how pairing indigenous knowledge and western science have been applied to assist with fisheries recovery in the Columbia River. Parallel understanding of information passed across generations is central to this effort, from tribal elders with their historical grasp of the natural ecosystem and fisheries, to molecular genetic approaches that track DNA that is passed from parents to offspring and subsequent generations. Examples are provided that illustrate how both indigenous knowledge and genetic tools have been applied to support fisheries recovery in the Columbia River Basin.

Aspirational architecture and AK‐47s: Fragmented violence in Liberia from settlement to the contemporary

AbstractGlobal awareness of Liberia's recent past is largely limited to the long‐term bloodshed that erupted with a 1980 coup and the civil conflict that followed soon thereafter (1989–2003). What remains understudied is how recent episodes of violence are tethered to the decades following Liberia's founding as a settler colony of the American Colonization Society in 1822. Our collaborative Back‐to‐Africa Heritage and Archaeology (BAHA) project, the first to archaeologically investigate the Back‐to‐Africa movement, explores processes of nineteenth‐century settlement at sites established by West Indians and Black Americans. In this article, we focus on the Barbadian‐settled township of Crozierville to highlight the complex ways in which materials associated with the colonizing project are linked to vestiges of recent violence that persist on the postwar landscape. With a specific focus on settler‐community architecture, in addition to the material vestiges of civil conflict, this article highlights the need to understand recent episodes of violence through Liberia's unique history of Back‐to‐Africa settlement and the Black/African Diaspora.

The indigenous critique and the divided brain hypothesis: Ideas to postpone the end of the World

The voice of Indigenous intellectuals on the conduct of the European conquerors, whenever and wherever in the Americas it has been recorded, consists of a thoroughgoing critique of the Europeans’ genocidal and ecocidal proclivities. In recent times, the voice has taken on apocalyptic tones, emphasizing that the West’s chronic disregard for nature imperils all of us, with Ayton Krenak’s eloquent appeal for ‘ideas to postpone the end of the world’. An astoundingly similar critique of the modern Western World’s mindset based on neuroscience comes from the Scottish psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, whose Divided Brain Hypothesis proposes an explanation for what the West has become: an existential threat to human survival. Others such as Mignolo, de Sousa Santos, Bateson and Harries-Jones, have put forward ideas which align with this hypothesis, but the present essay brings these two currents together for the first time and proposes that it was the West’s conquest of the Americas – its people and all their relations and onto-epistemes – that was a key factor in normalizing this mindset. To extend the metaphor, the conquest of the American hemisphere by the European hemisphere normalized the conquest of the right hemisphere by the left.

The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660 by Misha Ewen

Reviewed by: The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660 by Misha Ewen L.H. Roper The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660. By Misha Ewen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. What can we learn from another book on Jamestown? Actually, quite a bit, as Misha Ewen’s study of the first permanent English settlement in North America demonstrates. In the first instance, Ewen has significantly augmented the record of this venerable topic thanks to her visits to a range of British archives customarily ignored by historians of “early America.” The range of evidence she has unearthed provides a fine platform for tracking the connections that English people from all levels of the social pyramid had with early Virginia. These “micro-histories” (3) enable “us to get at the discreet, harder-to-reach corners of early modern society. In myriad unexpected ways, empire building seeped into the everyday life, and the accompanying documentary record, of early modern English society.” (152) Secondly, Ewen irrefutably corrects the still-prevalent view of the Virginia Company, which founded the enterprise in 1606, as an inept entity whose administration lurched from crisis to crisis until the Crown inevitably assumed direct control of Virginia in 1624. Rather, as she relates, the company leadership secured further governmental support for their initiative ranging from approval of lotteries to fund their operations to judicial approval of the transportation of criminals to labor on plantations to sermons promoting American prospects to prospective migrants. The establishment of Virginia helped set the pattern for English colonization by which “private” networks of merchants, aristocrats, and colonials took the lead, drawing upon their own connections, including governmental ones, to legitimize their ventures, raise money and recruit colonists. Ewen demonstrates then how the Virginia Company entrenched the concept of empire in metropolitan minds, just as it entrenched the English presence in America. Her work thus merits careful attention from historians of empire, colonization and seventeenth-century England. More particularly, it examines female investors, such as Lady Cecily West, whose jointure was used to fund the contribution of her husband, Thomas, baron De la Warr and Jamestown governor, but who invested in the colony in her own right, as well as the less elevated Mabel Collymore (35–55). It also chronicles the removal of the indigent to Virginia to solve crime, vagrancy and other social problems; transportation of felons and the indigent provided a ready alternative to hanging and an attempt to alleviate suffering but also manifested an insistence that the poor improve both themselves and a seemingly overpopulated realm (87–116). These accounts illustrate how colonization seamlessly grafted onto social practice. Ironically, though, they indicate the secondary, even epiphenomenal, effect of America on that consciousness. The successful introduction of tobacco cultivation and the end to the long, nasty war with the Powhatans. These crucial developments were underscored by the triumphal 1617 visit to the metropolis by the man largely responsible for them, John Rolfe, and his new wife, the Powhatan “princess,” Metoaka (a.k.a., Pocahontas). The couple’s grand tour (oddly unmentioned in The Virginia Venture despite a chapter devoted to “Creating Capital,” 57–86) included attendance at a court masque and a reunion between Metoaka and the tireless colonizing cheerleader, Captain John Smith, generated fevered interest in Virginia and a recapitalization of the Virginia Company. Its revamped leadership, implemented indentured servitude to facilitate migration and created a colonial House of Burgesses to provide self-government for planters. The devastating Powhatan attack of Easter 1622, though, doused these hopes and expectations. This “massacre” also generated such furious finger-pointing over the management and direction of the colony between clients of the Earls of Southampton and Warwick that the Crown was obliged to intervene. Meanwhile, tobacco proved alltoo-successful: planters in new colonies, most notably in Barbados, joined their Virginia counterparts in cultivating the weed thereby generating a price collapse as buyers of lottery tickets and readers of travel literature turned their attentions elsewhere. Who picked up the pieces? The Virginia Venture leaves open the wider question of who drove English overseas interests, which limits this otherwise fresh analysis; its fifth chapter lapses into the familiar, but misleading, comprehension...

Sowing Wheat and Other Merits: The First "Black Conquistador" of the Mexican Field

Through a close reading of the rhetoric, structure, and context of the Probanza de méritos of Juan Garrido (1538), this article repositions an African-born servant who made himself indispensable to the Mexican Conquest(s). I argue that Garrido developed a hybrid identity that allowed him to live not on the fringe of the Ibero-Atlantic world, but rather as an imperial agent operating at the heart of the expanding empire. Tracing how probanzas deploy rhetoric to engage in individual and collective negotiations with the Crown, demonstrating the bridge from a feudal society to an early modern state, I explore how Garrido may have understood the impact of "race" in his petition and thus reconsider blackness itself in the context of sixteenth-century colonial Mexico. Ultimately, I recast how we understand experiences of Afrodescendants in the conquest of the Americas, and how their own relationship with royal authorities reveals their agency.

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North

Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism

Recent histories of abolitionism have paid considerable attention to the religious origins of the movement, while a mountain of monographs have explored the role that Christianity played in defending slavery. In Bonds of Salvation Ben Wright aims to recover an ideological context that shaped not only abolitionists and their opponents but also every American in between. That ideological context was the overwhelming consensus that the nation and the world should be converted to Christianity. Wright aims to reveal “the role of Christian convictions in creating the ideological worlds of the early republic,” especially how this context shaped “conversionist” and “purificationist” responses to slavery (p. 4). Wright argues that conversionism, the belief that saving individual souls was the proper work of the church and also the surest path to societal transformation, provided a unifying ethos for American Christians in the years after the American Revolution as they embarked on the project of building denominational structures that spanned the nation. Conversionism and an enlightenment belief in progress allowed white evangelical Christians with sincere antislavery convictions to prioritize saving souls over freeing the enslaved in the belief that abolition would occur downstream from salvation. Meanwhile, a few purificationists, such as the Congregationalist Samuel Hopkins, argued that God would never lend his favor to a church that did not first reject slavery. Wright is clear that the conversionist compromise was functionally proslavery, and yet his reframing provides a more nuanced understanding of why many white American Christians who deplored slavery nevertheless did not feel morally compelled to adopt abolitionism. Most interestingly, Wright shows how both advocates and opponents of the American Colonization Society framed their arguments primarily in terms of whether colonization was an effective means of spreading the gospel to Africa, and only secondarily in terms of its effects on slavery.

Beyond the Anglo-World: Settler Colonialism and Democracy in the Americas

This essay argues that delimiting the settler colonial analytic to colonial legacies in the “Anglo-world” risks disavowing its congruent relationship with other colonial ideologies such as those of the Spanish imperial world. In examining Alexis de Tocqueville’s comparisons of Anglo- and Spanish American colonization alongside Latin American writers like Lorenzo de Zavala and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, it shows how they occupied a common discursive terrain in grappling with the prospects for democracy in the new world. For Tocqueville, the failure of Spanish American democracy compared to the United States stems from the different systems of land colonization at work in each context. Sarmiento and Zavala provide different accounts of American colonization that exhibit both intersections with and departures from Tocqueville. Bringing these writers together shows how settler colonial ideologies and imaginaries in the Americas circulated in a shared hemispheric space and reciprocally shaped one another in contingent ways.

Decolonialismo e identidad cultural en América Latina: Herencia Bio-Psico-Social

Since the arrival of colonialism in America, it aimed to impose a new identity on the native inhabitants, a fact that affected all areas of life of the indigenous peoples. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that the system of relationships developed in this struggle of the native peoples maintains a legacy that continues to influence the cultural identity of the Latin American peoples to this day. This is a documentary-type study, taking as an example the existence in Venezuela of a Psychopathic load, as a possible result of that inheritance imposed since colonial times. The theoretical review of several authors makes reference to this inherited psychopathic burden, which is expressed in events such as: homicides and other types of violence, in addition to some problems evident in daily social life. The results of the shared documentary analysis assume that this load of aggressiveness could have been inherited from conflicts generated from the first Spanish conquerors. However, other authors point out that the wars of independence broke with the continuity of our Identity. Finally, we reflect on initiating a change of attitude from the colonial/modernity relationship and strengthening the attitude towards the decolonial, which warrants abandoning and moving away from that social catastrophe that delves into non-human behavior and precisely taking a turn towards restoration of the subjective and material human nature.