Early American Frontier Research Articles

Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism by Emma Hart

Reviewed by: Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalismby Emma Hart Kristin Condotta Lee Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism. By Emma Hart. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. vi, 274. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-65981-7.) Well before Revolutionary committees of correspondence monitored their neighbors' consumption of tea, residents of the soon-to-be United States debated the role of the "public good" in their commercial exchanges. Emma Hart's Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalismfollows the contours of this argument, beginning with the medieval fairs of Great Britain, moving through early American frontier settlement, and ending with the idea of "republican citizenship in the marketplace" that emerged in the 1780s and 1790s (p. 185). Hart brings to her text a focus on the places where trade occurred in British North America. Centering on Pennsylvania and South Carolina, she contends that early settlers did business as individuals, prioritizing "private good" or "selfish ends" above the traditional regulations of Old World trade (pp. 8, 47). Over time, however, as economic crises arose and creole elites concentrated their power, price controls, standard measures, and especially centralized markets took on new appeal. The idea of an economic common good, monitored in shared trading spaces, became key to the Revolutionary cause. The early nation under the Constitution and those landed white men used the concept's malleability to their profit—often at the expense of women, racial minorities, and the propertyless. Trading Spacesparticularly traces the ways early Americans forgot about, then rediscovered, existing ideas of the public good by looking at everyday sites of exchange. The first two chapters establish where trade happened in England, Scotland, and British North America: concentrated fairs, marketplaces, and shops for the former two and decentralized ferries, taverns, and even private homes for the last. Distance, Hart argues, crucially shaped the colonial economy. It simply did not make sense for sellers to cart their goods to limited hubs with customers nearby. Chapter 3 points to the successes Americans achieved in such spaces, including women, Indigenous traders, and enslaved African Americans—all of whose actions traditionally would have been limited in centralized marketplaces. This system, however, continued to favor propertied white men, who could access credit in hard times. Chapters 4 and 5 point to exactly such moments, especially after 1763 and during the 1770s and 1780s when colonial assemblies compacted frontier trading and urban provisions markets in order to assert control over economic rivals. In doing so, Hart shows, elite men used commercial policies to re-identify the local—and, as chapter 6 concludes, the national—good with their own interests. Although never uncontested, their efforts negotiated a role for economic limitations in a country that, in part, was founded to preserve the private right to trade freely. Hart builds on a solid scholarship on transatlantic commodity chains, shifts in retailing, and merchant firms. Trading Spacesadds a unique focus on the physical spaces where Americans exchanged. Yet Hart also proposes a fascinating argument about the continuity of familiar institutions in the British imperial world. In a manner reminiscent of Alison Games's The Web of Empire: [End Page 905] English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660(New York, 2008), Hart probes why successful Old World models initially failed to travel to new settings and how, when they did, they were adapted to New World purposes. Ultimately, Trading Spacestells the story of early American identity, weaving together social histories gathered from an array of qualitative sources with discussions of political economy. Hart remains primarily interested in the big question of how contemporaries understood their commercial spaces, and there are moments when readers may wish some of her interesting anecdotes about ordinary, especially minority, traders were further elaborated. But this is only to acknowledge that her work starts a conversation that one hopes others will continue. Kristin Condotta Lee Washington University in St. Louis Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association

Review of Gregory Evans Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015, 408p. isbn 9781421418650. Price $34.95.

Review of Gregory Evans Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015, 408p. isbn 9781421418650. Price $34.95.

Are we Going Back to our Roots? The Restoration of Early Church Ecclesiology in the Modern Church Today

A movement, known as the Restoration Movement, developed on the early American frontier (19th century) to unite the various denominations that followed migrants from Europe and to bring them back to the ideals of the early church. The means to fulfil this quest was done through the belief that the early church could be “restored” in the 19th century. It was asserted that if all denominations simply read the Bible only and rejected all human creeds and traditions that came along with the centuries, there would be one church, total unity and an exact replica of the 1st century church. The methodology was correct, but unfortunately the intellectual paradigms of the day led the restoration leaders to formulate a wanting ecclesiology which ended in more schism than unity. This article sets out to establish that when one considers the modern church trends today and the true nature of the early church, there is clear evidence that contemporary ecclesiologies are being shaped more accurately into the shape of the early church. This is happening by default and spontaneously. Postmodernism is the catalyst that is slowly but surely influencing the natural restoration of the early church in contemporary society.

The American Frontier as State of Nature

John Locke claims that “in the beginning, all the world was America.” If this were, in fact, the case, then the early American frontier ought to resemble the state of nature that Locke describes. Louis Hartz finds in early American settlement a sort of instinctive Lockeanism, while Frederick Jackson Turner sees in the frontier the primary determining factor in American development. Combining the two suggests that American society may well have developed along Lockean lines, but only if the frontier was in fact at least an approximation of Locke’s state of nature. The frontier does resemble such a state in certain respects, though Locke’s concepts of natural law and justice are conspicuously absent, or at least very weak. This helps to explain why the Americanized version of Locke described by Hartz, rather than a more accurate and complete reading, became the dominant ideological force in early American political development.

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd, and: Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America by Russ Castronovo

Reviewed by: Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd, and: Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America by Russ Castronovo Ann Marie Plane (bio) Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier gregory evans dowd Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015 391 pp. Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America russ castronovo New York: Oxford University Press, 2014 247 pp. These two books tackle the problem of communication in the worlds of early North America. Each sheds light on the complexities of [End Page 274] these processes, even as it engages the historicity of such processes with less success. Such an errand into the wilderness could hardly be timelier in the post-Trump era of fake news sites, Facebook echo chambers, and a heightened awareness of media manipulation as a tool of power. It is unfortunate, therefore, that each book stumbles in its attempt to deliver on its promising conception. Gregory Evans Dowd offers a persuasive opening chapter on the cultural importance of rumor. Reading along, I wondered how it could be that historians have so thoroughly neglected this topic. Dowd reaches back to the foundational text of many a historiography class, Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft, and finds in the work of Bloch, and in that of his contemporary Georges LeFebvre, a close attention to false stories, and how, particularly in wartime contexts, such stories influence consequential actions. Dowd draws lightly on the work of sociologists, particularly Tamotsu Shibutani, remarking on their attention to how rumors gain power and credibility. After introducing these various currents, however, Dowd pulls back from advancing any particular conclusions regarding the role of rumor-cum-legend in shaping historical memory. Instead, Dowd asserts that his work "mainly seeks to investigate the power and significance that literally groundless rumors and legends held in their own day … even if some of those tales persist and distort history" (13). His work, then, relies on "examin[ing] a selection of unverified tales told by colonizers and Native Americans that punctuated eastern North American history from the sixteenth century to about 1850" (2). Dowd focuses sometimes on the Southeast, sometimes on the eastern woodlands area of North America; he identifies two key bookends for his tale, beginning with sixteenth-century Spanish rumors of gold in the region and ending with Georgia's discovery of gold in Cherokee country in the 1820s. In between, Dowd organizes the narrative around large-scale "longitudinal" tales in parts 1, 3, and 5 (things like gold, small pox, slavery) and "episodic" tales—more particular stories of specific rumors and their fates in both frontier and metropole in parts 2, 4, and 6. Dowd eschews analysis of the precise nature of the social context in which rumors live. He notes only that "[s]ince the early twentieth century we have called this medium, variously, worldview, collective consciousness, ideology, mentality, discourse, episteme, expectation, and even hegemonic discourse," noting that he prefers to "sidestep the semantic fray, exploring the stuff of the rumors and legends themselves" (11). In some respects, he has to [End Page 275] do this, since the capacious chronological framework of his book encompasses several arguably discrete social milieux, each of which would likely have its own media, patterns, and procedures. Dowd's investigation stretches from the first Spanish entradas of the sixteenth century to the playoff systems among British, French, Spanish, and native power centers in the eighteenth, to the crushing expulsions of the Jacksonian era during the United States' early Republic period. Casting such a broad net, however, makes it very hard to offer any systematic analysis of what cultural preconceptions ground some false stories, enabling them to gain lasting traction, while others disappear on a fickle wind. One might expect, in Dowd's narratives of the particular ("episodes"), these problems could be overcome by maintaining a much tighter focus on the origin, dissemination, and ultimate fate of the frontier's "flying tales." This does not happen in every such treatment. One of the more useful examples, however, comes in his discussion of Benjamin Franklin's hoax, circulated as useful disinformation in April 1782, through...

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier

Book Review| October 01 2017 Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. By Gregory Evans Dowd. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 380 pp. ISBN 978-1421418650 (hardcover $34.95). Elizabeth Hannan Kading Elizabeth Hannan Kading Mystic Seaport Museum Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Connecticut History Review (2017) 56 (2): 223–224. https://doi.org/10.5406/connhistrevi.56.2.0223 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Elizabeth Hannan Kading; Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Connecticut History Review 1 January 2017; 56 (2): 223–224. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/connhistrevi.56.2.0223 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressConnecticut History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Gregory Evans Dowd. Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier.

Gregory Evans Dowd. Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier.

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd

Reviewed by: Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd Alan G. Shackelford (bio) Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. By Gregory Evans Dowd (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 391. $34.95 cloth) Gregory Evans Dowd’s Groundless takes students of early American frontiers in a new direction from the debates and concerns that have dominated the field in recent times. This is no rehash of Richard White’s “middle ground” or its revisers and critics. Rather it is a powerful statement about how misinformation not only shaped early America but also how it continues to (mis-)shape our understanding of it. Rumors, legends, and outright lies are often understood as the bane of historical scholarship. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, they are often buried in the historical record. Should they make their way past the critical eye of the researcher, they will undermine the factual accuracy of the narrative and leave the scholars’ analysis in question. But Dowd, following the lead of cultural historians studying other places and times, finds opportunity in what others might simply see as pitfalls. The misconstruing of information, whether intentional or unintentional, can, as Dowd writes, “bear witness to widely shared beliefs and understandings” (p. 14). As such, this book is explicitly as much an inquiry into historical method as it is [End Page 267] an argument about the past itself. It is this quality that will make it a refreshing and novel read for scholars and serious students of early North America’s frontiers. Many of the vignettes Dowd mines to explore and illustrate the role of misinformation will be familiar to scholars of early America. But what they will find new is his perspective on them. He turns his evidence inside out, not to salvage the evidentiary building blocks for a narrative revolving around events and personalities but rather in an exposition of the evidence itself. Because there is no central narrated event or character, the book revolves around several interrelated and somewhat chronologically developed themes dealing with the colonial conquest of North America, including the colonial search for and expropriation of wealth, the subjection and destruction of American Indian communities, the emergence of race-based slavery, and the use of violence and coercion in all these endeavors. The book is divided into six parts, which alternate in giving what the author terms “longitudinal” and “episodic” perspectives. The three “longitudes” take a theme or a set of interrelated themes and pursue it or them over a broad period of time. For instance, Part One of the book addresses how treasure hunting, pestilence, and slavery all worked together over some two and a half centuries to reveal colonial intentions and stoke indigenous fears. The three “episodes” are focused around more discrete historical events, for instance Part Two focuses on the role of rumors in the turbulent Cherokee-British alliance in the years immediately preceding the Seven Years’ War. Consistent with the author’s previously published books, this one is clearly written in accessible language. He tackles complex issues with sophistication but without jargon. That being said, the book’s several arguments span a vast geography encompassing much of North America east of the Mississippi River, a broad period of time stretching over three and a half centuries, and a host of characters from a multiplicity of Indian and colonial communities. Serious students of early America will have no problem with this episodic quality, but more casual readers could find this “hop-scotching” challenging, [End Page 268] particularly considering the absence of maps. Yet the value of such a quality is that even if not read in its entirety, this book is a powerful statement about why scholars should approach evidence with circumspection, an open mind, and imagination. By not only understanding but also acknowledging the shortcomings of evidence and by allowing the evidence to speak before coming to one’s own conclusions, scholars might actually find the unexpected. They might find fallacies that speak truths. Given the imaginative and forthright approach to evidence and its analysis, I can imagine using this book in any advanced course on early America or historical...

Review of 'Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier'

Review of 'Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier'

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd

The Midwest and Early American History

The Midwest and Early American History Donald R. Hickey David Preston, Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Read to Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 460pp. $29.95. Colin Calloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 214pp. $24.95. [End Page 147] Patrick Bottiger, The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 244pp. $50.00. Mary Elise Antoine, The War of 1812 in Wisconsin: The Battle for Prairie du Chien. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016. 287pp. $29.95. David Andrew Nichols, Engines of Diplomacy: Indian Trading Factories and the Negotiation of American Expansion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 254pp. $32.95. John Reda, From Furs to Farms: The Transformation of the Mississippi Valley, 1762–1825. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. 201pp. $38.00. Peter Shrake, The Silver Man: The Life and Times of Indian Agent John Kinzie. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016. 165pp. $14.95. Gregory Evans Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 391pp. $34.95. Scholarly interest in the history of the Midwest originated in the late nineteenth century, stimulated in part by the enormous influence of Frederick Jackson’s Turner’s seminal paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which he delivered in 1893 at the annual conference of the American Historical Association in Chicago. “The true point of view in the history of this nation,” he said in that paper, “is not the Atlantic coast, it is the great West.” Turner’s call coincided roughly with the publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s popular 4-volume work, The Winning of the West (1889–96), which was devoted almost entirely to the Trans-Appalachian West and especially the Midwest. Turner’s pronouncement was followed by the proliferation of PhD programs at midwestern universities, where faculty and students, using readily accessible local sources, produced a growing body of monographs exploring the local, state, and sectional history of the region. Most of these works are still serviceable today. Of special note are two broad studies of the Old Northwest that represent a kind of culmination of this phase of the [End Page 148] historiography: Beverly W. Bond Jr., The Civilization of the Old Northwest: A Study of Political, Economic, and Social Development, 1788–1812 (1934), which makes good use of contemporary newspapers; and R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1840 (two volumes, 1950), which is full of valuable information. Seeking a greater voice in the profession, historians in the region in 1914 established an association that produced a journal, the Mississippi Valley Historical Journal. Although the field of midwestern history was well-established by World War II, thereafter it went into eclipse. The huge growth of graduate programs in other parts of the nation, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with the emergence of new fields of study, pushed midwestern history into the background. In truth, the elite schools in the East had never lost their dominant position nor their interest in eastern history. Students of colonial and early national America who practiced the newer forms of history—quantitative history in the 1970s and the history of race, class, ethnicity, and gender more recently—have had no trouble finding congenial topics in the East. Reflecting these changes, the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1964 was retitled the Journal of American History. Recently, midwestern history has enjoyed something of a revival. One reason is a growing belief that events in the West shaped broader government decisions. As François Furstenberg has put it, “rather than imperial capitals imposing their will on the populations of distant peripheries, the actors on those peripheries impose their will on policymakers in the center” (Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” American Historical Review 113 [June 2008], 653). Some of the credit for this revival must also go to historian Jon Lauck. An indefatigable advocate of the history of the Midwest, Lauck is the author of several books on the...

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd (review)

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd (review)

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. By Gregory Evans Dowd

<i>Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier</i>. By Gregory Evans Dowd

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Early America: History, Context, Culture Series. By Gregory Evans Dowd.

Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Early America: History, Context, Culture Series. By Gregory Evans Dowd. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. xi + 391 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographical essay, index. $34.95.) Gregory Evans Dowd masterfully “seizes upon the uncertainties in [historical] evidence to attempt a new history of the early North American colonial encounter” (p. 275). By situating rumor and legend at the center of his analysis, Dowd reveals that rumoring and hoaxes—from the beginnings of European colonization to Andrew Jackson’s campaign for Indian removal—bore great power on the frontiers of early America. In fact, rumors and legends ultimately acted as forces of violence and colonialism. In addition, Dowd uses the stories that were told about those rumors to … bryan.rindfleisch{at}marquette.edu

Review: Senator Benton and the People: Master Race Democracy on the Early American Frontiers. By Ken S. Mueller

Review: Senator Benton and the People: Master Race Democracy on the Early American Frontiers. By Ken S. Mueller

Senator Benton and the People: Master Race Democracy on the Early American Frontiers. By Ken S. Mueller.

Senator Benton and the People: Master Race Democracy on the Early American Frontiers . Early American Places Series. By Ken S. Mueller. (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014. xi + 320 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $45.00, cloth; $29.95, paper.) Although one of nineteenth-century America’s preeminent political figures, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton has attracted no major biographies or monographs since the 1950s. The political career of Benton, a pillar of the Democratic Party for decades and westward expansion’s most bombastic visionary, spanned the era from the War of 1812 to the sectional crisis of the 1850s. For much of the twentieth century, the ardent Jacksonian was lauded by historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Nisbet Chambers, and John F. Kennedy, as a tribune for the common settler and, late in his career, a courageous opponent of the extreme proslavery and sectionalist elements growing in Washington, DC, and Missouri, despite his own slaveholding background. … pasleyj{at}missouri.edu

Father Richard’s Motives for Publishing the First U.S. Catholic Newspaper

Beleaguered and overworked French missionary priest Father Gabriel Richard and a 16-year-old boy published the first American Catholic newspaper. Rather than doing so in a large Eastern city, they brought forth their newspaper, The Michigan Essay , in a small town on the early American frontier. Besides being the first Catholic newspaper in the nation, it was also the first newspaper of any kind ever published in Michigan. This article focuses on the motives of the priest and the teenaged ally for undertaking this risky and expensive venture, and how it resulted from Father Richard’s zeal for proselytizing, teaching moral virtue as one of his role models Benjamin Franklin had done, and educating native American Indian children in his care.

Daniel P. Barr. A Colony Sprung from Hell: Pittsburgh and the Struggle for Authority on the Western Pennsylvania Frontier, 1744–1794.

In A Colony Sprung from Hell, Daniel P. Barr tells the story of the struggle for authority in the lands surrounding the forks of the Ohio River (modern-day Pittsburgh) in the second half of the eighteenth century. He contends that the disputes over power that marked this region were a product of the chronic inability of provincial, imperial, or national authorities to effectively govern the western Pennsylvania frontier. Barr highlights how governments lacked the legitimacy or resources to impose their will over the region and that war and social conflict undermined whatever efforts they did muster. Moreover, in response to the repeated failures of external entities to provide order, the region's growing population of white settlers developed a localist political culture that was suspicious of outsiders, placed local needs before the interests of outside authorities, and, as a result, hampered governments' efforts to assert control. Barr's book joins a number of recent borderland studies that portray early America's frontier zones as places sought after and influenced by many, but controlled by none. Thus, A Colony Sprung from Hell does not so much break new ground as add a valuable case study to a now familiar view of the backcountry. Through his analysis of the contest over the Ohio forks, Barr provides an excellent window into the complex, multi-faceted nature of the battle for property and power along the early American frontier. He shows that the conflict involved various Native American nations, the provinces (and later states) of Pennsylvania and Virginia, ordinary settlers, powerful land speculators, British imperial officials, and, finally, the government of the United States.