Early America Research Articles

A New Jerusalem: Flavius Josephus in Early America

This article argues that the first-century Jewish historian, Titus Flavius Josephus, was of central importance to early American Protestants as they wrestled with how to construct a divinely upheld polity and with who would be included within it. By tracing the prefaces to the many editions of Josephus that were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it becomes clear that many Protestant readers in America felt torn between two competing identities: Rome and Israel. Scholars of early America are familiar with both labels. But as many early Americans knew from Josephus, those images were not always complementary. In fact, as they pondered over the account of the decimation of the first Jerusalem at the hands of Rome, it became clear that there might be something antithetical in those ancient models. This article argues that Josephus's histories enabled Americans to hold together the tensions in their national identity and ancient imagination that envisioned the United States as both a new Rome and a New Jerusalem. As a foundation, Josephus breathed life and legitimacy into the developing American culture. By neglecting to account for Josephus in this era, scholars have overlooked one of the most pervasive stories that formed the character and understanding of American Protestantism.

Republicanism in a Monarchical World: The Early United States and the Southern European Republics

Republicanism was a deeply rooted belief of those who crafted early American foreign policy and often led policymakers to an isolationist approach in dealing with European monarchies. How did those same figures respond when dealing with republican states abroad? This paper integrates the American viewpoint—from letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and other sources—with the perspective of the republics they encountered—using primary sources and foreign-language scholarship—to demonstrate that American foreign policy was unaffected by the republican government forms of the southern European republics. The paper covers early American interactions with Venice, Genoa, San Marino, and Ragusa primarily during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The paper demonstrates that while individuals admired each of the various republics of the Old World, both the United States government—motivated by republican fears at engaging with European power politics—and the governments of the republics the United States interacted with consistently prioritized commercial relationships in diplomacy and did not treat republican states in any distinct manner from monarchical ones. This focus on American relations with European republics supports the literature that suggests an absence of ideologically motivated interventionism and internationalism in the early Republic.

Forum: Holly Brewer's “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire”—Introduction

Historians have long since agreed that slavery was central to the social, economic, and political life of the English-speaking North American colonies, and then early United States. Yet the origins of North American slavery have remained far less clear. Holly Brewer's article, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire,” which appeared in a recent issue ofLaw and History Review, attempted to clarify one key question within this puzzle. Did judges and legislatures in the colonies create their own institution of slavery? Or did they borrow from English precedent? For Brewer, the answer is clear: seventeenth and eighteenth century English judges, merchants, and others, in tandem with “crown policy,” built the institution of slavery that would be “a foundation for a common law of slavery in all English colonies and for the slave trade.” Slavery, in other words, was legal in England before theSomersetdecision. It would thus be legal in the British Empire.1

James M. Córdova. Review of "Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas" by Alessia Frassani.

James M. Córdova. Review of "Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas" by Alessia Frassani.

"The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America by Colin G. Calloway

Reviewed by: "The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America by Colin G. Calloway Kate Fullagar "The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America. By Colin G. Calloway. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 283 pages. Cloth, ebook. At the enormous conference between Indigenous and colonial leaders in Augusta, Georgia, in November 1763, a Cherokee leader from Chota staged a piece of political theater. Kittagusta, "the Prince of Chota," stretched out before the assembled delegates "a string of beads with three knots." He explained that the first knot was Chota, the leading town of the Overhill Cherokee. The last knot was Charleston, the main town of the Carolina colonists. The knot in between was Fort Prince George, the small British encampment that had served as a major trading depot through the 1750s and was the site of a treacherous colonial massacre of Cherokee hostages in 1760. Three years later, Kittagusta expressed hope that the talks between each town "shall always be kept straight."1 Kittagusta's theatrical flourish speaks to many of the themes of Colin G. Calloway's "The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America. Firstly, the book shows how strongly Native Americans in the early modern era incorporated colonial centers into their own geographies. Secondly, it demonstrates that they understood those centers in relational and comparative ways to their own towns. Finally, Calloway emphasizes a history of nonviolent exchange and communication between Natives and European settlers in early North America that is often swamped by the more dramatic episodes of warfare and bloodshed. Kittagusta's pointed inclusion of Fort Prince George's darker role in the Cherokees' past, as a site of massacre as well as of trade, also reminded his audience that he never forgot the deception and danger that colonists always posed—a theme to which Calloway's book gestures perhaps less than Kittagusta would have liked. Though Calloway flags the "dispossession and racial violence" (194) of colonial American history, he focuses most of his attention on the way that Indians negotiated for peace, trade, and work, and on how they "adapted to new pressures" (3). This decision to emphasize the more peaceful forms of encounter between Natives and settlers is deliberate; noting the magnitude of work—including his own—that already exists on treaties and frontier violence, Calloway argues here for a deeper inquiry into [End Page 458] all the other forms of interaction between these two groups of people in North America. This quest leads him to the colonial town. As Calloway remarks, "Chiefs Now in This City" were far more common sights than either contemporaries or later historians have recognized. He stresses that the image of Indians beating a steady if melancholy retreat further and further into the so-called backcountry as the settler revolution advanced westward with relentless force is a damaging myth that obscures how "Indian people frequently moved toward rather than away from them [urban areas], as they responded to new centers of power … and took advantage of new economic opportunities" (3). In other words, Calloway shows that Indians recognized dividing lines in the middle of newcomer settlements rather than beyond their horizons and also that these edges could be the basis of productive as well as destructive relationships. He adds to Patrick Spero's recent dictum that frontiers existed "anywhere Indians were" by revealing how, from a Native perspective, they popped up "anywhere colonists were" (4).2 There are disadvantages to Calloway's emphasis on the positive elements of Native-European interactions, though. Balancing narratives of tragedy and possibility is the hardest and most common problem for any historian of Native America; to gain a fuller understanding in this case, "The Chiefs Now in This City" might best be read alongside some of Calloway's own earlier books, especially The American Revolution in Indian Country and Pen and Ink Witchcraft, which more fully detailed Indian bloodshed and cultural loss.3 "The Chiefs Now in This City" covers the entire Eastern Seaboard of North America, from the Mi'kmaqs in Canada's eastern Maritimes to the Creek near Saint...

Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America

Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Primeros Libros de las Américas: Impresos Americanos del Siglo XVI en las Bibliotecas del Mundo

Primeros Libros de las Américas is a free database of scanned images of early printed books produced in the Americas from 1455 to 1600. This project is an international collaboration of more than 25 institutional partners from Mexico, Spain, Peru, and the U.S. The collection continues to grow as partner institutions join the project. The database includes high-resolution images and rich metadata descriptions that allow efficient searching. The goal of the project is to build a free digital collection of imprints from the early Americas that will include at least one copy of the 136 titles that have survived to the present. The collection offers unique primary sources for a variety of academic fields studying Colonial Spanish America.

‘Let us conquer space’: Visual thinking as nation building in the early United States

The visualization of spatial knowledge is so common today that we rarely give it a second thought. But it depends upon the fairly recent recognition that maps are not just representations of the landscape, but also tools of analysis. By the end of the eighteenth century, Americans and Europeans began to use maps and other graphic tools to harvest data about the natural world. In the United States, this experimentation was prompted by political independence and the attendant need to govern the population, master the natural environment, facilitate white settler expansion, and establish agricultural self-sufficiency. To navigate this volatility, individuals began to experiment with visual and spatial representation from 1790 to the 1810s, and when considered together their efforts suggest a new era of visual thinking.

Book Review: Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849

Book Review: Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849

Trade networks, heroin markets, and the labor market outcomes of Vietnam veterans

The role of ethnic immigrant networks in facilitating international trade is a well-established phenomenon in the literature. However, it is less clear whether this relationship extends to illegal trade and unauthorized immigrants. In this paper, we tackle this question by focusing on the case of the heroin trade and unauthorized Chinese immigrants in the early 1990s United States. Between mid-1980s and mid-1990s, Southeast Asia became the dominant source of heroin in the US. Heroin from this region was trafficked into the US by Chinese organized criminals, whose presence across the country can be approximated by the location of unauthorized Chinese immigrants. Instrumenting for the unauthorized Chinese immigrant enclaves in 1990 with their 1900 counterpart, we first show that greater presence of unauthorized Chinese immigrants in a community led to a sizeable increase in local opiates-related arrests, a proxy for local heroin markets. This effect is driven by arrests for sale/manufacturing of the drugs. Next, we examine the consequences of Chinese-trafficked heroin by looking at its impact on US Vietnam-era veterans – a group particularly vulnerable to heroin addiction in the early 1990s. Using a triple-difference estimation, we find mostly small but statistically significant detrimental effects on labor market outcomes of Vietnam veterans residing in unauthorized Chinese enclaves in 1990.

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires

Reviewed by: The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires DeLisa D. Hawkes Derrick R. Spires. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2019. 352 pp. $49.95. Mary Helen Washington began her 1997 address to the American Studies Association asking the pivotal question: What happens when scholars put African American studies at the center of American studies? Literary historians can extend this question by asking: What happens when scholars stop approaching works written by African American authors as always in response to the discrimination and violence enacted by white Americans? What happens when we finally understand Black print culture as independent from white establishments and the ideologies that created them? Derrick R. Spires demonstrates in The Practice of Citizenship (winner of numerous prizes, including the MLA Prize for a First Book) that early Black writers have always been at the forefront of directing rather than merely responding to the conversation concerning the concept of citizenship in the United States. Early Black writers theorized not only what citizenship meant but also what actions it entailed as they demonstrated the practice of citizenship in their daily lives. Early in his Introduction, Spires establishes the importance of attending to both collective and individually written works as part of the "collaborative, multimedia, polygeneric cultural and intellectual process" of understanding "citizenship (and blackness itself) as a self-reflexive, dialectical process of becoming" (3). Spires invites readers engaged in fields such as literature, history, and political science to understand the work of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black writers as arguing for more than mere recognition by the white legal establishment; instead, relying on texts produced by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, the Black state conventions, William J. Wilson, James McCune Smith, and Frances E. W. Harper, Spires argues that Black writers theorized and practiced five interrelated themes of citizenship in their political work. These themes include neighborliness, participatory politics and circulation, economic citizenship, critique, and revolution. "From the perspective of black theorizing," writes Spires, "states do not make citizens—active and involved individuals and collectives create citizens" (16). Thus, Spires places early Black theorists at the center of US citizenship studies. Early Black print culture proved vital to creating and illustrating citizenship's actual practice rather than its mere idea. In the first chapter, Spires examines neighborliness—or "the ability of fellow citizens to engage each other on terms of mutual responsibility and good faith through 'real sensibility'"—as a citizenship practice in Jones and Allen's 1794 Narrative of the Proceedings of Black People (27). A text more commonly understood as written in response to Matthew Carey's A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793), which focused on the elite and depicted Black Philadelphians in a negative light, Jones and Allen's Narrative, Spires argues, corrects the horrific racial and economic assumptions about Black people's "real sensibility," or ability to achieve civic republic citizenship through depictions of neighborliness occurring between ordinary "poor black" women and men (35). Jones and Allen's Narrative achieves a racially and economically inclusive depiction of citizenship [End Page 239] through neighborliness by restaging scenes from Carey's Account. As Spires puts it: "Narrative interrogates late eighteenth-century theories about the ethical relation between citizens by thinking about the kinds of relations the good citizen should actively produce rather than the inverse, how to produce or identify the good citizen" (36). In other words, Jones and Allen are less concerned with what white Americans claim citizenship to be and are more concerned with what actual civic republic and fellow citizenship look like—in other words, less with the talk and more with the walk. This perspective challenges the very capitalistic nature of citizenship and serves as the basis for the other themes that Spires examines in the later chapters. While neighborliness makes participatory civic engagement an everyday practice that anyone can exercise, participatory politics and circulation counters "arguments that black people were … irredeemably inferior or too dependent on waged and manual labor to warrant full citizenship" (29). Spires examines the Black...

The Course of God's Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America by Philippa Koch

Reviewed by: The Course of God's Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America by Philippa Koch Richard O. Johnson The Course of God's Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America. By Philippa Koch. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 263 pp. During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, St. Michael's and Zion Lutheran Church, then the largest Lutheran parish in the American colonies, continued to gather for worship each Sunday, despite much criticism from those who thought it unsafe. Pastor Heinrich Helmut defended their decision, noting that the congregation practiced what we would today call "social distancing," kept the windows open, and shortened the service to mitigate potential spread of the contagion. The services, he argued, helped address the "hurtful fear" (129) that had engulfed the city. This anecdote is one of many enlightening glimpses offered by Koch in her study of religion and health in the eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic world. The book was conceived and begun before we had heard of COVID-19, but its timely release in the midst of the ongoing pandemic offers an opportunity to learn from our forebears how to think religiously about sickness and death in the context of God's providence. Koch examines a variety of sources, including "sickness narratives," in which Christians wrote accounts of their own illnesses or those of their loved ones, and Christian tracts offering medical advice, such as John Wesley's oft-reprinted Primitive Physic. It goes without saying that eighteenth-century people lived in much more immediate contact with sickness and death than we do—one reason the coronavirus has been such a disruptive force in society and church. Listening, then, to how our ancestors tried to make sense of sickness can help us reconceptualize our own pandemic experiences. Not that epidemics are Koch's primary focus; the Philadelphia yellow fever outbreak is one chapter, but there is much more. She shows us how Christians understood more mundane illness, maternal mortality, and infant and child death. Cotton Mather, she tells [End Page 195] us, was widowed three times and fathered fifteen children, only two of whom survived him, and his reflections are sobering. One of the strengths of Koch's work is that she gets beyond the too common reliance on Puritan writings in trying to understand Protestant views. Mather is a major source for her, but so are the Lutheran Salzburgers in Georgia and the evangelicals influenced by Wesley. She reveals the sometimes unexpected mutual influences among these individuals and groups, and she argues persuasively that there was a common Protestant approach to sickness and health, albeit with some different nuances among Calvinists, Lutherans, and Arminians. That common approach was rooted in a robust sense of God's providence. Koch rightly demonstrates that even among the Calvinists, this must not be viewed as simple fatalism. While these Protestants wrestled every bit as much as we do with the question of why a gracious God would allow suffering and death, they seldom doubted God's steadfast benevolence. The Christian's task, they believed, is to submit, yes, but also to struggle to make sense of it. The way to do this was through retrospection—a faithful and honest examination of one's past life and present suffering with the goal of finding the transcendent meaning in these experiences. To the extent that one can believe their accounts, they often got there. Many pastors and others have faced the same struggle intensely these past two years. In that context, this book may have a wider usefulness than just an interesting study of one minor topic in American religious history. The perceptive reader will be moved by surprising insights into how eighteenth-century Christians faced sickness and death with confident assurance—lessons, we are discovering, we still need to learn. Richard O. Johnson Webster, New York Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur

Reviewed by: Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur Christopher James Bonner (bio) Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction. By Kate Masur. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. Pp. 456. Cloth, $32.00; paper, $20.00.) In the summer of 1826, Washington, D.C., authorities arrested a Black New Yorker named Gilbert Horton on the suspicion that he had escaped slavery. Black travelers were presumed enslaved in much of the South, and when Horton could not produce documents to verify his freedom, authorities sent him to jail with plans to sell him into bondage if he could not provide such documentation. Horton’s arrest drew the attention and ire of prominent New Yorkers, such as Governor DeWitt Clinton. Clinton and others insisted that the arrest violated Horton’s rights as a free person and as a citizen of New York State. In so doing, they made significant claims about Black rights and the federal system as a whole. Horton’s story thus reflects central themes in Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done. Black people lived under a raft of oppressive state and local laws, and an interracial cadre of activists challenged those laws in ways that helped reshape the legal order in the mid-nineteenth century. Masur illuminates how the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment came to exist as measures that legalized racial equality in civil rights. She traces the roots of these policies through interconnected stories of state and federal government, Black and white activism, and a shifting party landscape to reveal how a civil rights movement functioned in the early United States. This book offers a clear and careful narrative of persistent advocacy and political possibility. Masur covers a broad geography, reflecting connections in political and legal development across state lines. Much of this focuses on state restrictions of Black freedom. In 1804, Ohio legislators approved a measure requiring Black people to document their freedom upon entering the state, and in 1807 the state outlawed Black testimony in legal cases involving white people. Virginia had previously enacted similar controls, and Ohio lawmakers embraced restrictions, in part, because they feared an influx of African Americans seeking refuge within their borders. Masur shows that these laws had roots in both racism and anxiety about poverty. State officials invoked a broad power to police communities, restricting Black [End Page 267] life, criminalizing vagrancy, and limiting who could claim state residency and be entitled to poor relief. Ohio’s laws offered a blueprint for measures in Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania; lawmakers across the North could justify racist legislation while claiming that they sought only to secure the public good. Black and white activists struggled against these laws for decades. They developed a robust concept of civil rights, understood as distinct from political rights, the latter being viewed as privileges reserved to a select few. Advocates for civil equality demanded that Black people have rights to sue, to testify in court, to move freely, and to receive equal protection of the law. They protested such measures as Ohio’s residency restriction, as well as the Negro Seamen Acts, which empowered southern officials to jail Black sailors, purportedly to protect the South from dangerous outside influence. As Masur notes, activists called Black men citizens and said these laws violated the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause. But they also made a broader argument that jailing free Black sailors “violated fundamental rights to which all persons were entitled” (122). The breadth of that claim is central to the civil rights movement Masur explores. Many white Americans opposed Black political equality and doubted claims that African Americans were citizens, but by the 1840s growing numbers were open to the idea that Black people were entitled to civil rights. Some white abolitionists viewed equal civil rights as essential to the fight against slavery. Masur highlights a series of petition campaigns that challenged exclusionary laws in specific states, and also urged people across the country to think about the harmful results of racist legislation. Masur builds on recent studies of African American protest with...

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America by Matthew W. Dougherty

Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America by Matthew W. Dougherty

The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America

The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America

Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America

Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America

"Hanging Pretty Girls": The Criminalization of African American Children in Early America

"Hanging Pretty Girls": The Criminalization of African American Children in Early America

In Memoriam Richard Slator Dunn (1928–2022)

I sadly note the passing of Richard S. Dunn, professor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania and director emeritus of the McNeil Center. A dear friend to scholars of early America and distinguished historian, Professor Dunn's first work, Puritans and Yankess: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630–1717 illustrated his wide-ranging interests that placed a classic New England subject, the Winthrop family, in a transatlantic context. His path-breaking work, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, provided a multifaceted, rich cultural history that examined the devastation of the slave trade, the techniques of Caribbean sugar production, and the difficulties of adapting English ways to the tropics. Charles Odegaard, the president of the University of Washington in the sixties, maintained that historians could do anything. Richard Dunn was evidence of Odegaard's dictum. Professor Dunn joined administrative acumen to the furtherance of the scholarly enterprise with his leadership of Penn's history department, the American Philosophical Society (with his wife Mary Maples Dunn, another example of an historian supremely capable of many things), and the McNeil Center at Penn. For this historian of New England, I remember him most fondly for my well-thumbed volume of Puritans and Yankees and his welcome to the McNeil Center's scholarly community.