Early North Research Articles

John Beveridge, the Neo-Latin Horatian Ode and the Narrative of British Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century North America

The composition of Neo-Latin poetry was integral to the bilingual literary culture of eighteenth-century Britain, and the practice was taken by the British colonists to America. Yet the role of this Neo-Latin verse in the new political, religious and social setting of early North America has remained largely unexplored. This article examines the Latin Horatian odes published by the colonial poet John Beveridge in his Epistolae familiares (Philadelphia, 1765), a collection of Latin verse epistles. Beveridge used his Latin poetry to not only describe but justify British colonisation of North America. His appropriation of Horatian models for the colonial experience was influenced by the later reception of Horace’s poems which attributed religious and political significance to them – in order to reflect the moral, religious and cultural superiority of Christian Europeans in America. By exploring the cultural symbolism of Latin poetry, this article enables a greater understanding of the place of Neo-Latin literature in the colonial endeavour to Anglicize, Europeanize and Christianize America.

‘Listen to the story’: narrative and song in Rāmcand Bālak’s Sītācarit, a Jain Rāmāyaṇa in Brajbhāṣā

ABSTRACTThis article explores the different modes of song in the Sītācarit, a seventeenth-century Brajbhāṣā telling of the Jain Rāmāyaṇa, and suggests a general understanding of the relationship between song and narrative that sees the songs as constituting an added narrative layer. It notes how the modes of song in the Sītācarit evoke different performative settings and aesthetic influences, ranging from the educational to the courtly, and suggests how the intertwining of narrative and song lets us glimpse the poetics of devotion through the lens of the circulation of literary and devotional trends in early modern North India.

The Reign of Error: North American Information Politics and the French Revolution, 1789–1795

The Reign of ErrorNorth American Information Politics and the French Revolution, 1789–1795 Jordan E. Taylor (bio) "It was as if the French Revolution took place in Canada," remembered the Canadian radical Henri-Antoine Mézière. After the eruption of what would become the French Revolution in 1789, Mézière described how Canadians would assemble "in the towns in small groups, tell each other about the latest news received, rejoice with each other when the news is favorable to the French and grieve (but not desperately) when it is unfavorable." Most Canadians held deep ties to France, and their participation in the French empire remained in living memory. Likewise, the inhabitants of the United States felt a kinship for their recent allies in the American war for independence and enthusiastically celebrated the early French Revolution. One U.S. commentator remarked on the "eagerness with which the information [about France] is sought for, and the joy expressed" by the "very considerable majority" of Americans at the revolution's developments. In these early years, almost all North Americans shared a hope that the French people would remake their nation, and perhaps the world, in the image of liberty.1 But only a few years later, beginning in late 1792, North Americans' [End Page 437] pro-revolutionary consensus began to dissipate. Considering the course of events in France—the overthrow of the monarchy, the outbreak of war, the onset of violence, and the attacks on religion—this might appear to be a natural response to events. But Canadian observers responded to these troubling events very differently than Americans. In the United States, controversy raged. Many Americans, especially radicals and those aligned with the Republican party, continued to celebrate France's revolutionary politics until nearly the end of the decade. But others, especially Federalists and their allies, turned firmly against it early on. In contrast, few Canadians dared to publicly support revolutionary France by 1793. One reason for this wide spectrum of opinion was that North Americans did not all hear the same accounts or read the same reports about revolutionary France. They had no transparent window onto the revolution. Instead, they relied on unstable and unreliable Atlantic information networks to learn about events in France. A range of contingent external forces, many of them unleashed by the French revolutionary wars, transformed these information networks and produced an uneven distribution of news across the continent. By the middle of the decade, Canadians accessed and curated a relentlessly anti-revolutionary stream of news, while Americans could pick and choose from a wider variety of news sources. By shaping how North Americans observed the French Revolution, these divergent information networks transformed the political cultures of the United States and Canada during the 1790s. Over the past two decades, scholars of early North American politics have drawn on Jürgen Habermas's insights about the "public sphere" to produce a rich understanding of the complex interplay between political ideologies and social and cultural practices. Yet while this scholarship approaches political culture from the inside out, there is also much to be gained by understanding how external forces constrained early North American politics and discourse. From this perspective, we might see politics taking place not only in inward-facing spheres, but also in outward-facing nodes within Atlantic networks.2 [End Page 438] Scholars often employ the word "network" to describe the exchange or mobility of persons, ideas, and commodities across space. Many kinds of networks existed in the early Atlantic world. Some were pre-arranged, formal, and relatively robust, such as national postal systems or diplomatic networks. Others were more informal and ad hoc, such as the movement of refugees or the so-called "republic of letters." Atlantic information networks tended more toward the latter. Like many networks in the early modern Atlantic, their existence depended on commercial exchange. With the exception of some regularly scheduled packet boats, Atlantic information networks had no independent existence. Rather, the movement of information across oceanic space was largely a byproduct of the movement of commercial vessels. These ships sailed at times and to destinations that might maximize their profit, not when and where they might ensure the...

북한 정권 수립기의 검열 문제에 대하여 -'『응향』 사건'을 중심으로-

북한 정권 수립기의 검열 문제에 대하여 -'『응향』 사건'을 중심으로-

Changes and Prospects of North Korean Civil Law in the 70th Year of the North Korean Regime

이 논문은 새로 입수된 참심원 교양자료(1956)를 중심으로 선행연구들과 중복되지 않는 범위에서 정권초기 북한 민법의 내용을 정리하고, 최근 이론의 분석을 통하여 북한 민법의 변화를 알아보았다. 참심원 교양자료는 재판 실무에서 쟁점이 될 수 있는 사항들을 설명하고 있어 정권 초기 북한 민사법의 흐름을 파악하는데 유익하였다. 민사법률관계나 권리능력 개념, 농호성원의 이혼시 재산 분배, 불법행위 가해자의 부양료 책임 등에서 사회주의 법리가 나타나기도 하지만 아직 생산수단에 대한 개인소유가 인정되고 있었던 상황이라 이중매매, 전당계약, 이자 등의 용어들을 통하여 오히려 현행 북한 민법 보다 우리 민법과 그 내용이 유사한 부분도 적지 않음을 알 수 있었다. 민법전은 2007년 이후에는 개정된 부분이 없고, 그 규율 내용도 여전히 사회주의 계획경제를 기반으로 하고 있지만 북한 경제는 이러한 민법 체계와는 달리 시장의 영향이 지배적이라고 전해지고 이러한 변화는 북한 민법 이론에도 영향을 미치고 있다. 북한 민법 이론에서 이전에 인정하고 있지 않던 개념인 물적재산권, 전당계약, 담보권 등에 대하여 언급한 것은 그 변화의 시작이다. 다만 북한의 정치상황을 고려하면 그 체제유지를 전제로 한 부분적인 변화가 있을 것으로 전망된다.This paper examines North Korean civil law and its changes at the beginning of regime based on Introduction to Legal System for Lay Judge, and also inspects the recent changes based on the new theories of North Korean Civil Law. Introduction to Legal system for Lay Judge, written in 1956 , elucidates the trend of North Korean civil law at the beginning of the regime as it offers practical guidelines for an trial during this period. The book explains the socialist legal principles such as the concept of capacity, distribution of property at the time of divorce in collective farms, and liability for the burden of illegal acts. However, as the North Korea still recognized the private ownership of the means of production in the early years, the book also reveals that the early North Korean civil law used the terms like stellionate, mortgage contract, and interest, which are more closer to the terms in the South Korean civil law than to those in the current North Korean one. The North Korean Civil Code has not been revised since 2007 and its contents are still based on the socialist planned economy. However, as the North Korean economy has been partially transformed into market economy, this change has influenced the North Korean Civil Law theories as well. We can detect the beginning of changes in references to property right, mortgage contract, and security right, which were previously unrecognized concepts in the North Korean Civil Law theories. However, considering the political situation in North Korea, it is expected that there will be a partial change on the premise of maintaining the system.

Early North American experience with the INCRAFT device

BackgroundSeveral low-profile grafts have been created for use in endovascular aneurysm repair in patients with small or difficult to access vessels. Our objective was to evaluate the outcomes of patients undergoing endovascular aneurysm repair with the INCRAFT device in a real-world North American setting. MethodsConsecutive patients undergoing INCRAFT implantation between March 2015 and December 2016 at two McGill University teaching hospitals were enrolled in a prospectively maintained registry. Clinical characteristic and perioperative outcomes were entered into the registry. Two authors performed anatomic measurements from preoperative and postoperative computed tomography angiograms and intraoperative angiograms independently. In cases of disagreement a consensus was reached. ResultsWe included 61 patients with a median follow-up of 363 days (mean, 344 ± 244 days). Minimum left and right access vessel sizes were 7.5 ± 1.7 mm and 7.4 ± 1.5 mm, respectively. More than 90% of grafts were implanted for aneurysm size or growth. Vessel access was percutaneous in 95% of cases. We had a mean length of stay of 0.88 ± 1.8 days with 57.3% of patients discharged the same day. There were 14 procedural type II endoleaks, 10 new type II leaks that were discovered during follow-up, and 11 that resolved for 77% of patients remaining endoleak free during follow-up. There were no 30-day mortalities. Three cancer-related deaths occurred during follow-up. Early complications included one access site repair for bleeding, one access site repair for dissection, and two aortounilateral conversions with femoral-femoral bypass owing to inadvertent ipsilateral gate cannulation. Long-term complications included one graft limb thrombosis, one intervention for type II endoleak with sac expansion that subsequently became infected and was explanted, and one intervention for a type III endoleak for an intervention. During follow-up, 95% of patients remained reintervention free. ConclusionsUse of the INCRAFT device in a real-world North American setting is relatively safe and effective, and is associated with a low rate of perioperative complications. However, we experienced early issues with inadvertent cannulation and deployment of the contralateral limb in the ipsilateral gate. Therefore, we recommend deploying the entire ipsilateral limb before cannulating the contralateral limb. Data with additional follow-up are needed to assess the long-term effectiveness of the INCRAFT device.

Gender Politics in Early Cold War North Korea: National Division, Conscription, and Militarized Motherhood from the Late 1940s to 1960s

This study delves into how North Korea designed gender relations from the late 1940s to 1960s, particularly focusing on the Cold War context which predominantly played in its state-building processes. Gender agenda in the 1940s was often used as a means to prove the North’s superiority to the Southern counterpart under the Cold War rivalry and national division. While the establishment of conscription during the Korean War institutionally enabled masculine dominance, the pursuit of Cold War modernity remolded North Korean men and women as collective militarized subjects in the postwar era. North Korea moreover indoctrinated militarized motherhood as an ideal femininity in the 1960s, asking women to bear and rear “manly” sons who are willing to volunteer for troops.

Vacuum bell treatment of pectus excavatum: An early North American experience

PurposeConservative treatment of pectus excavatum with a vacuum bell device may be an attractive alternative to surgical repair. We describe an early North American experience with this device. MethodsProspectively maintained chest wall clinic registries from two institutions were reviewed to identify pectus excavatum patients ≤21 years treated with the vacuum bell from 2013 to 2017. Multivariate linear regression was used to compare mean improvements in deformity-depth and Haller Index between groups of patients based on age and usage metrics (hours/day and days/week). ResultsThirty-one patients with a median age of 14 years received treatment with the device. Mean follow-up duration was 18 months. Median depth and Haller Index at treatment onset were 2.3 cm and 3.9, respectively. Improvements in deformity-depth were superior with device usage >2 h/day (p < 0.01) and daily use (p < 0.01). After adjusting for compliance, younger age of treatment onset was associated with greater improvement in Haller Index but not deformity depth. ConclusionOur prospective early North American experience found the vacuum bell to be a potential alternative to surgical treatment for pectus excavatum. Longer usage periods in a daily frequency are associated with best results. Type of studyTreatment study; case series with no comparison group. Level of evidenceLevel IV.

Origins of the pottery traditions in the early Neolithic European North of Russia

The following paper deals with origins of the pottery traditions in the early Neolithic European North of Russia. At present there is a prevailing scheme of ornamental styles development stages in the Early Neolithic antiquities forest zone of the European part of Russia from pinned-point/without ornament to the later ornamental comb tradition. Among the series of dates taken as a chronological frame for the Neolithic forest belt around 7000 years ago, there are deeper/ancient definitions for pricked fragments, as well as vessels with comb-style ornamentation. The paper presents technical and technological analysis of the ceramic complex of monuments in Berezovaya Slobodka in Nyuksensky district and monuments in Tudozere and Kemozere in Vytegra district.

Lagoa Santa's contribution to the origins and life of early Americans.

The region of Lagoa Santa, Central-Eastern Brazil, provides an exceptional archeological record about Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene occupation of the Americas. Since the first interventions made by the Danish naturalist Peter Lund in the 19th century, hundreds of human skeletons have been exhumed in the region. These skeletons are complemented by a rich botanic, faunal, technological, and geomorphological archeological record. We explore here the contributions of Lagoa Santa material to the origins and lifestyle of early Americans, providing an historic background. Cranial morphology of Lagoa Santa skeletons allowed the proposition of a model of two biological components for the occupation of the Americas, in which early Americans are morphologically similar to people of African and Australo-Melanesian origin. Furthermore, the archeological record in the region has revealed an intense use of plant resources, a restricted spatial distribution, and the symbolic elaboration of local hunter-gatherers, unveiling a distinct lifestyle compared to early North American populations.

Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India

This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer developed in the Hindi print sphere. The essay links the portrayal of servants with changing class, caste and religious dynamics, in which print intersected with material circumstances to shape the hierarchical relationship between servants and employers. While imaging ‘ideal’ servants, the Hindi vernacular was also infused with their negative counterparts and anxieties around personal interactions between mistresses and servants, taking its cue from quotidian life and caste–community relations of the time. Increasing assertion by Dalits and growing antagonism between Hindus and Muslims left its imprints on portrayals of subordinate-caste and Muslim servants by dominant castes and classes. The vernacular straddled these domains of distance/desire and hate/love in the servant–employer relationship.

Loess in the mid-Atlantic region, USA

AbstractLoess is common in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States south of the Late Wisconsinan glacial border particularly along rivers draining the glaciated areas of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. The broadest deposits occur on the flat landscapes of the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland where two episodes of deposition have been identified. The earlier Miles Point Loess has a limited distribution and is buried by the more widespread Paw Paw Loess. OSL and 14C dates place deposition of the Miles Point Loess during MIS 3. The well developed paleosol formed in the Miles Point Loess acts as a stratigraphic marker. The Paw Paw Loess buries Clovis age cultural materials which date deposition to the end of the Pleistocene. Loess deposits and paleosols are critical in understanding regional landscape evolution, Late Pleistocene environments, and early North American cultural history. Mapping the extent of loess in the Mid-Atlantic using the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s gSSURGO database overrepresents loess in some areas and underrepresents in others.

Through the Lens of War: Akbar's Sieges (1567–69) and Mughal Empire-Building in Early Modern North India

ABSTRACTThe present article is a study of the process of Mughal empire-building in early modern North India using war as the point of entry. Specifically, it focuses on three sieges from the early years of Akbar's reign—Chitor (1567–68), Ranthambhor (1569) and Kalinjar (1569). It teases out certain aspects of these sieges and discusses them at length individually. Bypassing historiographically-popular themes like combat and technology, it explores less-probed issues such as the fate of defeated enemies, the involvement of zamindars and mansabdars, military finance and the role of quasi-military labour in imperial military campaigns. In the process, it strives to write a social, cultural and economic history of Mughal military expansion focused primarily on the second half of the sixteenth century.

European Expansion and the Contested North Atlantic

Scholarship discussing European expansion into the North Atlantic and territorial claims over Newfoundland rarely examines the impact of Dano-Norwegian claims in Greenland. This article integrates the history of the Greenland Norse into the narrative of European expansion to better understand the multinational nature of the early modern North Atlantic fishery. It discusses the rise of island-Iberia in response to the influence of island-Scandinavia, particularly in matters of trade and imperial claims. John Cabot’s reports of “new found land” allowed the other Europeans to fish in waters beyond the Dano-Norwegian Atlantic claims, creating a multinational fishery over which no European power recognized sovereignty until the peace of Utrecht in 1713. Once Dano-Norwegian control over the North Atlantic and Europe’s cod fishery was broken, Norse occupation of Greenland on the far western edge of Europe became a forgotten though still important part of the history of European expansion.

Elizabeth Bishop's Theater of the Inevitable

Elizabeth Bishop's Theater of the Inevitable Heather Treseler ELIZABETH BISHOP'S BRAZIL, by Bethany Hicok. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. 192 pp. $59.50 cloth; $24.50 paper; $24.50 ebook. ELIZABETH BISHOP'S PROSAIC, by Vidyan Ravinthiran. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015. 250 pp. $80.00 cloth; $49.99 paper; $42.50 ebook. "Writing poetry is an unnatural act," Elizabeth Bishop observed in a set of notes dating from the late 1950s or early 1960s, "it takes great skill to make it seem natural. Most of the poet's energies are really directed towards this goal: to convince himself (perhaps, with luck, eventually some readers) that what he's up to and what he's saying is really an inevitable, only natural way of behaving under the circumstances."1 That Bishop, by mid-career, aimed to make her poems seem "natural" and "inevitable" is not surprising to those familiar with her craft. But two recent books, Bethany Hicok's Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil and Vidyan Ravinthiran's Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic, enhance our understanding of the cultural circumstances and technical theater behind Bishop's air of inevitability—the uncanny sense, which Bishop readers often have, that her finished poem could not have been written any other way without diminishing its power. Hicok's and Ravinthiran's books offer new contexts for reckoning with Bishop's enduring appeal. As Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis state in their introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop (2014), "At the beginning of the twenty-first century, her poetry seems, if anything, even more contemporary than during her lifetime, a process facilitated … mainly by the sheer originality and variety of her writing."2 Hicok animates the rich complexity of Bishop's years in Brazil, living among the cultural elite during a period of tumultuous political change and, later, personal urgency, evincing the ways in which Brazilian literature and politics informed Bishop's poetry. It is a book that enables Bishop scholars and readers alike to see, vividly, Brazil's place in Bishop's imaginary. Ravinthiran, for his part, draws on a theoretical framework that includes George Saintsbury as well as Derek Attridge and Stanley Cavell to uncover Bishop's use of sonic and semantic structures, typically germane to prose, within her poems, prose poems, literary prose, and letters. He offers a fascinating new [End Page 181] way to interpret—and to hear—Bishop's aesthetic, one with ramifications for the study of poetics, more generally. Both books work against established critical tendencies to read Bishop primarily as a North American poet, one who happened to spend the greater part of two decades in Brazil, and to consider her primarily as a second generation modernist or narrative lyric poet, principally informed by the techniques of a single genre. Hicok's study steers Bishop scholarship further away from its early North American focus, positioning Bishop's life in Brazil among its political tensions and upheavals, the social architecture of class and race, the influences of Portuguese language and literature, and the informing richness of its landscape and ecology. In Hicok's meticulous narrative, Bishop emerges as a poet influenced by—and indebted to—the cultural and literary legacies of both Americas. From a similarly novel perspective, Ravinthiran reads Bishop not as a poet who also happened to write remarkable letters and stories but as a writer intrinsically provoked and guided by the cadences of prose in her work across genres. Prosaic, in his definition, is rinsed of its pejorative force and repurposed to describe ways in which prose structures enhance the sound and cognitive texture of Bishop's inimitable style. Together, these two books extend our understanding of Bishop's oeuvre across generic and national boundaries, moving in the direction of the speaker in Bishop's "Santarém" (1978) who posits: Even if one were temptedto literary interpretationssuch as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female—such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight offin that watery, dazzling dialectic.3 Written toward the end of her life, long after Bishop had returned from Brazil, "Santarém" cautions critics who might be "tempted" to apply reductive binaries to the curated ambiguities—and the...

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...

Writing Translations, Writing History: Colonial American Voices and the Problem of Verticality

This article defines and analyzes the concepts of vertical and horizontal translation. Translators of historical documents must translate vertically through time as well as horizontally from a different language. These processes are further complicated when the original transcriber was a different person from the original speaker and when the source passes through multiple languages and cultures. The article explores these concepts in translations of sources by Pontiac, John Smith, and others in early North America.

Author

Author Joseph Rezek KEY WORDS History of Authorship, African American Literature, Black Atlantic, Early American Literature, John Marrant, Early American Print Culture, African American Print Culture, Book History, Textual History, Race, History of Print, Religion, Slavery, George Whitefield, Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon The author is not dead, for book historians, but she has been desacralized. From the Latin auctor—one who approves or sanctions, provides evidence or expertise; a prime mover; a progenitor of a race or nation; or one who creates a work of art—the English term author came to signify the sole originator of a literary text long after its association with God, the “Author of Nature.”1 Its literary meaning acquired a hallowed, quasi-mythological connotation only after the mutual imbrication of bourgeois individualism, professional authorship, and proprietary copyright in the eighteenth century. It was the modern, deified Author (capital “A”) that Roland Barthes sought to demystify. “We know now that the text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”2 Writing in Barthes’s immediate wake, Michel Foucault defined authorship exclusively through its function in discourse.3 These famous refusals of an author’s originating power and autonomy remain influential in literary studies. They also helped legitimize book history’s commitment to embedding authors within a “communications circuit,” a “field of cultural production,” or other contingent historical, personal, and economic relationships.4 And yet most book historians believe, contra Barthes and Foucault, that authors (lowercase “a”) play active if not [End Page 599] autonomous roles in constructing their texts. Authors, for us, are historical actors who compose texts, not works of mystical genius; they are embedded in and susceptible to historically specific circumstances and influences; they are directly beholden to the numerous individuals who control and distribute media technology (and not only print); and they are just as strategic in their navigations of the world of media and communication as any of their equally historically embedded and actively engaged readers. Despite this general commitment to author-as-actor, one Foucauldian insight continues to resonate. The “author function,” Foucault writes, “does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization.”5 This has been especially generative for early Americanists, who have labored to differentiate the story of authorship in early North America from familiar European narratives. They have emphasized early America’s fragmented and provincial print industry; its dependence on trans-Atlantic material, interpersonal, and cultural networks; the absence of copyright monopolies; indigenous media practices; and the consequences of slavery, settler colonialism, radical Protestantism, and republicanism. A unique picture of early American authorship has emerged from all this. Important studies have considered oral, non-alphabetic, and community-oriented authorship in Native American materials (Weaver, Round, Cohen, Mt. Pleasant et al.); the mutual imbrication of literary authorship and provincial moral and social life (Amory and Hall); the performative aspects of Puritan authorship (Neuman); the anonymity and pure negativity of republican authorship (Warner); African American participation in and resistance to dominant modes of white authorship (Foster, Brooks, Cohen and Stein); the belated rise of professional authorship (Charvat); the rise of female authors, especially in the nineteenth century (Kelley, Homestead); the persistence of amateur authorship (Jackson); and antipathies to authorship itself as a rubric for organizing literary culture (McGill).6 [End Page 600] While enumerating such distinctiveness, early Americanists have also attended to the way authors faced conditions not all that different from those in Europe—with a shared technology of the letterpress, a print culture similarly affected by orality and manuscript practices, and a media landscape shaped by some of the same cultural, economic, and ideological forces. John Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings (1785) is both distinctively American—composed by a member of the African diaspora who lived in the colonies—and materially European, as it was a popular religious pamphlet published in London. This makes it an ideal text to help us think about the meaning of the keyword author in early American studies...

Early North African Cattle Domestication and Its Ecological Setting: A Reassessment

Nearly four decades have passed since an independent North African centre for cattle domestication was first proposed in 1980, based on the Combined Prehistoric Expedition’s work in the Nabta Playa—Bir Kiseiba region of southern Egypt, and the initial rigorous debates between Andrew B. Smith and Fred Wendorf, Romuald Schild and Achilles Gautier. More recently, geneticists have entered the fray with determinations on the spread of haplotypes, and the timing thereof, that extend the scope and increase the complexity of the debate. Here, a new look at the botanical data and a re-analysis of the geology of Bir Kiseiba–Nabta Playa rejects the ecological foundations of the early African domestication model, while a detailed examination of the published osteological and radiometric data from the same area reveals a more nuanced picture than has been recognised to date. These results are placed into context by a wider review of the genetic and other archaeological evidence from the Western Desert of Northeast Africa, where no other cattle remains designated as domesticated have been found. It is concluded that (a) Bos remains from the early Holocene at Nabta Playa—Bir Kiseiba were those of hunted aurochs; (b) domesticated caprines were likely present in Northeast Africa before domesticated cattle; and (c) the domesticated cattle spreading across Northeast and northern Africa, including Nabta Playa—Bir Kiseiba, from the late seventh millennium BC or early sixth millennium BC onwards were descendants of Bos taurus domesticated in the Middle Euphrates area of the Middle East.

The first crocodylomorph from the Mesozoic of Turkey (Barremian of Zonguldak) and the dispersal of the eusuchians during the Cretaceous

A new crocodylomorph from the upper Barremian İncigez Formation of Zonguldak (NW Turkey) is described for the first time based on jaw and limb bone elements from the collection of the Istanbul Technical University. The material is attributed to Turcosuchus okani gen. et sp. nov. according to a unique combination of character states, such as a strong heterodonty, composed of non-spatulated teeth, a maximum of 10 teeth posterior to the symphysis, a sigmoidal dorsal margin of the dentary in lateral view, and a splenial excluded from the symphysis. An updated phylogenetic analysis of crocodylomorphs confirms that this new taxon belongs to the Hylaeochampsidae, and that it forms a relatively robust clade with the derived Unasuchus, Acynodon, Iharkutosuchus and Hylaeochampsa. Turcosuchus also presents some anatomical convergence with bernissartids, allodaposuchids, basal globidontans and other crocodylians. Turcosuchus okani is one of the earliest, but not basal hylaeochampsids, and the first known Early Cretaceous eusuchian outside Europe and North America. Our results support the clear geographical segregation between the Late Cretaceous tribodont eusuchians: basal globidontans in North America, and hylaeochampsids in the Tethyan area.http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:7071FA88-2C3D-4814-8649-4ADB581E190A