North American History Research Articles

Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands

This ambitious anthology asks whether we can more fully comprehend slavery by examining it across space, time, and disciplinary divides. Its contributors clearly benefited from the workshops that spawned the volume, sponsored by the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies. Instead of offering a loose collection of essays stitched together only by an introduction, the editors and authors have produced an innovative book that lives up to its title, drawing parallels between various regions and eras of North American history through the present. The volume demonstrates that Native American and Euro-American slave systems overlapped more than previously assumed. Both relied on violence and the removal of captives' prior identities. Both flourished because of “economic and social incentives,” and both expanded as part of extensive “cross-cultural trading networks” (pp. xx, xix). The book's contributors illuminate many instances where “indigenous and Euro-American slave systems evolved and innovated in response to each other,” validating the editors' decision to consider jointly institutions long studied separately (p. xxi).

The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America

Terri L. Snyder's thoughtful new book not only discusses ways some enslaved Africans in colonial North America sought to end their lives but also speculates fruitfully about the meanings they sought to enact as they took a final exit from enslavement. From the nineteenth century onward, various parties have been interested in making the rhetorical claim that whether enslaved or free, African Americans were especially unlikely to commit suicide. Snyder demonstrates that the documentary record of slavery might suggest otherwise. Clearly, enslaved suicide was common enough to shape slave resistance, abolitionist movements against slavery, and the institution itself. Africans' suicides began to cause turbulence for white plans on the Atlantic Ocean itself. In conversation with the work of Stephanie Smallwood, Marcus Rediker, and Sowande' Mustakeem, Snyder's account shows that the social history of the slave trade and “seasoning” processes reveal that Africans often valorized their own resistance-via-self-destruction. Suicide did not just disturb specific entrepreneurial projects, it also tore at the fabric of power itself. In the 1700s the modernizing European state and its settler colonial rhizomes moved away from punishing suicide when committed by free people. But colonial regimes could not let that happen in the case of people who were also property. This was especially so because the property owners were themselves the state, not least of all in the sense of being the state's embodied law enforcement capacity. While the actions of an enslaved person who killed himself or herself might suggest the contradictions of paternalism or the limits of domination, lawgivers knew that they had to incentivize themselves to hunt those who rebelled. One of the most fascinating archives in North American history is the long list of payments by the state in colonial Virginia to enslavers whose human “property” escaped—even if that meant the enslaved people had drowned themselves in rivers or shot themselves with stolen pistols.

Behind the Bears Ears: Climate, Environment, and Human Occupation in the Early Pueblo Era on Elk Ridge, Southeast Utah

The Pueblo I period was a time of tumultuous change throughout the Four Corners region. Long regarded as an era of gradual transition, it is now recognized by most authors as a discrete and decisive turning point in North American prehistory. Although this topic has been studied extensively in the central Mesa Verde area of southwestern Colorado, very little formal research has occurred for the early Pueblo era in southeast Utah. The high uplands area of Elk Ridge contains probably the greatest concentration of Pueblo I sites in this region. Cultural resource inventories on Elk Ridge itself, and an extensive published literature on nearby landforms such as Cedar Mesa, comprise a useful dataset for investigating the early Pueblo archaeology of southeast Utah. This paper presents a synthetic analysis of Pueblo I settlement patterning in the Elk Ridge area in terms of climatic and environmental factors.

Overbank sedimentation from the historic A.D. 2011 flood along the Lower Mississippi River, USA

Abstract In this study, we document sedimentary characteristics of overbank flood deposits associated with the epic A.D. 2011 flood along the Lower Mississippi River (southern USA) and directly compare the findings to sedimentation from a comparable flood event in 1973, with the general purpose of understanding how extreme floods contribute to floodplain depositional patterns and accretion rates of embanked fluvial systems. The thicknesses of the 2011 flood deposits averaged 138 mm along natural levee crests, 9 mm on meander scrolls, and 3 mm in backswamps. These thicknesses are considerably less than those documented for the 1973 flood, sampled at the same locations. We contend that less sedimentation in 2011 occurred because the flood was not supplied with much upstream sediment from the Missouri River. Further, the 2011 sediments are coarser than in 1973, indicating that the higher 2011 flood levels were associated with more energetic overbank flows that flushed fine-grained sediments downstream within the narrow embanked floodplain corridor. The largest recorded flood in North American history is only marginally preserved in the embanked floodplain stratigraphy of the alluvial valley of Earth’s third largest fluvial system.

Staging the Cascadia Earthquake before It Happens: Faultline Ensemble’s Holding onto the Sky as Community Health and Theatre Manifesto

Staging the Cascadia Earthquake before It Happens: Faultline Ensemble’s Holding onto the Sky as Community Health and Theatre Manifesto Kate Bredeson (bio) In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” [Kenneth, FEMA’s Region X director] Murphy says. —Kathryn Schulz, “The Really Big One” In early 2014 a group of Portland, Oregon artists and community health activists gathered at a retreat to discuss a play they wanted to make about disaster. Their hope was to use theatre as a way to examine current crises that they saw in their city. While Kathryn Schulz had not yet published her terrifying 2015 essay in The New Yorker about the impending Cascadia quake, those who gathered were familiar with the earthquake scenario, because it had long been a subject of conversation within the street-medic community, and several of those present were members of the Portland street-medic and health-care activist group Rosehip Medic Collective. At this retreat the group founded Faultline Ensemble, a new theatre company composed of artists, activists, and community health workers, and they began work on a collectively created script about the aftermath of what Schulz would call in her forthcoming essay, “The Really Big One.” Faultline Ensemble’s resulting play, Holding onto the Sky, premiered in November 2014. It uses the impending disaster of the Cascadia earthquake as a device to call attention to, and to stimulate a collective reimagining of, dominant local approaches to health care and community. In the wake of Schulz’s essay’s wide circulation and subsequent local and national conversations about the earthquake, Faultline’s February 2016 restaging of Holding onto the Sky ran for six sold-out performances. The production, which changed very little aside from a few casting adjustments and a move to a bigger venue, asks direct questions to its spectators who live in what will likely be the central area of the earthquake’s impact and whose lives will be among the estimated 13,000 lost when it hits. A provocative manifesto for increased individual responsibility and collective care, Holding onto the Sky uses the theatrical representation of a future catastrophe not just to provoke its spectators to prepare for the impending crisis, but to invite them to respond to everyday disasters in the forms of systemic inequities that uphold oppression and disparity in Portland’s past and present. This essay draws from my viewings of both the 2014 and 2016 productions of Holding onto the Sky, alongside my September 2016 interview with Rosehip member and Faultline Ensemble artistic director Taiga [End Page 95] Christie. I argue that in their company working methods and their creation process for, and productions of, Holding onto the Sky, Faultline proposes that community health and theatre are permeable practices that can unite communities in the face of current and future disasters. Holding onto the Sky draws on audience anticipation and anxiety in its depiction of a version of Portland in which residents cannot access hospitals, ambulances are unable to navigate city streets, and the city’s heaps of new glass condos—Portland’s glittering sign of gentrification—are collapsed. The play’s title evokes the central question that Faultline proposes in the work: what will Portlanders do when the ground opens up, buildings crumble, and the only thing left to hold onto is the...

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez

637 Reviews 60 or Steven’s, not Stevens’ on page 100), and more litter the text; Wiley Blackwell did not do its due diligence. The ultimate question to ask about a textbook is: Would I assign it? And I have not answered that for myself clearly, which I suppose is an answer itself. To be sure, it takes important steps beyond Carlos Schwantes’ The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (revised, University of Nebraska Press, 1996) but does not reach the scholarly quality of William G. Robbins and Katrine Barber’s Nature’s Northwest (University of Arizona Press, 2011), although that book addresses only the twentieth century. Contested Boundaries, thus, is a compromise as, perhaps, all textbooks must be. Of course, a textbook that pleases all audiences has not been written yet. One hopes a second edition might build on the strengths and improve some of the shortcomings. Adam M. Sowards University of Idaho THE OTHER SLAVERY: THE UNCOVERED STORY OF INDIAN ENSLAVEMENT IN AMERICA by Andrés Reséndez Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, Massachusetts, 2016. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, index. 431 pages. $30.00, cloth. In 1843, Oregon’s provisional government acted to prohibit slavery in the region and by 1849 justified Black exclusion laws as a means of keeping the fraught politics of antebellum slavery from reaching America’s far corner. Such measures did not allow the Pacific Northwest to entirely dodge antebellum slavery debates, but they have served to obscure what Andrés Reséndez has dubbed “the other slavery.” Although most narratives rightly focus on antebellum slavery as one of the central themes of American history, a parallel system of servitude in the West has gone nearly unnoticed. The Other Slavery thus serves as both an explicit corrective and a grand synthesis of the legacies of Indian servitude in North American history. By the late seventeenth century, African slavery so effectively replaced the earlier system in the British mainland colonies that Indian slavery lay in a nearly forgotten past. When Americans encountered Indian slavery anew in lands acquired in the war with Mexico, they readily shifted from the more familiar system of southern chattel slavery to take advantage of the labor of Native Americans. As Reséndez demonstrates, this world of Indian slavery was the direct descendant of practices originating in New Spain. Although the African slave trade contributed to early Mexico’s forced labor, it did not replace practices of Indigenous servitude that were flexible and adaptable enough to continue hundreds of years after the arrival of Spain in the Americas. One of Reséndez’s key points is that Indian servitude persisted, in part because it was not composed of a single monolithic system. Unlike the chattel slavery of the American South, it could not be effectively addressed by any specific legislation or focus. Instead, multiple local practices resulted in so-called apprenticeships , peonage, servitude, and outright slavery. The variances across the American Southwest and northern New Spain also hint at the even greater diversity of forced labor that persists with human trafficking today. Reséndez counts as many as five million Indigenous people enslaved in the Americas. That staggering number should be cause enough to force a re-examination of the role that active subjugation played alongside disease in the devastation of North America’s Indigenous cultures. He also highlights gender as a critical difference between American chattel slavery and Indian servitude. In the American Southwest and Mormon Utah, Americans adopted the older pretense of ransoming women and children captives to lend a veneer of cover to the process of making Indians into servants. In California, mission labor provided a model for later figures such OHQ vol. 118, no. 4 638 as John Sutter and John Bidwell. There, too, the lines between protectors of Indians and taking advantage of captive labor blurred. The book has rightly garnered much praise and attention, both as a finalist for the National Book Award and as a Bancroft Prize winner. Well before the end of this well-written and deeply researched book, it is clear that recognizing the parallel world of Indian servitude is critical to a fuller understanding American history. Although the Pacific Northwest is not the...

Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism by Mark R. Stoll

Reviewed by: Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism by Mark R. Stoll Joseph Witt Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism. By Mark R. Stoll. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 406. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-19-023086-9.) The connection between religions and environmental attitudes and behaviors has been a subject of increasing scholarly interest since the mid-twentieth century, inspiring a multitude of interdisciplinary publications, conferences, and even a new field of religion and ecology. With Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Mark R. Stoll has made a substantial contribution to this field by charting the influence of Calvinist theology on the development of environmentalism and conservationist policies in the United States. Shifting focus away from commonly cited innovators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Stoll describes how the worldviews and motivations of North American environmentalists emerged within relatively mainstream and conventional Protestant communities. The result is a thorough and engaging work that should inspire discussion and debate among scholars and students of environmental history, religious history, and the environmental humanities. Stoll’s central argument is that Calvinism, “from its moralism to its suspicion of humans in the landscape to its urgent evangelism,” directly shaped [End Page 197] the development of North American environmentalism, imbuing the movement with “tremendous social, cultural, and political power” (p. 53). The environmental movement originated among elite New England Puritans and Congregationalists who established an “enduring intellectual and moral framework” through their efforts to preserve the aesthetic and moral well-being of their communities (p. 61). Calvinist influence on environmental policy reached its zenith in the early twentieth century when the Presbyterian denomination was at its strongest and its members held a number of influential political offices. Stoll charts this thread of religious influence through the lived motivations and perspectives of artistic, literary, and scientific leaders. Puritan concerns for the aesthetic and moral common good, for example, are manifested through the works of popular nineteenth-century landscape painters, and the Presbyterian “determination to conquer avarice and save society” was evident in the popular writings of John Muir and other environ-mentalist leaders (p. 151). Many of the central figures of Stoll’s text are thus authors and writers rather than religious leaders, and as the author acknowledges, “A big segment of my argument is art-historical” (p. 4). Following the end of the Progressive era, the influence of Presbyterians on politics and conservation policies began to wane, and the environmental movement likewise changed course. Growing in influence through the twentieth century, Baptists and evangelicals tended to eschew the nature-revering spirituality of figures like Muir and emphasize individual salvation over the preservation of a common good. In the final chapter, “A New Era,” Stoll describes how African Americans, Catholics, and Jews brought new perspectives into the environmental movement in the twentieth century. These groups focused on issues of environmental justice rather than on preserving pristine tracts of wilderness from human development. While Stoll celebrates the increased scope and inclusivism of North American environmentalism, he also suggests that the contemporary environmental movement seems to have lost influence due to these shifts in underlying religious motivation, failing to sufficiently critique the rampant individualism of the current age. Stoll concludes, “If it is not dead yet, environmentalism is certainly weak, divided, and wandering in the wilderness” (p. 275). It becomes clear through Inherit the Holy Mountain that specific religious values and environmental attitudes have mutually influenced each other in some complex way through North American history. Stoll’s evidence shows that many early environmentalist leaders in the United States shared similar Calvinist personal histories and frequently spoke a common Calvinist-toned language of conservation for the public good. However, Stoll’s own data suggests some qualifications to his central thesis. Along with Calvinist connections, for example, elite social connections seem prevalent among many of the figures Stoll describes. Does this suggest that social and economic conditions played a more significant role in the development of environmentalism, particularly the movement for wilderness preservation, with religious identity merely being epiphenomenal? Stoll’s volume is a...

There's No Such Thing as “Prehistory”: What the Longue Durée of Caddo and Pueblo History Tells Us about Colonial America

Caddo and Pueblo responses first to the rise and fall of Cahokia and Chaco and then to Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveal how the centuries of history generated by these Native places and people must be reckoned with in order to understand the historical trajectories that they set in motion and that still reverberated in 1492 … and 1592, and 1692. Such a project involves putting potsherds and oral traditions on an equal playing field with archival documents. And, more critically, it involves a question of time. The key here is to see "colonial America" as one point, a late point, along a much longer continuum of North American history. If we place colonialism within the greater timescale of indigenous history, we may avoid the confines of a history that all too often casts the post-1492 trajectory of American Indians as one defined by decimation and declension. A longer time depth allows us to put both destruction and regeneration in context, and it reminds us that the heritage of colonialism that reaches into our present is paralleled—and shaped—by the heritage of indigenous history.

Building stories onThe Brick People

The focus of this study is an analysis of the novelThe Brick Peoplepublished by the Chicano author Alejandro Morales in 1988 and its homonymous documentary film from 2012. Both narratives are based on the same story, namely the lives of Mexican immigrants, who worked as employees inSimons Brickyardin Los Angeles, California, a city originally founded by Mexicans. In the official historiography, this part of Mexican migration in California has been ignored. This study will reveal how the novel and the documentary deal with this gap or interstice in North-American history and how they reflect the cultural divide in Southern California. We are particularly interested in how both the novelist and the documentary makers present the topics of integration, of preservation or construction of the Mexican cultural identity and of cross-cultural dialogue to an English speaking audience. Both the documentary and the novel narrate “value[s] that reflect […] the language, local conventions and culture of [the] geographic region” (ISO/TS 11669:2012(en), 2.1.10) of Los Angeles. The depiction of this target locale presents itself as a borderland that clusters a rich mix of cultural, historical, and (non) urban landscapes (Gersdorf 2009, 309). This ancient collective memory appears serendipitously as sudden sites or potential links of human action collected in one or more of the previous structures of consciousness and inspire individuals to perform and produce in unique and extraordinary ways (Morales 2012, 111).

Great House origins and population stability at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico: The isotopic evidence

One of the truly remarkable developments in the prehistory of North America was the construction of more than a dozen Great Houses—imposing multi-storied structures that were qualitatively different from the usual small, irregular, single-story homes—in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico from the early AD 800 to the 1100s. Beginning no later than AD 1000, scores of similar large pueblos, often referred to as Chacoan outliers, were erected throughout much of the southern Colorado Plateau in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. A small number of these outliers were connected by formal roads and many others participated in a broad network of exchange and ritual. The largest and most unusual of the Chaco Great Houses and one of the earliest to be built was Pueblo Bonito situated in the heart of the Canyon. Some of the most intriguing aspects of Pueblo Bonito are two clusters of human burials, almost certainly elites, found within its sandstone walls. We present here isotopic proveniencing data (strontium, lead, and oxygen) that situate these burials in a new and unexpected perspective. Our results suggest that almost all individuals interred in Pueblo Bonito had been born in Chaco Canyon or in nearby parts of the southern San Juan Basin. All of these individuals, moreover, likely belonged to the elite component of Bonito society, given their placement in special burial crypts within the walls of the pueblo. These conclusions suggest that the origin of Chaco Canyon Great Houses and the hierarchical society that organized their construction was more likely a product of local sociocultural dynamics than a result of migration of a group of new people into the Canyon from the northern San Juan Basin.

Rise of the Erg—Paleontology and paleoenvironments of the Triassic-Jurassic transition in Northeastern Utah

This field trip focuses on the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic transition in northeastern Utah. This transition records one of the most striking terrestrial environmental transformations in the history of North America, wherein the fluvio-lacustrine Chinle Formation is transgressed by the vast erg system of the Nugget (Wingate+Navajo)/Navajo/Aztec Sandstones. Exposures in northeastern Utah are ideal for studying this transition as they are closely spaced and accessible. The uppermost Chinle Formation beds are lacustrine/fluvial fine-grained sediments which are overlain by increasingly drier, sandy, transitional beds. The non-eolian basal beds of the Nugget Sandstone preserve a Late Triassic ichnofauna, with some sites including Brachychirotherium tracks. Large-scale dune deposits comprise most of the Nugget Sandstone and contain vertebrate (Brasilichnium) tracks and a diverse invertebrate ichnofauna. Interdunal, carbonate, spring mounds, as much as 3 m tall, fed carbonate freshwater lake deposits containing gastropod body fossils and invertebrate ichnofossils. Another lacustrine deposit, located at the Saints & Sinners Quarry, is on the shoreline of a non-carbonate interdunal lake/oasis. Over 11,500 bones have been collected from the site and represent two theropod dinosaur taxa, sphenodonts, sphenosuchians, a pterosaur, and drepanosaurs (with many complete, three-dimensional, articulated skeletons). In addition to bones, dinosaur trackways are also preserved in shoreline and other interdunal beds. The fauna shows that this interdunal area of the Nugget Sandstone was the site of intense biological activity. The drepanosaurs are chronologically significant in that they are restricted globally to the Late Triassic, indicating that at least the lower one-fourth to one-third of the formation is Late Triassic in age.

Diversity starts early: notharctid primates from the Sandcouleean (Early Eocene) of the Powder River Basin, Wyoming, USA

Abundant specimens, mostly isolated teeth, of the Primate family Notharctidae occur in the Early Eocene rocks of the Powder River Basin of northeastern Wyoming, USA. Very early in the North American history of the family, the notharctid species diversified and this diversity may have been widespread, and not restricted to more southerly areas in the Rocky Mountains. The diversity is shown by detailed analysis of the molar dentition. Two new genera are established: Megaceralemur with Megaceralemur trigonodus as its type and Megaceralemur matthewi sp. nov. as a Sandcouleean species and Pinolophus, with Pinolophus meikei sp. nov. as its type, for a form with an entoconid notch on lower molar 1. Megaceralemur has a prominent nannopithex-fold which dominates the posterior cingulum of upper molars 1–2 and a cristid obliqua on lower molar 1 which attaches to the metaconid, not the metalophid as it does in Cantius and other genera. A small species, Cantius lohseorum sp. nov., is named for a derived lineage the size of Cantius torresi.urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:066DC515-A2DD-40AF-AD8A-3834E2AFD0FB

Rise of the erg—Paleontology and paleoenvironments of the Triassic-Jurassic transition in Northeastern Utah

This field trip focuses on the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic transition in northeastern Utah. This transition records one of the most striking terrestrial environmental transformations in the history of North America, wherein the fluvio-lacustrine Chinle Formation is transgressed by the vast erg system of the Nugget (Wingate+Navajo)/Navajo/Aztec Sandstones. Exposures in northeastern Utah are ideal for studying this transition as they are closely spaced and accessible. The uppermost Chinle Formation beds are lacustrine/fluvial fine-grained sediments which are overlain by increasingly drier, sandy, transitional beds. The non-eolian basal beds of the Nugget Sandstone preserve a Late Triassic ichnofauna, with some sites including Brachychirotherium tracks. Large-scale dune deposits comprise most of the Nugget Sandstone and contain vertebrate (Brasilichnium) tracks and a diverse invertebrate ichnofauna. Interdunal, carbonate, spring mounds, as much as 3 m tall, fed carbonate freshwater lake deposits containing gastropod body fossils and invertebrate ichnofossils. 
 Another lacustrine deposit, located at the Saints & Sinners Quarry, is on the shoreline of a non-carbonate interdunal lake/oasis. Over 11,500 bones have been collected from the site and represent two theropod dinosaur taxa, sphenodonts, sphenosuchians, a pterosaur, and drepanosaurs (with many complete, three-dimensional, articulated skeletons). In addition to bones, dinosaur trackways are also preserved in shoreline and other interdunal beds. The fauna shows that this interdunal area of the Nugget Sandstone was the site of intense biological activity. The drepanosaurs are chronologically significant in that they are restricted globally to the Late Triassic, indicating that at least the lower one-fourth to one-third of the formation is Late Triassic in age.

A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867

A Hercules in the Cradle is the second book by Max M. Edling, a lecturer in North American History at Kings College, London, offering a reinterpretation of the origins of the American Constitution and of the importance of monetary and fiscal policies in the emergence of a strong American state prior to the Civil War. The title of the book comes from a 1791 tract by a Swedish church minister in Philadelphia, using the mythological infant to suggest that the United States was “a defenseless infant surrounded by life-threatening snakes,” to argue for “the new nation's weakness and precarious existence” (p. 1). The new nation, however, as did the infant Hercules, defeated the “snakes” “and in a rapid and dramatic manner grew to achieve great-power status by the end of the nineteenth century” (p. 2). The myth was alluded to by Alexander Hamilton, who was to Edling the major figure in this U.S. achievement, by his design of the financial policies that led to the success of the United States in “many wars and the stupendous territorial expansion” (p. 5). Although Hamilton was responsible for the development of the use of public debt and the structure of the federal budget, these policies were later followed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The approved budgetary policy was to have a balanced ledger in times of peace, with the use of increased taxes and short- and long-term borrowing during times of war. Significant was the belief that any existing debt should be repaid in the ensuing period of peace, a policy to reassure both internal and foreign lenders that the new nation was financially stable.

Shoes, Canoes, and Lives in Unexpected Archives: Searching in Fur Trade Ledgers beyond the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives

This article illuminates the existence and utility of fur trade ledgers and account books held in repositories beyond those held in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. While the vast holdings of the HBCA are a phenomenal resource for researchers of the North American fur trade, many smaller repositories across the continent hold fur trade sources that can complement research conducted in other institutions. Such sources can, when examined with an eye to the cultural information they contain, reveal far more about the cultural history of North America than simply the economic data for which they were created.

Idea of a new general history of North America: an account of colonial Native Mexico

Idea of a new general history of North America: an account of colonial Native Mexico

Assessing the provenance of Poverty Point copper through LA-ICP-MS compositional analysis

The Poverty Point site is the largest and most complex Archaic period earthwork site in eastern North America and the type site of the Poverty Point culture. Poverty Point holds a prominent position in eastern North American prehistory in part due to the extensive exchange system—the first of such scale—that brought exotic materials to this site from the Appalachians, Ohio Valley, and Upper Mississippi Valley. Among these exotic materials, copper was introduced into the Poverty Point exchange system from sources often posited to reside in the upper Great Lakes region, an idea reinforced by the identification of Upper Mississippi Valley sources for galena found at the site. This study tests such an assumption by using laser ablation inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analysis of six copper artifacts from the Poverty Point site and comparing the results to source samples from the Lake Superior region, central and southern Appalachian Mountains, and Canadian Maritimes. Results indicate that these copper artifacts most likely originated in the eastern sources of the Maritimes or Appalachian Mountains, rather than the Lake Superior region as long proposed.

Narrating the Contested Space of Detroit’s River Rouge, 1600–2015

Abstract The River Rouge, which flows through Michigan into the Great Lakes at Detroit, has been a contested space, from the Mound Builders c. 1100 AD to the present. The river’s changing uses and meanings provide a microcosm of North American history, including Native Americans, French fur traders, the British, American settlers, small-scale industries, and Henry Ford’s largest factory. Narratives treat the river as a landscape, as a highway, as a natural resource, as raw material, as a minor detail, or as a threatened environment. The river has been part of a romantic view of pre-history, a heroic story of colonial conquest, a tale of democratic expansion into new land, an exemplary second creation in which unfinished nature is transformed into the world’s largest factory, a narrative of class warfare between workers and capitalists, a tale of the triumph of democracy over National Socialism in World War II, a tragic story of the exploitation of nature, and a recovery narrative in which the river is rescued from pollution and misuse.

Reconnaissance in Sonora: Charles D. Poston’s 1854 Exploration of Mexico and the Gadsden Purchase. By C. Gilbert Storms.

Reconnaissance in Sonora: Charles D. Poston’s 1854 Exploration of Mexico and the Gadsden Purchase . By C. Gilbert Storms. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. xi + 193 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.) The movement of American adventurers and explorers, intent on knowledge and gain, characterized a good part of the early history of North America. During the first half of the nineteenth century, this activity focused on the trans-Mississippi West, including the Southwest, where filibusters journeyed into Spanish, then Mexican, Texas and, after the American victory over Mexico in 1848, northern Mexico. Charles Poston was an American filibuster who sought to take advantage of the anticipated U.S. purchase or annexation of disputed territory in what is today southern Arizona and northern Sonora. … lawsonr{at}bacone.edu

Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History by Paul Schneider

Reviewed by: Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History by Paul Schneider Michael Allen Paul Schneider, Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History. New York: Henry Holt, 2013. 416 pp. $20.00. The title of this book recalls a bygone era in more ways than one. Beginning nearly two centuries ago, a strongly held belief that the Mississippi River Valley was vitally important to American history and culture led scholars to write about it. Beginning with Timothy Flint’s Condensed Geography and History . . . of the Mississippi Valley (1828), authors described the Mississippi Valley as an exceptional cultural region. Their works include John W. Monette’s History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi (1848); Henry Lewis’s The Valley of the Mississippi (1854; originally published in German); J. W. Foster’s The Mississippi Valley: Its Physical Geography . . . (1869); and C. B. Walker’s vital The Mississippi Valley, and Prehistoric Events . . . (1880). Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1881) was followed by Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West (1889–96), a paean to the Great Valley, and James K. Hosmer’s concise chronological overview, A Short History of the Mississippi Valley (1901). Next, Frederick Jackson Turner outlined “The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History” in a 1908 keynote speech before the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, an organization whose very name and existence reflects the degree to which Americans saw the Great Valley as the heart of America. Throughout the twentieth century, Roosevelt’s and Turner’s sweeping portraits begat a number of more focused books about selected aspects of the Mississippi River Valley. Beginning in the 1970s, after the name-change of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association to the Organization of American Historians, new social historians produced scores of works focused on race, class, gender, and environment in the Valley of the Mississippi. Surveying all of this literature, one is struck by the fact that, of the hundreds of books written about the Mississippi Valley, all but a dozen [End Page 140] avoid synthesis. And of those dozen books which take a sweeping view, nearly all were written in the middle and late nineteenth century. Paul Schneider brings an impressive resume to Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History. A native of Amherst, Massachusetts, and graduate of Brown University, he has published in the New Yorker, Esquire, and the New York Times. He is author of the well-received The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness (1997), followed by a popular history of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard and several other books. He is currently editor of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine. “It’s impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi,” Paul Schneider states. “The river’s history is our history” (1). He begins his history of the Mississippi during the ice age and tells the story of prehistoric animals and men in the Great Valley. He devotes a major section to Mississippian Moundbuilders and their American Indian descendants, and then launches a discussion about the major European explorers—De Soto, La Salle, and Marquette—and the eighteenth century arrival of the British and their American subjects. This takes him into the history of the early American republic, Lewis and Clark, and the keelboat, flatboat, and steamboat ages on western rivers. The role of the Mississippi in General U.S. Grant’s Civil War campaigns marks the book’s crescendo, while a concluding section focuses on the author’s own Mississippi travels and his concerns for the river’s natural environment in an industrial age. Old Man River’s ample bibliography is composed of a mix of old and new scholarly secondary sources, firsthand accounts, and newspaper and magazine articles. As in his other publications, Schneider is adept at working with dozens of sources and expeditiously serving up documented, engaging, book-length narrative prose. This is not so much a book about the Mississippi Valley as one about events on or near the river itself. Schneider seems unaware of all but a few of the authors mentioned in the first paragraph of this review, or of his place in carrying on...