North American Colonies Research Articles

Insects and the American Farmer: Crèvecœur's Response to Buffon's and Raynal's Theories of American Nature

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer includes memorable scenes in which the farmer revives bees he has rescued from the craw of a king bird, and welcomes a hornet's nest inside his house. As I will argue, the book represented insects in a sentimental manner, as a retort to theories advanced by Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, that insects were noxious and overabundant in America. Insects played a key role in the late eighteenth-century controversy Antonio Gerbi called “the Dispute of the New World,” in which Crèvecœur's book weighed in to promote the North American colonies. In the collection of manuscript essays Crèvecœur presented to London publisher Davis and Davies in 1781, some described plagues ruining crops, or swarms biting colonists, but these texts were passed over, and not published until the 1920s. The article traces Crèvecœur's interactions with Buffon and with Raynal, who were variously rivals and mentors to him, as well as examining how the French-American soldier, farmer, author, and diplomat survived two revolutions and laid down principles today associated with sustainable agriculture.

Navigating the British Atlantic in the Eighteenth Century: What the Logbooks Tell Us

AbstractCrossing the North Atlantic was one of the world's most important oceanic voyages by the eighteenth century. By then, ships built and owned in the British North American colonies and, late in the period, the United States were crossing this dangerous and often-fickle ocean in large numbers. The surviving logbooks of such vessels can serve as unique source material for understanding the Atlantic experience for scholars prepared to interpret and exploit them. Recording the Atlantic passages of the small schooner Sultana, the snow George, and the brig Reward in the Global Sea Routes (GSR) database creates a record for future researchers with a broad array of interests, but only after the obstacles to interpretation are overcome, to the extent possible. I will discuss what those obstacles are, laying out the information to be found in these logs, how it is entered and why, and what it has to tell us about the Atlantic and those who used it at the time. I will make the case that what is contained in these sources justifies the acquisition of the technical and historical expertise necessary to use them.Note: the snow rig was popular among mid-size ocean-going Atlantic merchant ships by the mid-eighteenth century. It is similar to the two-masted brig, as opposed to the three-masted ship, but it has a small “try-mast” just behind the main mast (the after mast), on which the mizzen sail was hoisted.

Britain’s Decision to Push for Canadian Confederation

Prior to Canadian confederation the British Empire pursued a policy of scripter control over the British North American colonies by the imperial metropole. However, in the decades leading up to Canadian confederation the British Empire pursued a policy of consolidation of British North America and laxer control allowing for autonomy by Canadians. By providing the historical analysis of the decades leading up to Canadian confederation we can understand why this policy shifts of the British Empire into allowing confederation. A number of radical things will occur in the decades from the American Revolution in 1776 to Canadian confederation in 1867 that will allow for this to occur. The growth of the American Republic, Internal rebellions in Canada, and of course imperial shifting of policy towards India will allow confederation. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 the Seven Year War ended and France’s North American colonies, particularly Quebec, were handed over to the British. The British Empire would only enjoy complete dominance of North America until the creation of the new American Republic. For the next century despite the threat posed by the United States of America, Britain’s North American colonies remained divided and spread over the vast expanse of the Canadian North America. It was only in the 1860’s when the British Empire’s worldwide imperial goal shifted that Canadian Confederation became possible. Confederation of all colonies bordering the United States happen occur over a short period of time. Britain’s participation in the Canadian confederation process was key in preventing colonies from being annexed by the United States and facilitating confederation.

Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War by Friederike Baer (review)

Reviewed by: Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War by Friederike Baer Brady J. Crytzer (bio) Keywords Hessians, Germany, Revolutionary War, Prisoners of war Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War. By Friederike Baer. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 528. Cloth, $74.00.) In Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War, Friederike Baer offers a thorough and critical analysis of the German experience in the American Revolution. Relying on a variety of international sources, Baer reveals how German soldiers perceived the conflict, and how their contributions affected the outcome of the war. Despite their being major players in the British war effort, the contributions of German auxiliary soldiers remain some of the most under-studied elements of the American Revolution. Baer's efforts to shed light on these often-overlooked sources has helped to fill a critical gap in modern Revolutionary scholarship, making Hessians an essential read. In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, the British Empire witnessed its overall military strength reduced to a skeleton crew of less than 60,000 troops. With the empire at its largest size yet seen, British administrators were faced with a crippling debt, and an emerging rebellion in its North American colonies. To address their lack of military might, British diplomats scoured the continent of Europe in search of reliable auxiliary soldiers to fill the king's ranks. What followed was months of negotiations with some of the most unscrupulous monarchs of the Old World. Both at home and abroad, these negotiations were met with consternation and scorn; in the colonies John Adams described the ruler of Hesse-Kassel as a "Soul selling Landgrave" (29). In the first chapter of Hessians, Baer [End Page 326] expertly navigates the political consequences in Britain, Germany, and America. As a result of their diplomatic efforts, Baer reveals how British officials brokered several different agreements with six separate German states. In the second and third chapters of Hessians, Baer analyzes the recruitment of these soldiers and their subsequent voyage to the New World. While the respective German states discussed in these chapters held a unique place in the greater politics of Europe, Baer shows how they each desired unique concessions from their British clients. Amongst the most contentious aspects of these agreements was the reputation of the German rulers for unscrupulous and bad-faith negotiations. Their citizens were commodified; many of these rulers issued conscript drafts to field large armies with little care for training and readiness. In Chapter 3 Baer discusses how these troops were deployed to the New World, bringing the story to life through her use of first-hand accounts. The German soldiers shuttled to North America were often highly literate and very opinionated, and the author amassed an impressive collection of their early experiences on their trans-Atlantic voyage. The first analysis of the German Auxiliary experience in the New World is presented upon their arrival in New York and New Jersey. While the book offers a balanced narrative of the events of the period, Baer takes special care to place the foreign troops at the center of her analysis. They were the consummate outsiders with very little investment in the outcome of the conflict; that fact was a stunning reality given that they were often the ones tasked with actual combat operations. As products of Germany's famed martial culture, German officers often provided scathing critiques of the American war effort. The entire Patriot cause was viewed as an affront to the German affinity for order and autocracy, and the Continental commanders were deemed illegitimate and unworthy of respect. As Baer notes, one German officer named Andreas Wiederhold very deliberately described George Washington as "Mister Washington," and not "General Washington" (88). Chapters 4 and 5 of Hessians offer pointed analysis from an alternative viewpoint of the New York and New Jersey campaigns, with special emphasis of the battles of Trenton and Princeton. The geographically diverse nature of the war highlights the remainder of Baer's manuscript. The various theaters of the American Revolution saw patriot motivations diverge, and the character of the war change as well. While issues like slavery, loyalism, and plantation-style agriculture typified...

Variation in North American bumble bee nest success and colony sizes under captive rearing conditions.

Of the 265 known bumble bee (Bombus) species, knowledge of colony lifecycle is derived from relatively few species. As interest in Bombus commercialization and conservation grows, it is becoming increasingly important to understand colony growth dynamics across a variety of species since variation exists in nest success, colony growth, and reproductive output. In this study, we reported successful nest initiation and establishment rates of colonies and generated a timeline of colony development for 15 western North American Bombus species, which were captively reared from wild-caught gynes from 2009 to 2019. Additionally, we assessed variation in colony size among 5 western North American Bombus species from 2015 to 2018. Nest initiation and establishment rates varied greatly among species, ranging from 5-76.1% and 0-54.6%, respectively. Bombus griseocollis had the highest rates of nest success across the 11-yr period, followed by B. occidentalis, B. vosnesenskii, and B. huntii. Furthermore, days to nest initiation and days to nest establishment varied among species, ranging from 8.4 to 27.7 days and 32.7 to 47 days. Colony size also differed significantly among species with B. huntii and B. vosnesenskii producing more worker/drone cells than B. griseocollis, B. occidentalis, and B. vancouverensis. Additionally, gyne production differed significantly among species with B. huntii colonies producing more gynes than B. vosnesenskii. Results from this study increase knowledge of systematic nesting biology for numerous western North American Bombus species under captive rearing conditions, which can further improve rearing techniques available to conservationists and researchers.

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution

Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600‐1850. By MarkKnights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. 512 pp. £35. ISBN: 978‐0‐19879‐624‐4.

Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600‐1850. By MarkKnights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. 512 pp. £35. ISBN: 978‐0‐19879‐624‐4.

The role of Thomas Jefferson's political activity in the history of American statehood.

The subject of the study is the results, results and consequences of the political activity of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, considered one of the founding fathers of the United States. The first American president to hold the posts of Secretary of State, Vice President and President of the United States successively. The article examines the political ideas of Jefferson, who was one of the first political figures who spoke and justified the idea of separating its North American colonies from Great Britain. His political ideas and decisions as a statesman and politician were timely and brought much benefit to his country. As the author of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, he made a huge contribution to the creation of the United States. Its adoption meant the formation of a new state - the United States. For him, the principles of the declaration were to create a free American state based on the principles of democracy and civil liberty. The Declaration defined the social and legal status of a person in society. Declaring the people the only source of power, she put them on a par with the great ideologists of the Enlightenment. As Ambassador to France, he managed to secure a number of trade agreements with European countries. His merits as president undoubtedly lie in the acquisition of Louisiana and the establishment of diplomatic relations with Russia, as well as the pacification of relations with Great Britain.

The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin

Reviewed by: The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin Lauren Duval The Boston Massacre: A Family History. By Serena Zabin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 314 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. On a frosty March evening, Jane Crothers—who may have been a bar-maid at Boston’s Royal Exchange Tavern—crossed the street to speak with Private Hugh White, the sentry stationed outside the Custom House. An Irishman who enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth Regiment in 1759, thirty-year-old White had arrived in Boston a year and a half prior. Tensions occasionally flared between the troops and the local population, but for the most part, he—like many of his fellow soldiers—had found friendship and community in Boston. That evening, as he stood outside the Custom House, he chatted with neighbors, inquiring after their wives and children. A few blocks away, the clamor of angry voices echoed through the snow-covered city. Did the private know the cause, Crothers wanted to know. He did not. Tolling bells abruptly ended their conversation as the square in front of the Custom House flooded with angry, shouting Bostonians, hurling wood and ice. Guns drawn, seven soldiers rushed to Private White’s aid. As she would later testify, Crothers inched closer to the soldiers for protection, giving her a clear view of a man in a dark coat who, she alleged, clapped one of the soldiers on the back and encouraged them to fire—which they did shortly thereafter. Revealing her familiarity with the officers residing in the city, Crothers was “positive the man was not the Captain [Thomas Preston]” (155).1 Her witness testimony would prove key in exonerating Captain Preston from a charge of ordering the troops to fire on civilian inhabitants. This was not the end of Crothers’s engagement with the British army. When, three weeks later, Crothers married Private Joseph Whitehouse of the Fourteenth Regiment, she became an official part of Britain’s military establishment. By the time she testified as a witness for the defense at Captain Preston’s trial the following October, partisan narratives crafted to explain the violence of that night deliberately overlooked the experiences of women such as Crothers who bridged Boston’s military and civilian communities. Instead, as they pointed fingers at one another, Bostonians, lawyers, military officials, and politicians proclaimed that “an enormous gulf separated soldiers and civilians” (207) and that the two populations were—and always had been—separate. But such assertions, Serena Zabin shows in The Boston Massacre: A Family History, are more reflective of political posturing and legal maneuvers than the lived experiences of the men, women, and children who made their lives together in revolutionary Boston. [End Page 198] In her masterful retelling of the events that would become known as the Boston Massacre, Zabin reorients the familiar story of British troops firing into a rowdy crowd around the family ties of women such as Crothers and the neighborly relationships displayed in Private White’s conversations outside the Custom House. “From the moment their guns went off, the spotlight of history has focused its narrow beam on those British soldiers” (137), Zabin writes. But, she contends, there is so much more to the story—“a much wider and richer catalog of . . . events” that includes “women as well as men, friends as well as foes” (150). Focusing on the period from the troops’ 1765 embarkation for the North American colonies through the soldiers’ trials in December 1770, Zabin brings revolutionary Boston to life. British troops and their families, she shows, were enmeshed in Boston’s local community. Residing for nearly four years “on a peninsula hardly bigger than a square mile” (xvi), military families lived in the same neighborhoods, shopped in the same markets, and attended the same churches as civilian inhabitants. In their spare time, soldiers worked in local businesses and forged relationships with their coworkers. They got drunk with their neighbors in Boston’s many taverns, alcohol occasionally inflaming partisan tensions and leading to brawls. Such conflicts were not limited to men; soldiers’ wives, whose domestic and caretaking labors were essential to the functioning of early modern armies, befriended local woman, often socializing—sometimes...

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer

From 1675 to 1685, Kruer argues in Time of Anarchy, a “tide of insurrection” swept across England’s North American colonies as frontier settler patriarchs, driven by a combination of conspiratorial fear and material danger, withdrew from the political compact of empire (3). The most significant catalyst for these popular revolts, Kruer compellingly demonstrates, was one of eastern North America’s least understood, and most sparingly documented, indigenous nations: the Susquehannock.The raiding of Susquehannocks in Maryland, Virginia, and Albemarle (North Carolina) wrought popular protest against colonial governments for failing to prevent or adequately respond to frontier violence. Confusion surrounding the identity of raiders, and the perception that government inaction was motivated by alignment with the interests of Native Americans generally over those of settlers, further encouraged conspiracies that imagined coalitions of tributary Algonquian nations, foreign enemies, and complicit oligarchs combined against white Protestant colonists. These conspiracies nourished rebellions—most notably Bacon’s Rebellion—that fomented violent acts of racial hatred against Natives. Such acts provoked further frontier bloodshed and generated a “feedback loop between Anglo-Indian violence and colonial crisis” that challenged central authority in colonial polities for a decade—the Time of Anarchy (201).Time of Anarchy is both an ethnohistory of the Susquehannock people and a political history of English North America in the Restoration era. The work succeeds marvellously in each aspect. The range of themes organizing the work’s seven chapters—“emotional cultures, rumors, migrations, conspiracy theory, peacemaking, captivity, and racial thinking”—marks Time of Anarchy as one of the most methodologically sophisticated treatments of late seventeenth-century America ever to appear (7).Each chapter produces valuable insights, and Kruer’s writing on conspiracies and captivity is particularly novel. He distinguishes conspiracies from rumors by asserting that the former contain “narrative emplotment, with genre conventions” (117); identifies several conspiracies that periodically convulsed through colonial America; and frankly concludes that the most pervasive of them all, that of Franco-Native papist collusion, was based on knowledge of “actual projects” (127). On captivity, Kruer effectively proves that the Susquehannock, while living as supposed hostages among the Iroquois, remained an influential nation whose interests, grievances, and expertise largely directed “Northern Indian” raiding on southern frontiers during the early 1680s. This fascinating conclusion points tantalizingly toward further research in Iroquoian identity and politics during the early historic period, a once vibrant field that has been theoretically staid for several decades.Although the work proceeds in a roughly linear fashion, its thematic organization does render Time of Anarchy’s central thread—the anarchic feedback cycle described above—somewhat difficult to track and assess across time. Discussion of Culpepper’s Rebellion in North Carolina, the critical example of the cycle in motion outside of Virginia and after Bacon’s Rebellion, is scattered across three small sections (136–138, 163–166, 203–204) over the same number of chapters. Challenging details of this revolt, such as the fact that retaliatory strikes against the Susquehannock were in this instance carried out by proprietary rather than rebellious settler forces, are included but not subjected to analysis in this abbreviated treatment. More concerning for broad applications of the anarchic cycle, the two revolts in Maryland that followed Bacon’s Rebellion—the Clifts uprising and Fendall’s Rebellion—were comparatively merely riotous affairs of several dozen agitators. Kruer describes the former as having failed to “inspire a mass rising,” (122) and the latter as an “ignominious repeat” (214) of this flop. The narrative is more attentive to the flurry of frightened, hyperbolic writings that these tumults evoked from colonial officials than to the paltry material scale of the unrest, an emphasis that is perhaps due to its thematic focus on conspiracy. Readers are ultimately left wanting for a detailed explanation of why frontier raiding, conspiracies, and racial hatred produced Bacon’s Rebellion, but no other sustained, massive insurrections.Time of Anarchy is the sort of book that enables such granular critiques of its subject matter through its comprehensive, empirical, and edifying presentation of relevant evidence. Historians of Iroquoian peoples and Stuart Empire will undoubtedly consult its pages for many years to come, and they will be well rewarded for the effort.

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

Overwintering in North American domesticated honeybees (Apis mellifera) causes mitochondrial reprogramming while enhancing cellular immunity.

Many factors negatively affect domesticated honeybee (Apis mellifera) health, causing a global decrease in their population year after year with major losses occurring during winter, and the cause remains unknown. Here, we monitored for 12 months North American colonies of honeybees enduring important temperature variations throughout the year, to assess the metabolism and immune system of summer and winter honeybee individuals. Our results show that in flight muscle, mitochondrial respiration via complex I during winter is drastically reduced compared with summer. However, the capacity for succinate and glycerol-3-phosphate (G3P) oxidation by mitochondria is increased during winter, resulting in higher mitochondrial oxygen consumption when complex I substrates, succinate and G3P were assessed altogether. Pyruvate kinase, lactate dehydrogenase, aspartate aminotransferase, citrate synthase and malate dehydrogenase tend to have reduced activity levels in winter, unlike hexokinase, NADH dehydrogenase and pyruvate dehydrogenase. Transcript abundance of highly important immunity proteins such as Vitellogenin and Defensin-1 were also increased in winter bees, and a stronger phagocytic response as well as a better hemocyte viability was observed during winter. Thus, a reorganization of substrate utilization favoring succinate and G3P while negatively affecting complex I of the ETS is occurring during winter. We suggest that this might be due to complex I transitioning to a dormant conformation through post-translational modification. Winter bees also have an increased response for antibacterial elimination. Overall, this study highlights previously unknown cellular mechanisms between summer and winter honeybees that further our knowledge about this important species.

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

A Miskitu Critique of British Trade Practices

A Miskitu Critique of British Trade Practices

СЕВЕРОАМЕРИКАНСКИЕ КОЛОНИИ БРИТАНСКОЙ ИМПЕРИИ И ПРОБЛЕМА ОБЕСПЕЧЕНИЯ ИХ БЕЗОПАСНОСТИ В 60-Е ГГ. XIX В.

The paper examines the process of transformation of the principles of Imperial defense in the North American colonies of the British Empire. It limits the chronological scope of the work to the 60s. XIX century, when the colonial possessions of Britain in North America received the status of a dominion, which assumed self-government, including in the field of defense. It traces the genesis of the idea of mutual obligations in the field of defense between the mother country and the North American colonies in the first half of the 19th century. It studies the strategic plans for the defense of Canadian territory, developed by British government and military experts at various levels. It formulates the views of W. Gladstone, which determined the policy of Imperial defense throughout the whole decade. It pays particular attention to the transformation of the maritime aspect of Imperial defense and its consequences for the North American colonies. It characterizes 60s 19th century by a weakening of the Anglocentric model of building relations with the North American colonies, where all the full obligations to ensure their security were assigned to the mother country. Henceforth, the colonies were to be responsible for the land defense of their territories. Thus, by the end of the 60s. 19th century finally took shape the trend of transition to the principle of mutual control and collective responsibility in the field of Imperial defense.

Global Revolutions

Global Revolutions

The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity by Carolyn Eastman

Reviewed by: The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity by Carolyn Eastman Sandra M. Gustafson The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity. By Carolyn Eastman. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 358 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity is an impressive achievement. Carolyn Eastman's reconstruction of the life and career of the Scottish cultural entrepreneur James Ogilvie is at once deeply researched, expertly situated in several bodies of scholarship, and a delightful reading experience. From the title forward, The Strange Genius of Mr. O aims to appeal to both experts in the field of early American history and interested general readers. Eastman's study also has broad implications, engaging questions concerning the historical nature of celebrity, the place of opium in the transatlantic world, responses to religious skepticism in the early republic, constructions of masculinity both in the classical world and on the North American frontier, the different valences of oratorical and print culture, and the relationship of historical maladies to present-day understandings of mental illness. Tracing all these themes as they radiate from the core narrative of Ogilvie's life, Eastman provides her readers with a tale of postrevolutionary America that underscores central tensions between the classical republican thought that fueled the revolution and the emerging realities of a modern commercial republic. The "strange genius" that Ogilvie possessed was a talent for oratory, which he transformed into a lucrative performance art while advocating for its central role in a republican system of education. Ogilvie's choice of form has a distinctly antiquarian flavor today, when people give speeches, addresses, sermons, or lectures but not "orations." Ogilvie, though, belonged to a world where oratory was not only a recognized practice; it was celebrated as the preeminent republican genre. Ogilvie made a name for himself as a celebrity orator starting late in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But he sank into oblivion within a few years, in part because of his lingering association with atheism. This too reflected specific features of the early republic; as Eastman notes, the modern sense of "celebrity"—that is, one who is fashionable or popular—emerged [End Page 315] later in the United States than in Britain or France. In Ogilvie's day, the term retained the sense of an "exemplary" (129) figure, a meaning that complicated his reception, particularly after his religious skepticism came to public attention. A relevant body of scholarship that Eastman overlooks is the work of the historians who analyzed early American political culture through the lens of "classical republicanism"—Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, and Joyce Appleby, among others—emphasizing the Renaissance-era recovery of Greek and Roman thought and its impact on Europe's North American colonies.1 As one influential aspect of this movement, classical oratory was elevated to a place of eminence in the political imagination and given a central role in higher education. Students were trained in classical rhetoric, read orations by Demosthenes and Cicero, and practiced to become great orators themselves. The republican enthusiasm for oratory shaped a public culture in which Dr. Joseph Warren's decision to wear a toga while delivering the annual Boston Massacre Oration in 1775 evoked, as Eastman notes, "the classical opposition to tyranny" (146).2 By the time Ogilvie donned a toga for his lecture tour of the United States in the 1810s, his mode of dress had become such an unremarkable feature of modern republican iconography that reviewers rarely mentioned it; indeed, Eastman notes that by the early 1800s, the toga no longer conveyed a revolutionary spirit but rather signified "the social stability of a culture that would not succumb to extralegal violence, as had the French Revolution" (146). The common thread linking these two meanings of the toga was devotion to the preservation of the republic, whether from foreign tyranny or internal disorder. The significance that Eastman assigns to Ogilvie's Roman attire captures...

Voyager pour apprendre: les Canadiens reçus docteurs en médecine à Paris au XIXe siècle.

Thirteen Canadians obtained a doctoral degree from the Faculty of Medicine of Paris between 1822 and 1905. Their studies in France played a decisive role in some of the major trends of 19th-century Canadian history: the formation of a French-Canadian professional bourgeoisie, the formalization of diplomatic ties between Canada and France, the development of bacteriology in America, and the rise of French-Canadian nationalism at the turn of the 20th century. This article traces the careers of these medical doctors by using unpublished sources, mainly their student files and doctoral theses, located through the Pierre Moulinier database and made available by the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Santé of the Université Paris-Descartes. By examining these doctors' travels to Paris, it shows the impact on the Canadian medical profession of the relationship between a former North American colony and its former imperial capital.

A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas by Sean F. McEnroe

Reviewed by: A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas by Sean F. McEnroe Mark W. Lentz A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas. By Sean F. McEnroe. [Diálogos Series.] (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2020. Pp. xxviii, 319. $95.00 hardcover: ISBN 978-0-8263-6118-9; $34.95 paperback: ISBN 978-0-8263-6119-6.) A Troubled Marriage takes a hemispheric approach to the strategies, successes, and setbacks faced by the upper echelons of indigenous society under Spanish, French, and English rule. Geographically, the book’s protagonists’ origins range from South America to Canada in the Americas. The tactics of military support, marriage alliances, services as intermediaries, conversion to Christianity, and adoption of European-introduced literacy and crafts lent themselves to overall positive outcomes for the indigenous and mestizo figures studied by McEnroe. The author depicts these alliances as a two-way street, emphasizing the Europeans’ dependence on indigenous allies, especially in the early contact period. McEnroe’s monograph spans the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. The book’s organization balances a chronological arrangement with a thematic approach, with the first chapter dealing with early contacts and the last chapter examining independence. In between, chapters are arranged topically, covering dynastic alliances, religious adaptation, adoption of writing and the arts, urban coexistence with colonizers, and military alliances during and after the conquest. The flexible timeframe for each chapter takes into account the divergent trajectories of contact and colonization of indigenous spaces by separate states and empires. The regions and indigenous leaders examined in this book depend on historical circumstances. Due to the nature of A Troubled Marriage’s subject matter, the book focuses on areas in which an indigenous elite persisted after initial contact and in zones where European colonists had sustained interactions with the indigenous population, which resulted in a documentary record to reconstruct such relationships. Cuzco, Lima, Mexico City, and Tlaxcala figure prominently in the book partly as a result of these sites’ well-preserved original sources and the persistence of a largely literate native elite that left a long paper trail in those locations. To complete a work so sweeping in scope, McEnroe’s archival itinerary included stops in over twenty repositories in six different nations, namely the United States, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and Spain. His expansive bibliography demonstrates engagement with the leading works on the native populations of English and Francophone Canada, the English North American colonies and the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Paraguay. Such extensive research did not result in a dense book, however. McEnroe’s serial biographical organization and his narrative style make A Troubled Marriage easily accessible to the Diálogos Series’ main audience, university classrooms. Individually, most chapters would work as standalone sections to introduce readers to themes for specialized topics classes. [End Page 616] Despite its accessibility, a few editing issues may give some readers pause. Any work so panoramic in its scope covering contact to the nineteenth century from South America to Canada may include a few errors. However, copy editors should have noticed a few glaring ones, such as identifying July 16 as Mexico’s Independence Day (p. 202) or “Lake Eerie” instead of “Lake Erie” (p. 210). Other errors seem to reflect an overall unfamiliarity with Central America, such as his reference to the “Mexico-Honduras border” (p. 7) or describing the indigenous population of Honduras as “neighbors” to the Kaqchikel Mayas of highland Guatemala (p. 180). Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas, the book’s subtitle, suggests that the book’s focus will be on indigenous elites. However, while the book covers the “uneasy marriage” between indigenous Americans and Europeans, its subject matter does not exclusively examine the autochthonous population. Many of the biographical sketches include mestizos such as Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, Diego Muñoz Camargo, Diego Valadés, and “the Inca” Garcilaso de la Vega. While these figures played an important role in recording the indigenous past and acting as intermediaries, their European heritage and influences are downplayed, even though some, such as Garcilaso de la Vega, spent much of their lives among Europeans in Europe. Some character studies even focus on Europeans who adopted aspects of...