North America from the Era European Expansion and to the Formation of the United States, 16th-18th Centuries
This course covers North America from an Atlantic perspective from the 16th to the 18th century. The course is designed to prepare students for the qualifying exams, help them develop the background they will need to teach a US survey (or world history course), and raise historiographical and research questions that they might find useful in their own work (even if they work in different time periods). The emphasis is on cultural contact in Early America and the diversity of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century peoples in eastern North America and the Caribbean; secondarily, it is meant to introduce students to scholarship on the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. Some significant topics in early American history receive less coverage than one might wish and are left to you to pursue on your own (see the bibliography).
Primary Source Books
to be Used in Conjunction with the Readings Below:
Jill Lepore, Encounters
in the New World: A History in Documents (NY: Oxford University Press,
2000).
Allen Greer, The Jesuit
Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-century North America
(Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000).
Robert Allison, The Interesting
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Boston, MA: Bedford./St.
Martin's, 1995).
Jack N. Rakove, The Federalist:
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay: The Essential Essays
(Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003).
1. Colonial Encounters
Inga Clendinnen,
Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987) - 2nd edition
if available.
Karen
Ordahl Kupperman, "Reading Indian Bodies," in Kupperman, Indians
& English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2000): 41-76 (Chapter 2).
2. Spanish Settlement
and the Spanish Borderlands
James Brooks: Captives
and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Juliana Barr, "A Diplomacy
of Gender in the 'Land of the Tejas': Indian-European Communication in
the Colonial Spanish Borderlands," in Bernard Bailyn and Pat Denault, eds.,
Cultural
Encounters in Atlantic History, 1500-1825: Passages in Europe's Engagement
with the West (NY: Palgrave, forthcoming).
3. French Settlement:
Canada, the Mississippi Valley, and Louisiana
Peter Moogk, La Nouvelle
France: The Making of French Canada-A Cultural History (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2000).
Jennifer Spear, "'They Needed
Wives': Metissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana,
1699-1730," in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries
in North American History (NY: New York University Pres, 1999), xxx.
4.
Early Modern England
Kim
Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern
England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Press, 1995).
Emily Bartels, "Imperialist
Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa,"
Criticism,
34 (Fall 1992), 517-538.
5. Africa and the African
Slave Trade
John Thornton, Africa
and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 1998). - 2nd edition is
available.
Christopher Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation
in the Age of the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly,
56 (1999): 273-306.
Jennifer Morgan, "'Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulders': Male Travelers,
Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770," WMQ, LIV
(1997), 167-192.
6.
Early British America: Chesapeake, Carolinas, and the Caribbean
Edmund Morgan, American
Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (NY: Norton,
1975).
Selections from: Kathleen
M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender,
Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).
7.
Early British America: The Middle Colonies, New England, and British Canada
Christine Heyrman, Commerce
and Culture: the Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750
(NY: Norton, 1984).
8. Slavery and Race in
the New World
Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint:
Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
9. Religion and Culture
Stephen Foster, The Long
Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700
(Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
10. Anglo-American Society
in the Eighteenth Century
Linda Colley, Britons:
Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press,
1992).
11. Native American Life
Daniel K. Richter, Facing
East from Indian Company: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Selections from: Richard
White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great
Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
12. Coming of the American
Revolution
Bernard Bailyn, Origins
of American Politics (NY: Knopf, 1968).
Edmund Morgan, The Stamp
Act Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953)
- any edition.
13. Creation of the American
Republic
Thomas Slaughter, The
Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (NY:
Oxford University Press, 1986).
Selections from: Gordon
S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel
Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1969).
14. New Nation: Politics
and Society in the 1790s
Joanne Freeman, Affairs
of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CN: Yale
University Press, 2001).
Linda Kerber, "The Paradox
of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts,"
American Historical Review, 97 (1992): 349-378.
Jan Lewis, "'The Blessings
of Domestic Society': Thomas Jefferson's Family and the Transformation
of American Politics," in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies,
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 109-146.