{"title":"The International Life of a Russian Colonial Document: The Russian-American Company, the Kashaya Pomos, the Bodega Miwoks, and the 1817 Métini Protocol","authors":"Jeffrey Glover","doi":"10.1353/eam.2020.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2020.0006","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In September 1817 officials of the Russian colony of Ross drafted a protocol of a meeting held with the Kashaya Pomos, the Bodega Miwoks, and other Native Americans. The protocol described how the Russians had promised gifts and military protection to their Native American allies in exchange for the right to continue occupying Métini, a Kashaya Pomo–controlled territory about eighty-five miles north of San Francisco. Soon, reports of the meeting had made their way up and down the coast and across the Pacific, as Native Americans, Russian imperial ministers, and diplomats from Russia's imperial rivals debated its significance. This essay describes how the Russian-American Company used the protocol and other agreements with Native Americans to lay claim to coastal territories, and how Russia's imperial rivals disputed such claims. It argues that company officials used documentation of Native American signs of consent, such as speeches and gestures, to assert ownership of Métini, while Spain disputed the validity of agreements with Native Americans. The meaning that Russian officials assigned to Native Americans' consent enabled the Kashaya Pomos, the Bodega Miwoks, and other groups to exert some influence over Russian colonization and trade.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74023411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lewis Henry Morgan's Early Theory of Progress: His Evolving View of the Passions and Social Development","authors":"James Z. Schwartz","doi":"10.1353/eam.2020.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2020.0005","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Lewis Henry Morgan has long been regarded as one of U.S. anthropology's founders. Much of the recent scholarship on Morgan explores his depiction of indigenous culture and his theory of progress. Focusing on his early thought, this article demonstrates how in the 1840s he moved from a moralistic to an increasingly ethnological understanding of advancement, and how his evolving view of Native peoples and the human passions underpinned this change. As a temperance reformer in the early 1840s, Morgan equated progress with economic growth, territorial expansion, and the spread of democracy. Additionally, he feared that the immoral passions of drinkers, radicals, and Native peoples threatened these gains. By 1843 he began attributing to European colonists the destructive passions he had formerly assigned to indigenous peoples, and came to view progress as a destructive force detached from human agency and morality. His 1851 League of the Iroquois links the passions to progress, but he saw these drives primarily as social phenomena, some of which stymie advancement while others enhance it. This study thus links Morgan's early temperance work to the ideas expressed in League of the Iroquois and in his 1871 Ancient Society, illuminating the symbols that Victorian Americans employed to represent progress.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82497723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Custom, Text, and Property: Indians, Squatters, and Political Authority in Jacksonian Michigan","authors":"G. E. Dowd","doi":"10.1353/eam.2020.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2020.0004","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:A controversy over land in the Grand River Valley of Michigan reached the United States Attorney General's office in 1837. The quarrel warrants attention not only because the lands had value but because it engaged several groups with competing understandings of their rights to property. Native Americans confronted settlers, who confronted one another. At one level, the dispute pitted two forms of customary rights—one exercised by Indians and the other by squatters—against the demands of capital and the discipline of the state. But on another level, the contest reveals how in the early national period, irregular settlers could look to law, Native people could speak the language of improvement and look to text, and advocates of federal order could invoke imaginary violence.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83322243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conquest for Commerce: American Policymakers, Bermuda, and the War for Independence, 1775–83","authors":"Nicholas G. DiPucchio","doi":"10.1353/eam.2020.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2020.0000","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article explores American policymakers' efforts to annex the British colony of Bermuda during the U.S. War for Independence (1775–83). From Silas Deane to James Madison, Patriot leaders and diplomats idealized Bermuda as a valuable commercial outpost in the Atlantic world, viewing the colony as essential to their new nation's trade. This article considers the failed proposals, quixotic diplomatic demands, and unrealized military plans to acquire Bermuda to illustrate how conquest and commerce were inextricably linked in the minds of early America's policymakers. By exploring American interest in Bermuda, this article also contends that Patriot leaders' demands for other British territories—Canada, Nova Scotia, the Floridas, the Bahamas, and the trans-Appalachian West—were intended not as a blueprint for a continental empire. Rather, American leaders sought British territories such as Bermuda and the trans-Appalachian West to protect, expand, and promote the republic's Atlantic-based commerce.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89652821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Language Ideology in the Paxton Pamphlet War","authors":"Scott Zukowski","doi":"10.1353/eam.2020.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2020.0003","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This essay examines the literary texts of Pennsylvania's 1764 Paxton pamphlet war, giving close attention to the linguistic representations through which vying parties attempted to claim superiority in the Anglo-American sociopolitical hierarchy. Competing ethnic and political groups published creative literature (including poetry, dialogues, a farce, and a narrative) disparaging their opponents' British virtue and status by lampooning their literary and grammatical acuity and emphasizing their deviation from \"acceptable\" spoken English. Through analysis of the pamphlet war's portrayals of Quaker, American Indian, and Scots-Irish Presbyterian language, this essay demonstrates that the interrelated issues of language, virtue, and British identity were central to the concerns of provincial Pennsylvanians in 1764.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76739775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Neither Utterly to Reject Them, Nor Yet to Drawe Them to Come In\": Tributary Subordination and Settler Colonialism in Virginia","authors":"Dylan Ruediger","doi":"10.1353/eam.2020.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2020.0002","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This essay explores tributary relationships between colonists and Algonquian peoples in seventeenth-century Virginia, placing the process of political subordination into familiar narratives of indigenous dispossession. Virginia's tributary system—a political and legal institution founded in 1646 at the conclusion of the third Anglo-Powhatan war—created a colonial order in which Indian communities became subordinated but largely autonomous polities within a composite imperial state. This idea of tribute, a form of what Hugo Grotius called an \"unequal alliance,\" had roots in Algonquian political traditions and the emerging European literature on international law. Drawing on these lineages, this essay provides a framework for thinking about how the tributary system developed in the decades between 1646 and 1676. The legal and political distance separating tributaries from colonists proved to be an important tool for indigenous communities struggling to maintain communal identity, but provided colonists with a flexible means of effecting dispossession. Though colonists' resentment of the slender protections Governor William Berkeley afforded tributaries erupted into civil war in 1676, Bacon's Rebellion failed to destroy the tributary system. It was reestablished at the Treaty of the Middle Plantation in 1677, which still provides the legal framework for Indian relations in the state of Virginia.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84184925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Washington Family Fortune: Lineage and Capital in Nineteenth-Century America","authors":"C. Good","doi":"10.1353/eam.2020.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2020.0001","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:No family better displayed the enduring value of lineage in the new republic than the next generation of George Washington's family. His step-grandchildren, the Custises, may not have shared a last name with the first president, but they readily invoked their family connections in writings and speeches as a source of prestige and political legitimacy. The Custises also prominently displayed cultural capital in the form of Washington's furniture and relics in their houses (and even on their bodies) to bolster their social and political status. Decades into the nineteenth century, they continued to give small gifts of objects associated with Washington to reinforce their membership in the illustrious president's family. The Custises' social and cultural capital purchased them high social standing and access to political leaders. They masked their accumulation of capital behind the idea that their connection to George Washing-ton was affectionate rather than aristocratic, smoothing the way for family and lineage to serve as a strong credential in America.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73005115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mounting the Poyto: An Image of Afro-Catholic Submission in the Mystical Visions of Colonial Peru's Úrsula de Jesús","authors":"Rachel Spaulding","doi":"10.1353/eam.2019.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2019.0018","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This essay considers how Africans and their descendants may have expressed their socioreligious identities within the early modern Iberian Catholic world. The author argues that the seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian mystic Úrsula de Jesús situates herself within both Catholic and Yorùbá orishá religious practice. In a close reading of Úrsula's spiritual diary entries, the author speculates that Úrsula intentionally inflects the meanings of the words poyto to signify a Poitou mule and pollino to refer to a little donkey. In doing so, Úrsula reframes an image of mounting that may be read concurrently as a transformed representation of Catholic submission and as an image of Yorùbá ritual spirit possession. Within the transculturated religious space of colonial Lima, the author suggests that Úrsula rearticulates Catholic rhetoric to reframe her Afro-religious practice and perform the role of a spiritual authority. The essay explores how Úrsula de Jesús would have transposed an African past into her religious expression in her Catholic convent to encounter both mystic visions and orishá spiritual possession in a unified religious experience.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80943573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mary C. Kelley and Nancy J. Vickers","authors":"Mary Kelley, N. Vickers","doi":"10.1353/eam.2019.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2019.0028","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay is a brief remembrance of Mary Maples Dunn in a special issue commemorating her life and scholarship.</p>","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88160984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neo-Solomonic Palladianism: Touro Synagogue and Its Women's Balcony, Newport, Rhode Island","authors":"Catherine W. Zipf","doi":"10.1353/eam.2019.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2019.0021","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Touro Synagogue stands as a statement of deeply held beliefs in a modern interpretation of Jewish principles and in the importance of classical architecture. The design's incorporation of both neo-Solomonic themes and Palladian principles placed it on the cutting edge of synagogue design in the Atlantic world. While seemingly separate, these two systems converge symbolically in the synagogue's women's balcony. Following contemporary neo-Solomonic principles, the balcony was a key component in the creation of numerological relationships among the parts of the building. At the same time, it also established architectural balance within the progression of Palladian elements. As a pivotal space in both theories, the women's balcony inserted women into the process of Judaic worship in a way that reflected the values of open-mindedness and inclusion inherent in Newport's Jewish community. It also placed them at the heart of two larger dialogues, one about the role of women within Judaic practice and one involving the relationship between the Newport congregation and the Atlantic world.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86244409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}