Contested Spaces of Early America (Early American Studies) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812223993 ISBN 13: 9780812223996

Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Colonial America stretched from Quebec to Buenos Aires and from the Atlantic littoral to the Pacific coast. Although European settlers laid claim to territories they called New Spain, New England, and New France, the reality of living in those spaces had little to do with European kingdoms. Instead, the New World's holdings took their form and shape from the Indian territories they inhabited. These contested spaces throughout the western hemisphere were not unclaimed lands waiting to be conquered and populated but a single vast space, occupied by native communities and defined by the meeting, mingling, and clashing of peoples, creating societies unlike any that the world had seen before.

Contested Spaces of Early America brings together some of the most distinguished historians in the field to view colonial America on the largest possible scale. Lavishly illustrated with maps, Native art, and color plates, the twelve chapters span the southern reaches of New Spain through Mexico and Navajo Country to the Dakotas and Upper Canada, and the early Indian civilizations to the ruins of the nineteenth-century West. At the heart of this volume is a search for a human geography of colonial relations: Contested Spaces of Early America aims to rid the historical landscape of imperial cores, frontier peripheries, and modern national borders to redefine the way scholars imagine colonial America.

Contributors: Matthew Babcock, Ned Blackhawk, Chantal Cramaussel, Brian DeLay, Elizabeth Fenn, Allan Greer, Pekka Hämäläinen, Raúl José Mandrini, Cynthia Radding, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Alan Taylor, and Samuel Truett.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Juliana Barr is Associate Professor of History at Duke University and author of Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Edward Countryman is University Distinguished Professor at Southern Methodist University and author of several books, including The American Revolution, Americans: A Collision of Histories, and most recently Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era.

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Introduction
Maps and Spaces, Paths to Connect, and Lines to Divide
Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman

"In the last decades of the twentieth century," argued David J. Weber, "American historians discovered America." Scholars of New Spain, New France, and New England began to look toward other colonial regions for connections and comparisons. Ethnohistorians explored the commonalities and contrasts in histories of indigenous people from Peru to Greenland. We cannot speak of "early America" anymore with only the East Coast British colonies, the St. Lawrence River Valley, or Mexico and Peru in mind. The topic has grown vastly larger.

This volume suggests that we should think of "early" or "colonial" America on the largest possible scale. In its own historical time, our subject stretched from north of Quebec to south of Buenos Aires and from the Atlantic littoral to the Pacific coast. It needs to stretch just as far in modern understanding. This book brings together scholars and scholarly perspectives from the entirety of that zone around the organizing theme of contested spaces, places throughout the hemisphere where people who had been total strangers met, mingled, and clashed, creating colonial societies unlike any that the world had seen to that time. Our original intention was to honor David Weber's career and achievements upon his retirement, but his death in August 2010 turned this project into a memorial. The book thus has emerged both from Weber's lifework and from a larger turn in the study of early America to which he contributed mightily. David offered a bridge—in scholarship and among scholars—to link together the historic Americas and to see beyond borderlands, borders, and territorial crossings to imagine that history as a hemispheric project. The authors here are based at institutions not just across the United States but also in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Great Britain, and we hope that the essays will in some way embody the scope and breadth of David's vision to bring together the histories of early America.

In geographical terms, our writers deal largely but not exclusively with the areas that now compose the U.S. Southwest and the northern parts of Mexico. But their discussions also extend to what now forms Canada; the western, northern, and eastern United States; and Argentina. Our interest is with contestation over places that did not yet bear their modern names, not with any kind of precursor to the modern nation-states whose seemingly timeless boundaries are the main subject of conventional classroom and textbook political maps. For our purposes those nations and their internal divisions into states and provinces do not exist. Instead, a really good map of the colonial situation of the early western hemisphere would show a set of sometimes fluid, sometimes unbending fields of force, all of them dealing with the issue of space. We need not look for such an ideal map. Instead, we can turn to the maps that people who were caught up in colonial interactions generated as they tried to make sense of one another. The potential set of such maps is enormous, and no single map within that set is perfect. But taken together they bring out the theme of contested spaces that is our subject here.

Let's first look at the map that appears on the cover of this book and also in Figure I.1, drawn by the Portuguese adventurer-soldier Antonio Pereira half a century after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Pereira certainly saw America all of a piece, as did most cartographers of his age. His depiction of the western hemisphere as a single extensive landmass is part of an illuminated vellum map of the world in his time. What Pereira showed represented the sum of knowledge gained from Spanish and Portuguese explorers, primarily by sea, and from travel reports, notably regarding the Amazon River, and that information dates the map almost precisely to the year 1545. Scattered throughout North, South, and Meso-America appear three Portuguese flags, two flags sporting the French fleur-de-lis, and thirteen Spanish standards—all along the coastlines. To Pereira the vast interior remained unknown and apparently undeveloped, uncontrolled, or simply unpopulated. A caravel carries the Portuguese cross of Christ across to South America, another approaches the Strait of Magellan, and five Spanish ships navigate the Pacific Ocean. This is a space preeminently about Europeans in motion, transforming oceans from barriers into highways, while creating Portuguese and Spanish commercial empires built "literally on water."

Early modern European cartography reflected not just the advancement of knowledge but also the machinations of geopolitics. Geographic information (or sometimes the lack of it) determined the power and fate of nations. The flags and ships of Pereira's map proclaim America to be a world of competing European nations already divvying up rights within the hemisphere, and a blue banner unfurled across North America asserts possession by declaring the land there to be "Nova España." Early modern maps such as Pereira's thus created a landscape for colonialism, both anticipating the territory that vying European nations claimed in America and licensing plans to appropriate, conquer, and colonize. Visualizing a "breathless progression from 'I see' to 'I possess,'" colonial maps were expressions of desire, not reality. The names "New Spain," "New France," and "New England" appeared on maps long before the lands claimed became active zones of European invasion and settlement. European rulers legitimated colonial authority in America through cartography just as they had previously done with state systems in Europe; they used it primarily as a "political discourse concerned with the acquisition and maintenance of power" within national borders and across them. Maps were part and parcel of military intelligence, commercial activity, and territorial and proprietary rights and in America maps were "tools of imperialism as much as guns and warships."

In the hands of rulers, as scholars beginning with the late Brian Harley taught us to understand, such maps gave the illusion of control over distant lands and of powers claimed vis-à-vis other European nations; in the hands of colonizers, they promoted the lands to would-be settlers, proprietors, and investors. Such maps were not accurate, mirrorlike representations of objective reality. They were intensely political documents, boasts of power that were open to contestation and that could not be definitively enforced, despite all the might of the distant monarchs whose American dominions they purported to depict. Looked at carefully, they reveal tension and dispute, rather than settlement. One dimension of such dispute pitted European claimants against one another in a paper war of differently colored spaces and supposed borderlines. But other dimensions also are present, if we look. One such dimension involves all the Europeans, taken as a group despite their differences in language, religion, culture, and politics, vis-à-vis all Natives, also taken as a group, despite differences that dwarf the ones that separated Europeans. Another dimension takes those differences into account, showing how different sorts of Native people and different sorts of invaders cooperated in some situations and clashed in others.

A key quality in colonial-era European and later Euro-American maps of America was the attempted erasure of indigenous populations from the land and its history, viewing American space in purely European terms. Maps charted voyages of "discovery" in an "age of exploration" in which Europeans moved across spaces, and the land and sea became surfaces for European action. Such spatial narratives reduced Indian places, people, and cultures to "phenomena on this surface." They appeared as if always in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812223993
• ISBN 13: 9780812223996
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 444
• Herausgeber: Barr Juliana, Countryman Edward
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar