Guest Post: Did Squanto meet Pocahontas, and What Might they have Discussed?

November 21, 2017 By Rachel Herrmann in Guest Posts Tags: British Empire, Coll Thrush, East India Company, empire, imperialism, Indigenous London, John Chamberlain, John Rolfe, John Slaney, John Smith, King James, London, Matoaka, Newfoundland Company, Pamunkey, Pawtuxet, Philpot Lane, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Queen Anne, Rebecca Rolfe, Squanto, Thanksgiving, Thomas Hunt, Thomas Smythe, Tisquantum, Tsenacomoco, Virginia, Virginia Company, Wahunsonacock, William Bradford 5 Comments

This is a guest post by Dr E. M. Rose. Dr Rose is a Visiting Fellow, Department of History, Harvard University, and can be reached at emrose@fas.harvard.edu. These observations emerged during research Rose conducted in the spring of 2017 as Visiting Fellow at The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC)/Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation at Historic Jamestowne.

Two of the most famous Native Americans in early colonial history may well have met in London. Matoaka, nicknamed Pocahontas, who lived near the Jamestown settlement in Virginia and Tisquantum, better known as Squanto, who greeted the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts, were apparently living near other in the English capital in late 1616. Pocahontas and Squanto were both part of a small and complexly entwined commercial community of merchants, sea captains, and maritime entrepreneurs, whose ventures spanned the globe. The two Native Americans were kidnapped in America within a year of each other and eventually came to England, where they were welcomed enthusiastically.[1] Although there is, as yet, no documentation to prove that such a meeting took place, circumstantial evidence suggests that they met when they were staying only a few hundred yards down the street from each other in the homes of men with interlocking business interests. Although the histories of Jamestown and Plymouth are usually treated as separate chapters in most narratives of American history, they were closely linked. Continue reading →

Call for Papers: BGEAH and BrANCH joint postgraduate and Early Career conference

September 22, 2017 By Rachel Herrmann in Calls for Papers, Conferences Tags: BGEAH, BrANCH, Call for Papers, Early Career Researchers, ECR, IHR, Institute of Historical Research, London, PGR, Postgraduate Researchers 1 Comment

BGEAH & BrANCH Unite for a Postgraduate and Early Career Conference at the IHR in London

Friday 23 MARCH 2018

Call For Papers

In 2018, the British Group in Early American History Postgraduate and Early Career Conference enters its 4th year, and for the first time, joins forces with the British American Nineteenth Century Historians’ postgraduate community for a joint event. This will take place on Friday 23rd March 2018 at the London-based Institute of Historical Research, the UK’s national center for history. London, with its unique colonial archival resources and lively research student population, is one of the leading centers of American scholarship in Europe, and the IHR is a natural location for this event. The IHR Library’s North American Room houses one of the foremost UK collections of published material relating to the early history of the United States, Caribbean, and Canada. The day-long BGEAH & BrANCH Postgraduate and Early Career Conference will be a key forum for the discussion of individual research as well as themes and issues emerging in the field of American research in the UK. Continue reading →

Review: Coll Thrush, Indigenous London

September 16, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A, Special Features Tags: Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Britain, British Empire, cultural history, Dickens, Indigenous, Iroquois, London, Native Americans, Pocahontas, Print Culture, urban history 2 Comments

Review: Coll Thrush, <i>Indigenous London</i>

**Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).**

Wander through the Museum of London’s rich galleries, glowing with relics and rites of Roman Londinium, and you’ll spot scraps of the city’s wall half-strewn along the route. Burned in bits or eaten by age, the red-and-white brick arches splay out like the broken teeth of empire, grinding a crooked grin in today’s cityscape. Amid the tidy exhibits and visitors’ whirl, it’s a graphic reminder of what London was and how it has weathered so many centuries’ toll. But, as Coll Thrush’s Indigenous London asks us, “The audience of a museum is always / another sort of collection…Indigenous objects, Indigenous eyes—/ Who sees and what is being seen?” (p. 135). For the scholar rescuing clues from the built environment, the wall raises a complex set of research queries: Who passed through the city limits, and why? How did diverse travelers experience urban life at a sensory level? What did it mean for indigenous visitors to sample London? And how can we expand the historical canon of voices who tell that story in the early modern era? Continue reading →

Q&A with Coll Thrush

September 12, 2017 By Rachel Herrmann in Review / Q&A Tags: Australia, british library, British Museum, Canada, Coast Salish, Coll Thrush, cricket, Eccles Centre, Ethnohistory, Hawaii, Indigeneity, Indigenous London, Indigenous Studies, Joseph Brant, Leanne Simpson, London, Native American history, New Zealand, Performance, Pocahontas, Queen Victoria, Saidiya Hartman, United States 7 Comments

Today Coll Thrush speaks with The Junto about his most recent book, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire, which examines that city’s history through the experiences of Indigenous travelers—willing or otherwise—from territories that became the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. A graduate of Fairhaven College at Western Washington University and the University of Washington, Coll Thrush is Professor of History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in unceded Coast Salish territories, and affiliate faculty at UBC’s Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. He is the author of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, which won the 2007 Washington State Book Award for History/Biography, and was re-released as a tenth-anniversary second edition in early 2017. He is also co-editor with Colleen Boyd of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American History & Culture. His article “City of the Changers: Indigenous People and the Transformation of Seattle’s Watersheds” was named Best Article of 2006 by the Urban History Association, and his article “Vancouver the Cannibal: Cuisine, Encounter, and the Dilemma of Difference on the Northwest Coast, 1774-1808” won the Robert F. Heizer prize for best article of 2011 from the American Society for Ethnohistory. During the 2013-2014 academic year, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Historical Research of the University of London and an Eccles Centre Fellow in North American Studies at the British Library. After the completion of Indigenous London, Coll will return to writing about the Northwest Coast of North America with a book project entitled SlaughterTown, a history-memoir examining trauma, memory, silence, and landscape in Coast Salish territories and his hometown of Auburn, Washington—formerly known as Slaughter. Continue reading →

Research in London

May 18, 2016 By Jessica Parr in Archives around the Atlantic, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, british library, Lambeth Palace Library, London, National Archives, Parliamentary Archives, research, research travel, Wellcome Library 18 Comments

Casey Schmitt kicked off the week with a discussion of doing research in Seville, Spain. Hannah Bailey continued our forum yesterday, with a discussion of research in France. I’m going to continue the conversation with reflections on doing research in London. (For those interested in research gear, see my post from last summer.) Since there are quite a few archives libraries and archives that are potentially of interest to Early Americanists, I will primarily focus on the logistics, such as navigating London and finding accommodations. I’ve provided basic information on a few major archives near the end.