An Interview with Ann Little

November 7, 2016 By Sara Damiano in Interview, Interviews with Historians, Review / Q&A Tags: biography, blogging, Canada, Gender, Interview, Native American history, New England, religious history, women's history 2 Comments

ann-little Today at The Junto we’re featuring an interview with Ann Little, an Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University, about her new biography, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Little has previously authored Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England. She also writes regularly at her blog, Historiann: History and Sexual Politics, 1492 to Present.

In The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, Little chronicles the life of a New England girl, Esther Wheelwright, who was captured by the Wabanakis in 1703 when she was seven years old. After living with the Wabenakis for several years, Wheelwright entered an Ursuline convent in Quebec at age twelve. She lived the remainder of her life there, voluntarily becoming a nun and taking on several leadership positions in the convent, including that of Mother Superior, during old age. Continue reading →

“Daddy” Schuyler, Hamilton, and the Dakota Access Pipeline

November 1, 2016 By Rachel Herrmann in From the Archives Tags: #NoDAPL, Alexander Hamilton, Archives, colonial New York, Dakota Access Pipeline, Dutch, Eliza Hamilton, fracking, Georgian Papers Programme, Hamilton: An American Musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Native American history, New York Public Library, New York State, Peggy Schuyler, Philip Schuyler, research, settler colonialism, Treaties 5 Comments

Three things happened in the last couple weeks to put Hamilton back on my mind: 1) the Victoria Palace Theatre in London announced that tickets for the show would finally (finally!) go on sale in January, 2) I started re-reading some of my research notes for this round of book edits, and 3) police arrested and pepper-sprayed peaceful Native Americans—Standing Rock Sioux, along with 90 additional nations and tribes—who were protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.[1] I find that being a historian is a job of intellectual mood swings. I read my sources telling me about the horrible things some of the people I study did in the past, and then I have to pull back and contextualize their actions within an eighteenth-century milieu in which many people were terrible people most of the time by 2016’s standards (and people, our standards these days are low). All this is a longish way of saying that I, like many historians, love Hamilton while recognizing that its treatment of Early Republic history misrepresents and sometimes leaves out some of the topics that matter most to me as a historian. And so today I want to talk about Hamilton, settler colonialism, and Native American history—in particular, about land battles and the relationship between Indians, federal governments, and state entities. Continue reading →

The 1904 Olympics: The American Future and the American Past

August 12, 2016 By Ken Owen in Commentary Tags: historical memory, Louisiana Purchase, Native American history, Olympics, St.Louis 3 Comments

International pageants such as World’s Fairs or Olympic Games are strange beasts of their very nature. While trying to project an image of a modern, vibrant place, they must necessarily also draw on the familiar in order to reach a wide audience. Sometimes this can be done in eye-catching and engaging fashion—think of the 2012 London Olympics, and their juxtaposition of Horse Guard’s Parade with beach volleyball. Thus these international pageants provide a curious mix of looking to the future at the same time as looking at the past. Continue reading →

Why the Exeter Chiefs Should Rebrand Themselves

August 9, 2016 By Rachel Herrmann in Opinion Tags: Cultural appropriation, Exeter Chiefs, Mascots, Native American history, Rugby, scalping, settler colonialism, Washington Redskins 4 Comments

This blog post originally appeared at the Imperial and Global Forum in June. It’s reposted with slight edits here for reasons I’ll go into below.

On any given weekend, you might find yourself on a train platform, surrounded by sports fans wearing “Native American” headdresses and “war paint,” and waving inflatable tomahawks. They’ll be wearing apparel purchased from the team’s online store (the “Trading Post”), where you can also buy a “Little Big Chief” mascot. During the event, supporters will chant the Tomahawk Chop to get into the spirit of things, and afterward, perhaps they’ll rehash the game on the team’s message boards (“the tribe”). But this isn’t the Atlanta Braves. It’s not the Washington Redskins. This is a rugby match for Great Britain’s Exeter Chiefs, and it’s a problem that evokes Britain’s imperial American past.

Continue reading →

Q&A with Alejandra Dubcovsky

June 8, 2016 By Rachel Herrmann in Interview Tags: Ais, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Apalachicola, Cahokia, Calusa, Cofitachequi, Coosa, Etowah, First Books, information networks, Informed Power, interviews with historians, Native American history, Spanish America, Timucua, Westos 2 Comments

Today at The Junto, we’re featuring an interview with Alejandra Dubcovsky about her new book, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South, which Jessica Parr reviewed yesterday. Alejandra Dubcovsky is an Assistant Professor of History at Yale (and soon an Assistant Professor of history at UC Riverside). She earned her BA and PhD from UC Berkeley. She also has a Masters in Library and Information Sciences from San Jose State. She was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work has appeared in Ethnohistory, The William and Mary Quarterly, and Native South. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Native American History within #VastEarlyAmerica

May 4, 2016 By Christopher F. Minty in Academia, Guest Posts Tags: Cayton, Contested spaces, Creeks, Early America, Indians, Native American history, UNC Press, vastearlyamerica 4 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Steven J. Peach, who will graduate in May 2016 with a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. (Congrats, Steven!) His research examines Creek Indian politics, diplomacy, and power in early America. This is his first guest post for The Junto.

In 2015, Gordon Wood charged the William and Mary Quarterly with no longer publishing scholarship fixed “exclusively” on the “origins” of the United States. Restricting early America’s geography to the modern limits of the U.S., he argued that articles like that on sixteenth-century Castile make the “boundaries” of early America “mushy.” Not so fast, responded Joshua Piker, the Quarterly’s editor. A few months ago, he refuted Wood by saying that the Quarterly never focused solely on U.S. origins. (Piker’s refutation is dazzling; if you have not read it, you should!) Piker went on to say that early Americanists must abandon any “misleading coherence or … artificial simplicity” to define the field. Instead, they ought to “get lost” in the “vastness” of early America—or Karin Wulf’s #VastEarlyAmerica.[1] What spaces did early America encompass, then, and how can the field begin to sketch them? Native American history offers a path forward. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Native American History & the Explanatory Potential of Settler Colonialism

February 10, 2016 By Christopher F. Minty in Guest Posts, Historiography, Recent Scholarship Tags: guest post, historiography, Native American history, Recent scholarship, research, settler colonialism, the west 2 Comments

Today’s post comes from Bryan Rindfleisch, Assistant Professor of History at Marquette University. Bryan received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2014. He is currently working on a book that examines the intersections of colonial, Native, imperial, and Atlantic histories, peoples, and places in eighteenth-century North America. This is his second post for The Junto. The first can be found here.

51auvvdbpil-_ac_ul320_sr208320_ One of the trending themes in Native American history is “Settler Colonialism.” From Patrick Wolfe’s foundational essay, to recent works by historians and literary scholars—Bethel Saler, Jodi Byrd, Gregory Smithers, David Preston, and Lisa Ford, for instance—this theoretical model has attracted significant attention within the field.[1]

In fact, I’ve deployed this concept as the framework for my upper-division class, “A History of Native America, 1491–Present,” at Marquette. But over the past several weeks it has become evident that settler colonialism is a bit of a minefield. Nevertheless, I find it to be an apt, if not critical, theory for researching and teaching Native American history. But it must be understood, and it must be used responsibly. Continue reading →