The Continental Toehold Dilemma

September 22, 2016 By Casey Schmitt in Historiography, Opinion, Recent Scholarship Tags: 17th Century, Barbados, British Empire, Caribbean, Jamaica, Surinam, vastearlyamerica 2 Comments

nouvellecarte

“The heart of the English Empire in the seventeenth-century Americas was Barbados,” according to Justin Roberts in his recent William and Mary Quarterly article.[1] That claim is perhaps not surprising—Richard Dunn established the social and economic importance of the island over thirty years ago in his seminal work, Sugar and Slaves. However, Roberts takes that point further by exploring the political ramifications of all of that Barbadian wealth in the West Indies. His article also speaks to a larger sea change in the historiography of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Continue reading →

“In the Service of the Crown ever since I came into this Province”: The Life and Times of Cadwallader Colden

August 29, 2016 By Christopher F. Minty in Academia, Book Review, Historiography Tags: 18th Century, academia, American Revolution, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Benjamin Franklin, book review, Cadwallader Colden, historiography, John Dixon, Native Americans, New York, New York City, Politics, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

**John M. Dixon, The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden: Empire, Science, and Intellectual Culture in British New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).**

80140100162200L On December 8, 1747, Gov. George Clinton (1686–1761) told a British statesman that the Assembly of New York “treated the person of the Governor with such contempt of his authority & such disrespect to the noble family where he had his birth that must be of most pernicious example.” He thought he might have to “give it [i.e., his position] up to a Faction.” The extant copy of this letter, held within Clinton’s papers at the William L. Clements Library in Michigan, was written by his most trusted advisor and ally—Cadwallader Colden, the subject of John M. Dixon’s first book, The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden: Empire, Science, and Intellectual Culture in British New York, published in 2016 by Cornell University Press.[1]

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 →