Colloquium in U.S. History to 1788

HIST 726, Fall 2017, Thursdays 3:30-5:30, Hamilton 420

Professor: Kathleen DuVal E-mail address: duval@unc.edu

Office: Hamilton Hall, #466 Office hours: Thursdays 10-12 & by appt.

Required Books

Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001)

Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010)

Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001)

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)

Ann M. Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)

David J. Silverman, Thundersticks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016)

Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013)

Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2009)

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)

Benjamin H. Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of

Doors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Articles are on JSTOR (through the UNC Library website) or in E-Reserves (access through Sakai).

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Assignments

Book Reviews: For each of the 9 monographs assigned between Aug. 31 and Nov. 16 (asterisked), you

will write a 2- to 3-page (double-spaced) book review. Before writing your first one, please read this

essay by Karin Wulf: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/01/09/the-art-and-craft-of-review/. For

examples, see book reviews in the William and Mary Quarterly. Each is due in pdf form by email by

Wednesday night before class. I will grade the first few reviews. After that, we will have a system of

peer review, and you will email your review to me and to your partner. For those reviews, you will

evaluate your partner’s review and email your comments to your partner and me by the Monday

following class. By Nov. 30, choose your best peer-reviewed review and email a revised version of it

to me to grade.

Discussion Leading: Once or twice this semester, you will lead the class discussion. Please follow the

instructions on Sakai.

Final Assignment: Devise a possible question for a qualifying exam. After vetting the question with me,

time yourself for four hours as you write an answer under exam conditions. If you are not taking a

qualifying exam in early American history, you may instead write two additional book reviews on

outside books chosen in consultation with me. The final assignment is due Dec. 7 by email.

Class Schedule

August 24 What Is Early America?

Oscar Handlin, “The Significance of the Seventeenth Century,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays

in Colonial History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), E-Reserves

Taylor, American Colonies (2001)

Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Whither the Rest of the Continent?” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (2004), 167-

175

Eric Hinderaker and Rebecca Horn, “Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early

Americas,” WMQ 67 (2010), 395-432

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August 31 Early Encounters

Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” WMQ

33 (1976), 289-299

Paul Kelton, “Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits: Colonial Epidemics and Southeastern Indian Survival,”

Ethnohistory 51 (2004), 45-71

Brett Rushforth, “‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,” WMQ

60 (2003), 777-808

Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country (2010)*

September 7 No Class (start early on next week’s reading)

September 14 Defining the Other(s)

Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (2001)*

Jennifer Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the

Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770,” WMQ 54 (1997), 167-92

Alden T. Vaughan, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia

Magazine of History and Biography, 97 (1989), 311-354

Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to be Red,” American Historical Review 102 (1997), 625-644

Wayne Lee, “The Native American Military Revolution: Firearms, Fortifications, and Polities,” in

Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern

World (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 49-80, E-Reserves

September 21 African Slavery

Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998)*

Stephanie E. Smallwood, “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of

Power in the Early Modern Atlantic,” WMQ 64 (2007), 679-716

Warren E. Milteer, Jr., “Life in a Great Dismal Swamp Community: Free People of Color in Pre-Civil

War Gates County, North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 91 (2014), 144-170

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September 28 Religion and Colonialism

Perry Miller, “Declension in A Bible Commonwealth,” in Miller, Nature’s Nation (1967), E-Reserves

Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (2016)*

Annette Laing, “‘Heathens and Infidels’? African Christianization and Anglicanism in the South Carolina

Low Country, 1700-1750,” Religion and American Culture 12 (2002), 197-228

October 5 Borderlands and Native Grounds (I will reschedule this class meeting as a dinner on the

Monday or Tuesday before or after Oct. 5, ideally with Prof. Barr.)

Juliana Barr, “Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the ‘Borderlands’ of the Early

Southwest,” WMQ 68 (2011), 5-46

Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), introduction, E-Reserves

Michael Witgen, “The Rituals of Possession: Native Identity and the Invention of Empire in Seventeenth-

Century Western North America,” Ethnohistory 54 (2007), 639-668.

Silverman, Thundersticks (2016)*

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October 12 Gender & Sexuality

Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century

New England Village,” WMQ 48 (1991), 19-49

Deborah Rosen, “Women and Property across Colonial America: A Comparison of Legal Systems in New

Mexico and New York,” WMQ 60 (2003), 355-382

Juliana Barr, “From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands,” Journal of

American History 92 (2005), 19-46

Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

2004), introduction, E-Reserves

Emily Clark and Virginia M. Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727-

1852, WMQ 59 (2002), 409-448

Kathleen DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana,” WMQ 65 (2008), 267-304

October 19 No Class, Fall Break

October 26 The Far West

Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln,

2003), prologue, E-Reserves

Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” Journal of American History 90

(2003), 833-862

Mapp, Elusive West (2013)*

November 2 The Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed.

Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), E-Reserves

Pearsall, Atlantic Families (2009)*

Joshua Piker, “Lying Together: The Imperial Implications of Cross-Cultural Untruths,” American

Historical Review 116 (2011), 964-986

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November 9 Labor and Economics

Seth Rockman, “The Contours of Class in the Early Republic City,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class

History of the Americas 1 (2004), 91-107

Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy (2009)*

November 16 The Revolution: Week 1

Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty (2011)*

November 23—No Class—Thanksgiving

November 30 The Revolution: Week 2 & Conclusions (revised book review due)

Mary Beth Norton, “The Seventh Tea Ship,” WMQ 73 (2016), 681-710

Sarah Knott, “Narrating the Age of Revolution,” WMQ 73 (2016), 3-36

“Roundtable: The American Revolution Reborn,” Common-place 14 (Spring 2014): http://www.common-

place-archives.org/vol-14/no-03/intro/#.Vo1sc1Lj-K8 (selections TBA)

Final Assignment due December 7 by email