University of Florida

Department of History

Semester II, Spring 2008

 

History 6198: Early American Society

CBD 324, Tuesdays 4:05-7:05pm

 

Dr. Juliana Barr

Keene-Flint Hall, #021

(352) 392-0271, ext. 237

jbarr@history.ufl.edu

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/jbarr

Office Hours: Wednesdays 3:00-5:30pm, and by appointment

 

 

This course covers the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, places the European invasion and settlement of North America in the context of African and American Indian history, and develops comparisons among the regions claimed by the English, Spanish, and French.  Key themes are: cross-cultural encounter; slavery in the Atlantic World; social, ethnic, and gender hierarchies; religious conflict and conversion; politics, empire, and revolutions – all of which will be examined across the diversity of regions and peoples of early North America.

 

 

Readings

 

Each week everyone will read the core assignment.  In addition, each person will also select an item from the list of secondary titles; there will be no duplication of secondary readings. Generally, an individual will be free to choose the work that most interests him/her, but some “volunteers” may be sacrificed to ensure that interpretive diversity prevails.  All books assigned as core readings are available for purchase at Goerings bookstore (1717 NW 1st Ave, phone 377-3703).  The secondary readings are left to your discovery, reading, and xeroxing at the library or online website of your choice.

 

In readings and class discussions, it will be the job of you and your colleagues to determine what questions each author seeks to explore, what type of evidence she or he employs to answer these questions, and how it is they reach the conclusions they do.

 

 

Written Assignments

 

You will have three writing assignments to complete in this course.  First, you will choose one of the core readings from weeks 3-9 on which to write a 4-page review.  It will be due the week we discuss the book, and you will help to lead the discussion that day.  Second, you will choose, in consultation with me, a thematic question that addresses how and why historians have treated a particular subject in the manner they have.  In pursuit of an answer, you will write an annotated bibliography and a 15-page historiographical paper.  In writings this essay, no archival research is needed or desired. 

 

Book review – DUE WEEK OF CHOSEN READING

 

Annotated Bibliography – DUE APRIL 15th

 

Historiographical Essay – DUE APRIL 30th

 

 

Course Requirements and Grading

 

Book Review                               10%

Annotated Bibliography               20%

Final Paper                                   30%

Class Discussion                         40% 

 

Students are expected to attend and to actively participate in class discussion on a weekly basis.  Absences will be counted against you; more than two absences will result in a failing grade.  Participation should reflect careful, timely reading of and thoughtful engagement with the assigned readings.         

 

 

 

Week 1/January 8:        Introductions

                                                                                                             

 

I.           BEGINNINGS

 

Week 2/January 15:      Digging out the Past

 

 

Core Reading:

 

James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life

 

 

Secondary Readings:

 

Please browse through the last ten years of the William and Mary Quarterly (which you can do online through the library website) and evaluate what appears to be the most recent trends in Early American history

 

II.          RELIGIONS AND BELIEFS

                                                   

Week 3/January 22:      You Can Do Magic

 

Core Reading:

 

David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England

 

Secondary Readings:

 

Overview

 

Jon Butler, “Coercion, Miracle, Reason: Rethinking the American Religious Experience in the Revolutionary Age,” in Religion in a Revolutionary Age, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, 1-30

Allen C. Guelzo, “God’s Designs: The Literature of the Colonial Revivals of Religion, 1735-1760,” in New Directions in American Religious History, eds. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, 141-78

Charles L. Cohen, “The Colonization of British North America as an Episode in the History of Christianity,” Church History 72 (2003), 553-68

Charles L. Cohen, “Puritanism,” in Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, vol. 3, 577-94

 

Religious Culture & Popular Piety

 

Anne S. Brown and David D. Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Early New England,” in Lived Religion in America, ed. David D. Hall, 41-68

Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700, 231-285

Richard Godbeer, “‘Love Raptures’: Marital, Romantic, and Erotic Images of Jesus Christ in Puritan New England, 1670-1730,” New England Quarterly 68 (1995), 355-84

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England, 93-135

Lyle Koehler, “The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation during the Years of Antinomian Turmoil, 1636-1640,” William and Mary Quarterly 31 (1974) 55-78

Mark A. Peterson, “The Plymouth Church and the Evolution of Puritan Religious Culture,” New England   Quarterly 66 (1993), 570-93

Marilyn J. Westerkamp, “Engendering Puritan Religious Culture in Old and New England,” Pennsylvania History 64 Special Issue (1997), 105-22

 

Worlds of New England

 

             Elise Brenner, “To Pray or to Be Prey: That is the Question: Strategies for Cultural Autonomy of Massachusetts Praying Town Indians,” Ethnohistory 27 (1980) 135-152

             David Harley, “Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession,” American Historical Review 101 (1996), 307-30

             Gloria Main, “Gender, Work, and Wages in Colonial New England,” William & Mary Quarterly 51 (1994), 39-66

             Daniel Mandell, “‘To Live More Like My Christian English Neighbors,’” William & Mary Quarterly 48 (1991), 552-79

             David Paul Nord, “Teleology and News: The Religious Roots of American Journalism, 1630-1730,” Journal of American History 77 (1990-91) 9-38

             Mark Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” William & Mary Quarterly 58 (2001), 305-47

             Carole Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective,” William & Mary Quarterly 52 (1995), 104-44

 

 

Week 4/January 29:      Blessed Be the Indians

 

Core Reading:

 

Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits

 

Secondary Readings:

 

Other Tekakwitha Interpretations

 

             K. I. Koppedrayer, “The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin: Early Jesuit Biographies of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha,” Ethnohistory 40 (1993): 277-306

             Nancy Shoemaker, “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood,” in Negotiators of Change, ed. Nancy Shoemaker, 49-71

 

Iroquois, Indian Women

 

             David Blanchard, “. . . To the Other Side of the Sky: Catholicism at Kahnawake, 1667-1701,” Anthropologica 24 (1982)

             Judith K. Brown, “Economic Organization and the Position of Women among the Iroquois,” Ethnohistory 17 (1970): 151-67

             Kathleen M. Brown, “The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier,” in Negotiators of Change, ed. Nancy Shoemaker, 26-48

             Theda Perdue, “Columbus Meets Pocahontas in the American South,” Southern Cultures 3, 1 (1997), 4-21

             Daniel K. Richter, “Iroquois vs. Iroquois: Jesuit Missions and Christianity in Village Politics, 1642-1686,” Ethnohistory 22 (1985): 1-16

             Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” Journal of Women’s History 2 (Winter 1991), 39-57

             Christopher Vecsey, “The Story and Structure of the Iroquois Confederacy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54 (1986): 79-106

             Natalie Zemon Davis, “Iroquois Women, European Women,” in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, 243-58 or in Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell, eds., American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850, 97-118                                       

 

Missions and Missionaries

 

             Takao Abé, “What Determined the Content of Missionary Reports? The Jesuit Relations Compared with the Iberian Jesuit Accounts,” French Colonial History 3 (2003): 69-83

             James Axtell, “The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures,” in Natives and Newcomers, 145-73 or in The European and the Indian, 39-86

             Carol Devens, “Separate Confrontations: Gender as a Factor in Indian Adaptation to European Colonization in New France,” American Quarterly 38 (1986), 461-80

             Peter Dorsey, “Going to School with Savages: Authorship and Authority among the Jesuits of New France,” William and Mary Quarterly 55 (1998): 399-420

             Rebecca Kugel, “Of Missionaries and their Cattle: Ojibwa Perceptions of a Missionary as Evil Shaman,” Ethnohistory 41 (1994) 227-44

             James P. Ronda, “‘We Are Well As We Are’: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions,” William and Mary Quarterly 34 (1977): 66-82

             Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade,” Ethnohistory 47 (2000): 423-52

             Bruce G. Trigger, “Early Native American Responses to European Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations,” Journal of American History 77 (March 1991), 1195-1215

 

 

 

III.         A WAY OF DEATH FROM THE CARIBBEAN TO THE MAINLAND

 

 

Week 5/February 5: Caribbean Contours

 

Core Reading:

 

Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World

 

Secondary Readings:

 

Overview

 

             Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (April 1996), 251-288

             David Eltis, “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas,” American Historical Review (Dec. 1993): 1399-1423

 

Africans in the New World

 

             Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 128-60

             Richard S. Dunn, “A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799-1828,” William and Mary Quarterly 34 (January 1977), 32-65

             Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831, 62-74

             Michael Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” Radical History Review 75 (1999) 111-120

             Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600-1780,” in Strangers Within the Realm, eds. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, 157-219

 

English West Indies

 

             Hilary McD. Beckles, “‘The Hub of Empire’: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century,” in William Roger Louis, et al., eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, 218-240

             Carl Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624-1690, 129-161

             Michael Craton, “Reluctant Creoles: The Planters’ World in the British West Indies,” in Strangers Within the Realm, eds. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, 314-362

             Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713, 46-83

 

Women, Family and Slavery

 

             Barbara Bush, “Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies,” in More Than Chattel, eds. David Gaspar & Darlene Clark Hine, 193-217

             Herbert S. Klein, “Creation of a Slave Community and Afro-American Culture,” in African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 163-87

             Jennifer Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle Over their Shoulders’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997), 167-192

             Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime and the Bodies of Slaves in 18th-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 34 (2001) 923-54

             Claire C. Robertson, “Africa into the Americas? Slavery and Women, the Family and the Gender Division of Labor,” in More Than Chattel, eds. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, 3-40

             Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105 (Dec. 2000), 1534-1575                           

 

 

             Week 6/February 12:    Multicultural Markets

 

Core Reading:

 

Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783

 

Secondary Readings:

 

Overview

 

             Donald J. Lemieux, “The Mississippi Valley, New France, and French Colonial Policy,” Southern Studies 17 (1978), 39-56

             Russell R. Menard, “Economic and Social Development of the South,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1, eds. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman 249-296

             Gregory Nobles, “Breaking into the Backcountry: New Approaches to the Early American Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly 46 (1989), 641-70

 

Patterns of Economic Interaction

 

             John G. Clark, New Orleans, 1718-1812: An Economic History, 126-148

             Gilbert C. Din, “The Spanish Fort on the Arkansas, 1763-1803,”