Go west: Mapping early American historiography

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 65, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 745-777

  Saunt, Claudio ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA   (United States)

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EID: 58149307782     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. Gordon S. Wood observes, "In 1760 America was only a collection of disparate colonies huddled along a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast." See Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 6.
2. In his account of the Continental army in 1776, David Hackett Fischer writes, "Men who came from different parts of the continent were beginning to understand each other." See Fischer, Washington's Crossing (New York, 2004), 30.
3. Likewise, Bernard Bailyn, writing about the 1754 Albany Congress, notes, "Though their recommendation for a continentwide political union was ignored, the mere fact that they met together to consider problems of continental scale was important." See Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986; repr., New York, 1988), 358.
4. Edmund S. Morgan, in a discussion of Puritan millenarianism, writes, "With the Great Awakening of the 1740s this vision was extended to involve the whole continent." See Morgan, The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America (New York, 2004), 36.
5. See Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004), 17.
6. For a provocative essay that lays out an agenda for early American historians in the twenty-first century and that inspired this article, see Peter H. Wood, "From Atlantic History to a Continental History," in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (New York, forthcoming).
7. For uses of the "British Colonies on the Continent of America," see the [Boston] New England Weekly Journal, Dec. 2, 1735, [2];
8. For reports on the continent during the Seven Years' War, see "Governor Pownall's Speech to both Houses of the Massachusetts-Bay, on Thursday the 24th of November last, viz.," New-York Gazette; Or, The Weekly PostBoy, Dec. 12, 1757, [2] ("hold the Command");
9. "Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman, in Georgia, to his Friend here, dated March 20," Boston Gazette and Country Journal, Apr. 23, 1764, [2] ("very favourable Event").
10. Boston Gazette, Or, Country Journal [Weekly Journal], Sept. 22, 1755, supplement, [2];
11. Boston Evening-Post, Jan. 9, 1758, [1].
12. Boston Post-Boy, Sept. 17, 1764, [3] ("Number of Gentlemen");
13. William Burke, An Examination of the Commercial Principles of the Late Negotiation Between Great Britain and France in 1761 (London, 1762), 24 ("Insular and Continental Colonies");
14. Newport Mercury, Oct. 22, 1764, [3] ("Continent of North-America");
15. Boston Evening-Post, Oct. 15, 1764, [3] ("great sums of money");
16. Boston Gazette, Apr. 15, 1765, [2] ("take a Survey").
17. Adam Gordon's travel journal appears in Newton D. Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies (New York, 1916), 367-453.
18. On a few scattered earlier occasions British Americans referred to their colonies as the continent, but the practice did not become regular until the 1760s. Bernard Bailyn writes, "The war stimulated the ambition and magnified the confidence and the scale of activities of many of the leading colonists." The 1763 Treaty of Paris released "an irresistible force for expansion" in the West. See Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 357-58.
19. Other works that distinguish insular from continental colonies or that refer simply to the continental colonies include Malachy Postlethwayt, Britain's Commercial Interest Explained and Improved . . . (London, 1757), 1: 458;
20. [John Wright], A Compleat History of the Late War . . . (Dublin, Ireland, 1763), 548;
21. [Ignotus], Thoughts on Trade in General, Our West-Indian in Particular, Our Continental Colonies, Canada, Guadaloupe, and the Preliminary Articles of Peace (London, 1763);
22. Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of New-York . . . (New York, 1766), 2: 743.
23. See also the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "continent," (n.) II.3.a.
24. New-York Gazette, Apr. 29, 1765, [3] ("All the Printers"), May 6, 1765, [2] ("one Fourth");
25. Massachusetts Gazette [and Boston Weekly News-letter], Feb. 6, 1766, [2] ("extremely oppressive");
26. New-Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle, Nov. 29, 1765, supplement, [2] ("'Where is now'");
27. Massachusetts Gazette [and Boston Weekly News-letter], Nov. 7, 1765, supplement, [2] ("spirit of industry");
28. [Thomas Paine], Common Sense Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, 4th ed. (Lancaster, Pa., 1776), 29 ("There is something"), 21 ("not the affair");
29. David Ramsay, An Oration on the Advantages of American Independence . . . (Charlestown, S.C., 1788), 21 ("one quarter").
30. On the origins of American nationalism and its link to the continent, see James D. Drake, "Appropriating a Continent: Geographical Categories, Scientific Metaphors, and the Construction of Nationalism in British North America and Mexico," Journal of World History 15, no. 3 (September 2004): 323-57.
31. David Ramsay, The History of the Revolution of South-Carolina, from a British Province to an Independent State (Trenton, N.J., 1785), 1: 17 ("were considered");
32. John Marshall, The Life of George Washington, Commander in Chief of the American Forces, During the War Which Established the Independence of His Country, and First President of the United States (Philadelphia, 1804-7), 1: 5 ("that immense continent"),
33. M[ason] L. Weems, The Life of George Washington; with Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen, 9th ed. (Philadelphia, 1809), 8 ("that greatest Continent"), 63 ("sacred fire");
34. Mercy [Otis] Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations (Boston, 1805), 1: 27 ("gave a general alarm"), 51 ("threatened the total extinction"), 101 ("in almost every town"), 177 ("whole people").
35. Population estimates are from the U.S. census: http://factfinder.census. gov. The description of cartograms is based on Waldo R. Tobler, "Geographic Area and Map Projections," Geographical Review 53, no. 1 (January 1963): 59-78;
36. Daniel Dorling, Area Cartograms: Their Use and Creation (Norwich, Eng., 1996);
37. Tobler, "Thirty Five Years of Computer Cartograms," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, no. 1 (March 2004): 58-73;
38. Michael T. Gastner and M. E. J. Newman, "Diffusion-Based Method for Producing Density-Equalizing Maps," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 20 (May 18, 2004): 7499-7504.
39. New Yorker, Mar. 29, 1976.
40. Saul Steinberg's illustration may have been inspired by Daniel K. Wallingford's map, produced sometime around the 1939 World's Fair in New York. See Wallingford, "A New Yorker's Idea of the United States of America," in Tobler, Geographical Review 53: 60. For a number of illuminating examples mapping the world's distribution of poverty, disease, education, and other such variables, see http://www.worldmapper.org.
41. William C. Sturrevant, éd., Handbook of North American Indians, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1978- ).
42. J[ohn] E. P[omfret], "Historical News," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 1, no. 1 (January 1944): 91-93 (quotation, 91-92). As Pomfret suggested, the first and second series published articles almost exclusively about Virginia, many of them genealogies of leading Old Dominion families. I therefore limited the project to the third series.
43. Peter Onuf, "Toward Federalism: Virginia, Congress, and the Western Lands," WMQ 34, no. 3 (July 1977): 353-74 (quotation, 353);
44. Daniel Scott Smith, "A Perspective on Demographic Methods and Effects in Social History," WMQ 39, no. 3 (July 1982): 442-68;
45. Andrew R. L. Cayton, "Land, Power, and Reputation: The Cultural Dimension of Politics in the Ohio Country," WMQ 47, no. 2 (April 1990): 266-86;
46. Michael Merrill, "Putting 'Capitalism' in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature," WMQ 52, no. 2 (April 1995): 315-26.
47. Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," WMQ 39, no. 3 (July 1982): 402-41 (quotation, 406).Though Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1820, articles on Massachusetts almost never touch on the colony's northern possessions. Therefore I placed Maine and Massachusetts in two different regions.
48. Dorling, Area Cartograms, 15-23;
49. Deane Whitney Merrill Jr., "Density Equalizing Map Projections (Cartograms) in Public Health Applications" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1998);
50. Gastner and Newman, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101: 7499-7504. Physicists Michael T. Gastner and M. E. J. Newman's 2004 computer algorithm produces easily readable maps and was employed here. To use their algorithm, one needs access to Arclnfo and GNU C compiler software as well as the Linux operating system.
51. John Mack Faragher, "Why the West Is Lost: Comments and Response," WMQ 51, no. 4 (October 1994): 727-28 (quotation, 727).
52. For James A. Hijiya's analysis of textbooks and syllabi, see Hijiya, "Why the West Is Lost," WMQ 51, no. 2 (April 1994): 276-92.
53. Recent books on the early American West include Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (New York, 2001);
54. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002);
55. Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln, Neb., 2003);
56. Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005);
57. Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass., 2006);
58. Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006);
59. Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007).
60. Surveys of early American history that adopt a continental perspective include Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001);
61. Jacqueline Jones et al., Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States, vol. 1: to 1877, 2d ed. (New York, 2007).
62. For a useful exchange on the continental perspective, see Joyce E. Chaplin, "Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History," Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (March 2003): 1431-55;
63. Alan Taylor, "Continental Crossings," Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 182-88.
64. Articles that explored New England town history include John Demos, "Notes on Life in Plymouth Colony," WMQ 22, no. 2 (April 1965): 264-86;
65. Philip J. Greven Jr., "Family Structure in Seventeenth-Century Andover, Massachusetts," WMQ 23, no. 2 (April 1966): 234-56;
66. Kenneth A. Lockridge and Alan Kreider, "The Evolution of Massachusetts Town Government, 1640-1740," WMQ 23, no. 4 (October 1966): 549-74;
67. Demos, "Families in Colonial Bristol, Rhode Island: An Exercise in Historical Demography," WMQ 25, no. I (January 1968): 40-57.
68. On the Virginia gentry, see for example T. H. Breen, "Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling among the Gentry of Virginia," WMQ 34, no. 2 (April 1977): 239-57;
69. A. G. Roeber, "Authority, Law, and Custom: The Rituals of Court Day in Tidewater Virginia, 1720 to 1750," WMQ 37, no. I (January 1980): 29-52;
70. Jan Lewis, "Domestic Tranquillity and the Management of Emotion among the Gentry of Pre-Revolutionary Virginia," WMQ 39, no. I (January 1982): 135-49.
71. On slavery, see Russell R. Menard, "The Maryland Slave Population, 1658 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties," WMQ 32, no. 1 (January 1975): 29-54;
72. Sarah S. Hughes, "Slaves for Hire: The Allocation of Black Labor in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782 to 1810," WMQ 35, no. 2 (April 1978): 260-86;
73. Allan Kulikoff, "The Origins of Afro-American Sociery in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700-1790," WMQ 35, no. 2 (April 1978): 226-59.
74. On the Chesapeake economy, see Charles G. Steffen, "Changes in the Organization of Artisan Production in Baltimore, 1790 to 1820," WMQ 36, no. 1 (January 1979): 101-17;
75. Jacob M. Price, "Buchanan and Simson, 1759-1763: A Different Kind of Glasgow Firm Trading to the Chesapeake," WMQ 40, no. 1 (January 1983): 3-41;
76. Menard, Lois Green Carr, and Lorena S. Walsh, "A Small Planter's Profits: The Cole Estate and the Growth of the Early Chesapeake Economy," WMQ 40, no. 2 (April 1983): 171-96.
77. Allan Kulikoff has generously shared his tabulation of methodologies employed by WMQ authors from a work in progress, "What Was Early American History . . . and What Has It Become." On the focus on Indians in British America, see James H. Merrell, "Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians," WMQ 46, no. 1 (January 1989): 94-119, esp. 95.
78. The Atlantic world has many incarnations, some more provincial than others. For critiques of Atlantic world history, see Peter A. Coclanis, "Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History," Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 169-82;
79. Coclanis, "Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?" WMQ 63, no. 4 (October 2006): 725-42;
80. In Bernard Bailyn's genealogy of Atlantic history, the field grew out of a belief, forged during World War II, that Americans and Western Europeans shared a common civilization worth protecting. The origins of that civilization became the subject matter of the history of the Atlantic world. See Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
81. Gordon S. Wood, "A Century of Writing Early American History: Then and Now Compared; Or, How Henry Adams Got It Wrong," American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (June 1995): 678-96.
82. For arguments to exclude the West, see Wood, "Why the West Is Lost: Comments and Response," WMQ 51, no. 4 (October 1994): 747-49;
83. Chaplin, Journal of American History 89: 1431-55.
84. Continental borders are artificial and bear little connection to historical patterns of human interaction. See Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 1-46.
85. The Native American population figures used here are based on Douglas H. Ubelaker's 1992 estimates and adjusted to fit the nineteen regions defined in Figure I. Of ten scholars' estimates since 1965 of the North American population at contact, Ubelaker's figure of 1.9 million is lower than all but one. See John D. Daniels, "The Indian Population of North America in 1492," WMQ 49, no. 2 (April 1992): 298-320, esp. table 2, 300-303.
86. For the sources of the regional population figures used here, see the sources for Table II on http://oieahc.wm.edu/Octo8/Saunt.pdf. For the Jemez population, see Ann M. Palkovich, "Historic Population of the Eastern Pueblos: 1540-1910," Journal of Anthropological Research 41, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 401-26, esp. 403.
87. These population comparisons were inspired by Wood, "From Atlantic History to Continental History."
88. William Lytle Schurz, "The Manila Galleon and California," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 21, no. 2 (October 1917): 107-26;
89. Steven W. Hackel, "The Staff of Leadership: Indian Authority in the Missions of Alta California," WMQ 54, no. 2 (April 1997): 347-76.
90. On the expansion of Russian traders into Alaska and the Spanish response, see A. I. Alekseev, The Destiny of Russian America, 1741-1867, trans. Marina Ramsay, ed. R. A. Pierce (Kingston, Ontario, 1990), 29-76;
91. Wallace M. Olson, Through Spanish Eyes: The Spanish Voyages to Alaska, 1774-1792 (Auke Bay, Alaska, 2002), chaps. 1-3.
92. On James Cook's voyage to Alaska, see J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (Stanford, Calif., 1974), 506-7, 580-636.
93. The first article in the Quarterly on the northwest coast appeared in July 2007, too late to be included on the cartograms presented here. See Anya Zilberstein, "Objects of Distant Exchange: The Northwest Coast, Early America, and the Global Imagination," WMQ 64, no. 3 (July 2007): 591-620.
94. Richard White, "The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (September 1978): 319-43;
95. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 308-10;
96. Blackhawk, Violence over the Land.
97. Juliana Barr, "A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the 'Land of the Tejas,'" WMQ 61, no. 3 (July 2004): 393-434.
98. On the precontact Southwest, see Patricia L. Crown and W. James Judge, eds., Chaco and Hohokam: Prehistoric Regional Systems in the American Southwest (Santa Fe, N.Mex., 1991).
99. On contact, see Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795 (Norman, Okla., 1975), chaps. 4-5;
100. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, Calif., 1991), chap. 2.
101. The year before Barr's article appeared, the Quarterly published a piece comparing legal systems in New York and New Mexico. Since it appeared in Notes and Documents, it was not included in the database compiled for this article. See Deborah A. Rosen, "Women and Property across Colonial America: A Comparison of Legal Systems in New Mexico and New York," WMQ 60, no. 2 (April 2003): 355-81.
102. Elisha P. Douglass, "The Adventurer Bowles," WMQ 6, no. 1 (January 1949): 3-23;
103. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985);
104. Daniel H. Usner Jr., "The Frontier Exchange Economy of the Lower Mississippi Valley in the Eighteenth Century," WMQ 44, no. 2 (April 1987): 165-92;
105. Greg Dening, History's Anthropology: The Death of William Gooch (Lanham, Md., 1988);
106. Michael Gannon, "The New Alliance of History and Archaeology in the Eastern Spanish Borderlands," WMQ 49, no. 2 (April 1992): 321-34;
107. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, N.J., 1992);
108. Sahlins, How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago, 1995).
109. For a nineteenth-century exploration of law and colonialism, a theme that resonates with early American history, see Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
110. Erminie W. Voegelin, "A Note from the Chairman," Ethnohistory I, no. I (April 1954): 1-3 ("chairman," 1-2);
111. Herbert E. Bolton to Benjamin Ide Wheeler, Dec. 18, 1911, in John Francis Bannon, ed., Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands (Norman, Okla., 1964), 23-31 ("Down to recent times," 25).
112. Herbert E..Bolton took a job in European history at the University of Texas in 1901 but, inspired by an esteemed mentor, Frederick Jackson Turner, he used the opportunity to "block out a field of my own here." See John Francis Bannon, "Herbert Eugene Bolton -Western Historian," Western Historical Quarterly 2, no. 3 (July 1971): 261-82 (quotation, 268).
113. Peter H. Wood makes a convincing argument in favor of a continental approach in Wood, "From Atlantic History to Continental History." On the lack of methodological differences between ethnohistory and early American history, see Merrell, WMQ 46: 114-15.
114. On smallpox, slavery, and violence, see, respectively, Fenn, Pox Americana;
115. Brooks, Captives and Cousins;
116. Historians interested in Spanish-language materials on the early American West and old Southwest must still first consult early-twentieth-century guides. See William R. Shepherd, Guide to the Materials for the History of the United States in the Spanish Archives (Simancas, the Archivo Historico Nacional, and Seville) (Washington, D.C., 1907);
117. Herbert E. Bolton, Guide to Materials for the History of the United States in the Principal Archives of Mexico (Washington, D.C., 1913);
118. Roscoe R. Hill, Descriptive Catalogue of the Documents Relating to the History of the United States in the Papeles Procedentes de Cuba Deposited in the Archivo General de Indias at Seville (Washington, D.C., 1916);
119. Charles E. Chapman, Catalogue of Materials in the Archivo General de Indias for the History of the Pacific Coast and the American Southwest (Berkeley, Calif., 1919). As of January 2008, JSTOR and the History Cooperative, the databases I used to search for citations of the Archivo General de Indias, Archivo General de la Nación de México, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, categorize 1, 901 WMQ pieces as articles. The Massachusetts Historical Society has an active publishing wing, which makes its collections easily accessible. Many of the documents in the Archivo General de Indias and the Archivo General de la Nación de México pertaining to early American history are on microfilm and available in the United States.
120. Wood, WMQ 51: 747-48.