Early American History Seminar

A century ago, historians of the “imperial school” were fascinated by the fact that every new English colony established during the Restoration period took the form of a proprietorship, that is that they were the personal property of one or a few great men enjoying neo-feudal privileges. This paper suggests that, despite its fusty fixation on constitutional forms, the imperial school was on to something. Proprietaries were not mere institutional devices but central to the kind of empire Charles II and his courtiers thought they were creating.

The seminar paper describes how the Spanish created a new network of information that consisted of mobile and trusted informers. It is part of a project that examines the acquisition and transmission of information in the pre-postal, pre-printing press colonial South.

Discussion will focus on two seminar papers: “African American and Indian Church Affiliation: Reevaluating Race and Religion in the North, 1730-1776,” by Richard Boles of George Washington University, and  “A World of Deference and Dependence: Slavery and Unfreedom in Eighteenth-century Boston,” by Jared Hardesty of Boston College. Boles’s paper explores black and Indian participation in each major Protestant denomination, suggesting the need to reevaluate aspects of the religious history of the colonial North in regard to how blacks and Indians influenced theology and church practices. Hardesty’s essay aims to raise serious questions about the nature of freedom in the American Colonies by engaging the literature concerning liberty in early America and challenging the popular slave/free dichotomy that dominates the historiography.

Rescheduled from October 30. This seminar paper will focus on the ideological elements in the conflict that emerged over wage and price regulation, as wartime debates created a conceptual gap between calls for economic equality and liberty. It is part of a larger study of the evolution of notions of equality in America.

Recently scholars have pointed out links between the 1636-1637 Anglo-Indian conflict known as the "Pequot War" and the 1643-1645 Dutch-Indian conflict known as "Kieft's War." This paper unpacks the larger historiographic implications of seeing the two wars as tandem events, and viewing New England and New Netherland as part of a single contested region.

This case study focuses on how Americans understood the workings of the natural world as they imperfectly made gunpowder for the Continental Army. It argues that paying attention to the interactions between humans and the natural environment leads to a richer understanding of the war, and that modern American attitudes towards the environment have important roots in the Revolutionary period.

Madison's Notes with his revisions remain the most prominent remnants of the Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. What does it mean to take seriously that Madison's notes on the Convention are notes? Two hundred and twenty-five years after Madison first wrote the Notes, changing technology makes it possible to revisit the manuscript. This paper will suggest that Madison revised his notes far more extensively than has been previously understood. The revised notes demonstrate that Madison's understanding of the Convention, the Constitution, and his own role changed dramatically between May 1787 and the end of the eighteenth century.