The Dongan Papers, 1683-1688, Part II


Book Description




The Dongan Papers, 1683-1688, Part II


Book Description

This volume makes available critical documents from a period of time when the Dutch played a major role in building the New World. The documents cover a number of topics, including religious issues, the General Assembly and its legal system, the council and courts, and Indian and French relations.




Invading Paradise


Book Description

Invading Paradise: Esopus Settlers at War with Natives, 1659, 1663 reopens and redirects debate about causes of the two Esopus Wars in what are now Kingston and Hurley, New York. Historical studies are found inadequate to explain the conflict and its genocidal outcome. If causality is ever to be reliably decided, the principal actors in this colonial drama need study. Records of aboriginals are understandably scant, while those of settlers are full enough to give impressions of their motivations and attitudes to the frontier. This study is the first to introduce as individuals the main European immigrants involved in the wars. Were they prepared for what confronted them upon acquiring native agricultural lands? Readers are invited to consider exactly what happened to bring on violence.




Bound by Bondage


Book Description

During the first generations of European settlement in North America, a number of interconnected Northeastern families carved out private empires. In Bound by Bondage, Nicole Saffold Maskiell argues that slavery was a crucial component to the rise and enduring influence of this emergent aristocracy. Dynastic families built prestige based on shared notions of mastery, establishing sprawling manorial estates and securing cross-colonial landholdings and trading networks that stretched from the Northeast to the South, the Caribbean, and beyond. The members of this elite class were mayors, governors, senators, judges, and presidents, and they were also some of the largest slaveholders in the North. Aspirations to power and status, grounded in the political economy of human servitude, ameliorated ethnic and religious rivalries, and united once antagonistic Anglo and Dutch families, ensuring that Dutch networks endured throughout the English and then Revolutionary periods. Using original research drawn from archives across several continents in multiple languages, Maskiell expertly traces the origin of these private familial empires back to the founding generations of the Northeastern colonies and follows their growth to the eve of the American Revolutionary War. Maskiell reveals a multiracial Early America, where enslaved traders, woodsmen, millers, maids, bakers, and groomsmen developed expansive networks of their own that challenged the power of the elites, helping in escapes, in trade, and in simple camaraderie. In Bound by Bondage, Maskiell writes a new chapter in the history of early North America and connects developing Northern networks of merit to the invidious institution of slavery.




Engaging Children in Vast Early America


Book Description

Engaging Children in Vast Early America examines the often overlooked roles that children played in moments of contact between Indigenous groups, Europeans, and Africans in North and South America over the course of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Adulthood is the default lens through which most of history is examined. This is because so few historians analyze the age or life stage of those they study. As a result, people of the past are often assumed to be adults when their actions or experiences align more closely with what modern society deems “adultlike.” Many of these “assumed adults,” however, were agentive children. This collaborative collection is the first of its kind to invite experts in the field of Vast Early America to engage with the history of childhood and youth. The result is nine innovative essays that expand our understanding of childhood and agentive children but also of empire and everyday life in Vast Early America. This accessible text is a unique resource for undergraduate courses in childhood and youth history, family history, and early American history.




Gateways to Empire


Book Description

In Gateways to Empire: Quebec and New Amsterdam to 1664, historian Daniel Weeks has provided the first comprehensive comparative study of the North-American fur-trading colonies New France and New Netherland. While neither colony profited very much, if at all, from the fur trade (though many individuals fortunes were undoubtedly made), Weeks finds that New France, which far outpaced New Netherland in this trade, grew more slowly and had greater difficulty sustaining itself. As he demonstrates in Gateways to Empire, other factors, including New Netherland’s openness to religious and ethnic diversity and wider connections to the Atlantic World, allowed it to become more economically secure than its rival north of the St. Lawrence. And yet, in both cases, the principal towns of these European colonies—Quebec and New Amsterdam—moved beyond their initial purposes as hubs for trade with the indigenous peoples to become gateways to European settlement. In this, New Amsterdam, by the late 1640s, was singularly successful, so that it rapidly fostered the production of new European towns in its hinterlands, organizing the landscape for settlement and also for trade within the European-dominated Atlantic-World system.







The Upper Country


Book Description

The Upper Country melds myth and conventional history to provide a memorable tale of French designs in the middle of what became the United States. Putting the reader on the battlefields, at the trading posts, and on the rivers with voyageurs and their allies from the Indian nations, Claiborne Skinner reveals the saintly missionaries and jolly fur traders of popular myth as agents of a hard-nosed, often ruthless, imperial endeavor. Skinner’s engaging narrative takes the reader through daily life at posts like Forts Saint Louis and Michilimakinac, illuminates the complexities of interracial marriage with the courtship of Michel Aco at Peoria, and explains how France's New World adventurism played a role in the outbreak of the Seven Years War and the beginning of the modern era. In this story, many of the traditional heroes and villains of American history take on surprising roles. The last Stuart kings of England seem shrewd and even human; George Washington makes his debut appearance on the stage of history by assassinating a French officer and plunging Europe into the first truly global war. From unthinkable hardship to dreams of fur trade profits, this fascinating exploration sheds new light on France and its imperial venture into the Great Lakes.




The King's Three Faces


Book Description

Reinterpreting the first century of American history, Brendan McConville argues that colonial society developed a political culture marked by strong attachment to Great Britain's monarchs. This intense allegiance continued almost until the moment of independence, an event defined by an emotional break with the king. By reading American history forward from the seventeenth century rather than backward from the Revolution, McConville shows that political conflicts long assumed to foreshadow the events of 1776 were in fact fought out by factions who invoked competing visions of the king and appropriated royal rites rather than used abstract republican rights or pro-democratic proclamations. The American Revolution, McConville contends, emerged out of the fissure caused by the unstable mix of affective attachments to the king and a weak imperial government. Sure to provoke debate, The King's Three Faces offers a powerful counterthesis to dominant American historiography.