About

Carla Pestana is a Distinguished Professor and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World at UCLA's Department of History. Her field of study encompasses the United States during the early period up to 1800, the Atlantic World, and the Caribbean. She holds an office in 5391 Bunche Hall and can be contacted via email at cgpestana@history.ucla.edu. Her academic focus centers on early American history within a broader Atlantic and Caribbean context, reflecting a comprehensive approach to the study of the formative periods of the United States and its connections to the wider Atlantic world.

Research topics

• History
• Art
• Archaeology
• Sociology
• Art history
• Political Science
• Genealogy
• Religious studies
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Law
• Oceanography
• Ancient history
• Psychology
• Geography
• Classics

Selected publications

• Lines Drawn Across the Globe: Reading Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations by Mary C. Fuller (review)

  Journal of world history · 2024-11-13

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Origins of Witchcraft Crisis 50 Years Later

  The American Historical Review · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire by Adrian Chastain Weimer (review)

  The William and Mary Quarterly · 2023-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire by Adrian Chastain Weimer Carla Gardina Pestana A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire. Early American Studies. By Adrian Chastain Weimer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. 379 pages. Cloth, ebook. The 1660s in New England were once considered diminished and relatively unimportant, a once united and inspired society that had lost its original direction. The 1953 great work of Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, both began with and dismissed the period. To his way of thinking—a perspective that dominated early American historiography for decades—New England was a society in decline. The initial sense of mission disappeared as the founding generation passed from the scene. Young people failed to join their local churches and the sense of shared purpose fractured with rising concern for material success. Preachers, trying to reverse this dismaying trend, delivered sermons that rebuked the populace, and Miller labeled their laments "jeremiads" after the Old Testament prophet who harangued his people to forgo their sinful ways. New Englanders lost confidence, focus, and unity. He brilliantly illustrated a society in crisis with his treatment of the tribulations of Cotton Mather, son and grandson of illustrious ministers, who frantically labored to defend the witchcraft prosecutions even though he lacked both the information and the conviction to do so.1 In Adrian Chastain Weimer's hands, the 1660s emerge as the opposite of diminished and insignificant. To be sure, as she demonstrates in A Constitutional Culture, New Englanders faced challenges and, like the youngest of the famous Mathers, they struggled over how best to respond. These colonials, however, presented a largely united front that relied upon a common understanding of their circumstances. They shared, she argues, a commitment to a constitutional arrangement that sustained their connection to England, accepted monarchy, and sought local control over institutions. Over three decades in North America, starting in the 1630s, these colonists learned to manage their own affairs in church and state, and they hoped to retain this right. They did not seek autonomy beyond what local control entailed; they did not long for independence or even imagine that such a state was sustainable. They willingly fought for what they did desire, even as they debated the best strategy for achieving their goals. [End Page 785] Weimer sees New Englanders—magistrates, clergymen, merchants, and farmers—as eager to protect a shared "constitutional culture." This culture reflected their view of how their own settlements and their relationship to empire ought to function, valuing local participation in decision making by male householders (who were also typically, but decreasingly, church members), a distant monarch who interfered little but accepted settlers as loyal subjects, and a church organization under the control of male church members and the clergymen they appointed. With decades of experience running their own affairs without much oversight—indeed, in a remarkable number of cases, setting up thriving though unsanctioned colonies—they organized churches, distributed land, and managed trade, warfare, and relations with neighboring colonies. Four of the New England polities established a mutual defense pact in the 1643 United Colonies, allowing a regional approach to problems that affected all, with wars against displaced Indigenous residents and the neighboring Dutch dominating their deliberations. Most residents supported these arrangements; participation extended to most adult men and decisions were made locally and coordinated regionally. The goal of upholding constitutional culture reverberated across the region once the Stuart government moved to curtail it in the early 1660s. Weimer deals primarily with Massachusetts, which wielded outsized power and where a preponderance of evidence remains, but she attends to other polities as well. She examines the smaller entities of Connecticut, New Haven (which became part of the Connecticut Colony in 1664), Plymouth Plantation, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and even Maine and New Hampshire—usually (and regrettably) overlooked in studies purporting to deal with New England. Weimer does not minimize the differences that divided them, acknowledging the peculiarities of each outpost, but she demonstrates that all engaged in local governance and felt a commitment to...

  PublisherDOI

• Atlantic Mobilities and the Defiance of the Early Quakers

  Journal of Early Modern History · 2023-11-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract By the mid-1650s, the Quakers participated in an astounding campaign to spread the news of their movement. Bent on convincing everyone, they traveled through Europe, the Mediterranean, and the English Atlantic colonies. This missionary campaign was unusual in that individual converts made the decision to travel of their own accord and they did so extensively for over a decade. This travel was unstructured, even chaotic, and yet it had a major impact by spreading convincement far and wide. Quaker mobility increased the number and the spread of adherents, establishing widely scattered communities of Friends. In response to Quaker success, in the mid-1660s English authorities tried to adapt coerced transportation to rid communities of Quakers. This effort revealed a “moral economy of transportation,” in which moves to dispatch individuals were judged and, at times, resisted. Both the movement of Quakers and the efforts of officials depended upon new routes of travel and practices of coerced migration, indicative of changes in the movement of peoples that the seventeenth century witnessed.

  PublisherDOI

• Benjamin Colman's Epistolary World, 1688–1755: Networking in the Dissenting Atlantic. By William R. Smith. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xvi + 284 pp. $119.99 hardcover/softcover, $89 e-book.

  Church History · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Benjamin Colman's Epistolary World, 1688–1755: Networking in the Dissenting Atlantic. By William R. Smith. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xvi + 284 pp. 89 e-book. - Volume 92 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Boundaries of Belonging: English Jamaica and the Spanish Caribbean, 1655-1715</i>. By April Lee Hatfield

  Journal of Social History · 2023-08-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Boundaries of Belonging: English Jamaica and the Spanish Caribbean, 1655-1715. By April Lee Hatfield Get access Boundaries of Belonging: English Jamaica and the Spanish Caribbean, 1655-1715. By April Lee Hatfield (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. 307 pp. $45.00). Carla Gardina Pestana Carla Gardina Pestana University of California, Los Angeles cgpestana@history.ucla.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, shad054, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad054 Published: 23 August 2023

  PublisherDOI

• Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic , by Jennifer L. Morgan

  New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids · 2023-04-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Charles I's Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe

  Journal of American History · 2022 · 17 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Art history

  In 1660, with Charles II posed to return to England to take his late father's position as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the two men who signed Charles I's death warrant, William Goffe and Edward Whalley, sailed for Massachusetts Bay Colony. In New England, these regicides were feted, housed, and—once the newly restored monarchy sought to track them down—hidden from Crown officers. They lived out their lives in hiding in New Haven, Connecticut, and especially in the remote Massachusetts town of Hadley. Whalley probably died in 1675, and Goffe in 1679 or 1680. The two are remembered in connection with the cave in which they once hid, but especially for the reappearance of Goffe—as the “angel of Hadley”—who purportedly rallied the Hadley townsfolk during King Philip's War (1675–1676) (p. 70). The legend of Goffe's providential appearance would be memorialized in visual images, novels, and plays. Matthew Jenkinson's book contributes to our understanding of the remembrances of these regicides. The work opens with a brief preface recounting a twenty-first-century visit to the graffiti-filled Judge's Cave, so called to honored Whalley and Goffe's role in what could be perceived as a legitimate trial, rather than the commission of regicide, denoting the murder of a king. Jenkinson reviews events in England, from the monarch's execution in 1649 through the Restoration in 1660, that sent the two men fleeing. Two chapters then cover the men on the run, including efforts to track them down and the various stratagems to hide them and deny culpability for their escape. The remainder of the book (four substantive chapters and a brief conclusion) assesses their “afterlives”: accounts of them during the American Revolution, media coverage in the early nineteenth century, and the “revival, rise and decline” of attention to them after the Civil War (p. 152).

  PublisherDOI

• Distance and Blame: The Rise of the English Planter Class

  Early American studies · 2022-09-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Richard S. Dunn's <i>Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English, 1624–1713</i>, remains a key book that shapes our understanding of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. His work depicts the creation of the English West Indies, with a special focus on Barbados's turn to sugar, its commitment to slavery, and the emergence of its planter class. Dunn sees the region as set apart by its socially dysfunctionality, a site of unprecedented brutality. He conveys a strong sense of moral outrage about the cruelties of life there. His depiction inadvertently supports the efforts to distance the slaveholding Caribbean from the English metropole. In this view, the Caribbean attracted the dregs of English society who then of necessity created a brutal social environment, one that included slavery. Dunn does not endorse this view of how slavery developed, acknowledging the role of elites and the middling sort in the rise of both slavery and the planter class that profited from it. We now understand slavery's reach differently, so that the West Indies (and even the lowest of its English migrants) can no longer be blamed for its rise and centrality.

  PublisherDOI

• Quakers in the British Atlantic World, c.1660–1800, by Esther Sahle

  The English Historical Review · 2022-06-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This work by Esther Sahle does not offer an overview of the Quakers in the British Atlantic, as its title seems to suggest. Rather, its declared purpose is to pursue the question of whether the Society of Friends enjoyed a stellar reputation for honest business dealings that bolstered members’ commercial success. Along the way, it explores the mid-century Quaker Reformation, including areas of reform only tangentially related to its main query. Max Weber believed that the Quakers stood as an exemplary case of Protestantism’s effect on larger historical changes. When considering northern European development in contrast to southern European stagnation, he underscored Protestantism’s role in creating an ethic of hard work and austerity. Weber famously cited Friends to illustrate this phenomenon. He postulated that an aesthetic of plain living and a commitment to upholding the light of truth through honest dealing aided their business success, causing them to eschew needless consumption and making them attractive trading partners. Others have built on Weber’s theme, explaining Friends’ success with references to the existence of far-flung Quaker networks that facilitated business dealings and to the fact that their Dissenter status limited their career options. Blocked from other pursuits that required university education or the freedom to engage in national governance, they dedicated their energies to commerce instead.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sharon V. Salinger

  University of California, Irvine

  153 shared

• Mansel G. Blackford

  4 shared

• Gabriella Safran

  4 shared

• Martin Schneider

  Princeton University

  4 shared

• Steve Conn

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Heather Coleman

  4 shared

• John Bushnell

  4 shared

• Peter Holquist

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1990

• M.A., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1985

• B.A., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1982

Awards & honors

• Clark Professor, Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies, U…
• Graduate Woman of the Year, UCLA Association of Academic Wom…
• First prize, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, American L…
• Distinguished Scholar Award, U.C.L.A. Alumni Association, 19…
• Walter Muir Whitehill Prize in Colonial History for “The Cit…