Revolutionary Diplomacy: Spanish Connections and the Birth of the United States by Thomas E. Chávez (review)

The William and Mary Quarterly · 2025-10-01

Before the American Revolution, Native nations guarded their societies against tyranny

2024-11-05

Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country by Lori J. Daggar (review)

The Journal of Southern History · 2023

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economic history

Reviewed by: Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country by Lori J. Daggar Kathleen DuVal Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country. By Lori J. Daggar. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. viii, 254. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-5128-2329-5.) In 1816, two members of Baltimore’s Society of Friends wrote a report to the U.S. secretary of war regarding their recent visit to the Ohio River Valley. Philip E. Thomas and James Ellicott were happy to report that missionaries had “overcome the Shawnees’ ‘general indisposition’ to work” and were ready to teach them to farm, hoping the U.S. government would provide funding (p. 126). Like many reformers, these Quakers believed their philanthropic work would alleviate the “sufferings” of Native people, but they also had an economic interest at stake (p. 126). As part of Baltimore’s growing business community, they stood to profit from the roads, canals, and railroads that would connect their city with the Ohio Valley. Published in the Early American Studies series of the University of Pennsylvania Press, Lori J. Daggar’s Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country is part of a wave of scholarship that views the early American republic as an empire. Like historian Emily Conroy-Krutz, Daggar argues that we should see missionaries in the era of the early republic as agents of imperialism. Daggar convincingly shows that in the western United States the “civilizing” mission of missionaries and U.S. Indian agents contributed to both westward expansion and the development of a national economy that linked coastal ports and manufacturing with lands and markets in the West. The federal government partnered with missionary societies to gain the expertise of missionaries working on the ground and in return funded missions, including paying salaries and providing land, an arrangement ultimately formalized in the 1819 Civilization Fund Act. Perhaps it should be no surprise that missionary and imperial efforts went hand in hand in the early United States as in other eras, yet missionaries’ [End Page 738] self-delusions and actual defense of Native peoples have at times blinded historians to this connection. The greatest contribution of Cultivating Empire is to fit these seemingly contradictory truths together. Daggar coins the term “speculative philanthropy” to explain how a philanthropic (if paternalistic) desire to promote the welfare of others fit just fine with economic motivations “in the particular context of the early republic and its culture of speculation” (p. 5). Reformers believed they could do good and do well as the United States spread its prosperity and way of life, centered in male-headed monogamous households, to everyone from Baltimore’s poor to the Shawnees and to non-Christian peoples around the world. This speculative philanthropy created a “mission complex,” Daggar explains, that connected missionaries and their churches and societies to federal officials, manufacturers, speculators, and settlers, all supporting and hoping to benefit from the era’s emerging capitalism (p. 10). By looking at all of this as a complex, we see that missionaries, even if they opposed Indian removal, were part of this process. While Daggar’s focus is connections between Baltimore and the Ohio Valley, she makes clear that the mission complex extended southward into Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, and Choctaw Country. Daggar also shows how Native communities in the Ohio Valley worked to establish their place in the developing market economy. From leaders such as Miami Little Turtle and Shawnee Black Hoof to individual Native men and women making consumption and production decisions for their families, they recruited missionary and U.S. agent assistance (disregarding ignorant advice to start farming, which they already did) to reach markets in East Coast cities, invest in grain mills and other capital projects, access U.S. systems of credit and debt, and hire labor for their farms and businesses. Yet, as Susan Sleeper-Smith and Michael John Witgen have also shown, the more that Native nations integrated their lands and economies with those of the United States, the more white Americans wanted to seize them. Daggar traces how some of the biggest...

Bernardo de Gálvez:

University of Virginia Press eBooks · 2023-07-14

Chapter 3. How Native Nations Survived the Imperial Republic

University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2023

• Political Science
• History
• Ancient history

One Husband, One Wife, Whaddya Got?

Reviews in American History · 2020

• Religious studies
• History
• Art

One Husband, One Wife, Whaddya Got? Kathleen DuVal (bio) Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Polygamy: An Early American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xv + 397 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $32.50. In January 1855, Parley Pratt wrote a loving letter from San Francisco to Belinda Marden Pratt, his wife. He told her about a woman he believed— correctly—that his wife would sympathize with, because both women had suffered through difficult first marriages. “She is the very counterpart of your self,” Parley wrote. As Belinda once had, she “is groaning under a bondage,” but one “tenfold more terrible ... than yours once was” (p. 279). Their stories would take a happier turn, though, with both women finding a safer home and a kinder husband. Both would become wives of Parley Pratt. Parley’s tender words and Belinda’s appreciation of them are pretty much the opposite of what most of their American contemporaries thought of plural marriage. Critics of women who defended plural marriage would call them an “infernal minister of the devil,” a “duped drudge,” and a “martyr to unbridled lust” (p. 3). Just the year before Parley sent his letter, a U.S. official in Utah had written that polygamy “belongs now to the indolent and opium-eating Turks and Asiatics, the miserable Africans, the North American savages, and the Latter-Day Saints” (p. 284). That sentence alone reveals a great deal about the 1850s, and a lesser book focused on polygamy in early America would have found plenty of material by centering only on ignorant critiques like that one, starting with Spanish priests coming to North America to change the continent’s heathen ways. Sarah Pearsall’s marvelous new study does analyze these many critiques and uses them to illuminate the long history of early American thinking about marriage, gender, sexuality, and power. Even more significantly, though, Polygamy introduces us to people like Belinda Marden Pratt who lived in—and sometimes purposefully chose— plural marriage. Parallel to more prominent nineteenth-century reformers, she scrutinized marriage, and she came to the conclusion that polygyny (one husband and multiple wives) was the best system for children and for women. In her experience, “by mutual and long continued exercises of toil, [End Page 13] patience, long-suffering sisterly kindness” as they maintained a household and mothered children together, sister-wives created the best kind of family (p. 277). Through this kind of close look at polygamy in practice, this breathtakingly ambitious and successful book analyzes power in early America “as seen through households, which is where most people actually lived” (p. 1). As Pearsall’s diverse and compelling chapters on polygamy took me from the seventeenth-century Pueblos of New Mexico to the palaces of eighteenth-century Dahomey to 1850s Utah, I found myself surprised at just how useful polygamy was. Polygamous marriages, like monogamous ones, served many purposes: production and reproduction, legitimizing lineages and inheritance, forging diplomatic ties, building and broadcasting power, and providing long-term love, sex, and companionship. Sister-wives lightened Belinda Marden Pratt’s work both physically and emotionally at the same time as they bolstered their husband’s prestige among other men and into future generations (including Mitt Romney, a great-great-grandson of Parley and his fourth wife). In addition, as Pearsall repeatedly proves, plural marriage is (to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss) useful to think with, for historians as much as for theologians, politicians, and reformers. By de-normalizing monogamy, the book contextualizes all marriage and brings new insights to women’s history, family history, and the study of sexuality. Pearsall’s tenacious research in archaeology, language, and astoundingly wide-ranging primary and secondary writings uncovers polygamy in all kinds of places, often where it was hidden in plain sight. As she did in her previous book, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (2009), Pearsall connects the intimate to the grandest scales of power, colonialism, and race, showing that gender, family, and sex are hardly sidebar subjects but instead are key to understanding just about everything men and women do. First of all, polygamy “was as much about economics as it was about sex” (p. 40). In...

Tai S. Edwards. Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power.

The American Historical Review · 2019-08-20

The painting on the cover of Tai S. Edwards’s excellent and eye-opening book Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power shows Wáh-chee-te, a woman whose long wavy hair, parted down the middle, flows down her back to meet the folds of her painted dress and deep-blue shawl. On her feet are strikingly beautiful moccasins, and she holds a baby who looks just about to learn to walk. A few pages into the book, another Osage woman, from more than half a century later, in the duller shades of a black-and-white photograph, is dressed in startlingly similar fashion: a dark shawl, a light skirt, and well-crafted moccasins, with a sleeping baby in a cradleboard. If publishers could afford color images beyond the cover, the book might include Osage women in shawls and moccasins at a powwow or ceremony today. As Edwards shows, Osage women over the centuries have found ways of continuing Osage traditions despite white Americans’ repeated attempts to destroy them as a people. Women made sure Osage identity and nationhood continue to this day.

The Indian World of Early Americanists

Reviews in American History · 2019-01-01

The Indian World of Early Americanists Kathleen DuVal (bio) Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. xv + 431 pp. Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xviii + 621 pp. When I was researching my dissertation and drowning in primary sources, my advisor asked me a question that helped me start to make sense of the details: "What surprises you?" Lisa Brooks's Bancroft-winning new book, rich with insights that will surprise the reader over and over, describes her own surprise as she sat down with Wampanoag tribal historians, hoping they would share oral traditions about the distant past. Instead, "out came books" (p. 13). Wampanoags have been reading and writing since the seventeenth century, and books form an essential part of their sources for analyzing and remembering the past. Brooks's attentiveness to many kinds of sources—from rivers to maps to oral history to the written word—makes Our Beloved Kin a startling interpretation of this seventeenth-century indigenous place and time. Literary scholar Brooks's book on King Philip's War and historian Colin G. Calloway's book on eighteenth-century Indians and George Washington might seem to have little in common, but both take as a given an insight that academic scholars once found surprising and now accept: that Native people are an essential part of American history and are in many ways the central story of early America. Building on a generation of scholars including Daniel K. Richter, Jean M. O'Brien, Mary Beth Norton, Ann Marie Plane, Theda Perdue, and Calloway himself, Brooks and Calloway employ ethnographic methods, reading documents against the grain, and, in Brooks's case, familiarity with Algonquian places and Algonquian historians to provide dense histories of places, people, and interactions. Both books reveal how closely European colonists and early U.S. leaders and citizens lived with Native people, as individuals and as nations. In praying towns and trading posts, they lived and worked in close quarters, and connections continued beyond those places. Metacom and Little Turtle visited [End Page 173] the towns and homes of Europeans and Euro-Americans. Plymouth Colonial Governor Josiah Winslow and George Washington understood the diversity of Indian nations and leaders and how to distinguish allies from enemies. (None of which is to say they deeply understood each other or always respected each other's diversity.) By recognizing this proximity and writing from Native as well as European perspectives, Brooks and Calloway give well-worn subjects new life. Since the 1980s, Calloway has written over a dozen books on Native history, much of that work on the eighteenth-century people into whose world Washington and his country intruded. Calloway's new book makes a major contribution in turning the story back around to show how embedded this Continental Army general and first U.S. president was in the Indian world that Calloway has done as much as anyone to show us. Our Beloved Kin builds on Brooks's path-breaking first book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008). That book brought Native literacy to the fore with a literary scholar's approach of analyzing a few individual writers along a common theme. Focusing on the writings of Samson Occom, Hendrick Aupaumut, Joseph Brant, and William Apess, Brooks explained "the common pot" as an Algonquian and Iroquoian metaphor for connectedness and the shared responsibility for maintaining and restoring peace. Our Beloved Kin applies similar analysis to the most studied Native-European war of the seventeenth century, producing a book that is more of an academic historian's kind of narrative than The Common Pot while still deeply embedded in indigenous language and place. Over and over, both books reveal the central importance of land in early America and the fact that the land in question was Native ground. As Calloway succinctly puts his book's central point, "Washington spent a lifetime turning Indian homelands into real estate for himself and his nation" (p. 477). The debates and wars over...

AFTERWORD

University Press of Mississippi eBooks · 2018-09-09

Writing Translations, Writing History: Colonial American Voices and the Problem of Verticality

Early American literature · 2018-01-01 · 2 citations

This article defines and analyzes the concepts of vertical and horizontal translation. Translators of historical documents must translate vertically through time as well as horizontally from a different language. These processes are further complicated when the original transcriber was a different person from the original speaker and when the source passes through multiple languages and cultures. The article explores these concepts in translations of sources by Pontiac, John Smith, and others in early North America.