Jeffers Lennox [This is the seventh essay of the Borealia series on Cartography and Empire–on the many ways maps were employed in the contested imperial spaces of early modern North America.] If we accept the argument that maps helped create and resist empires (and we should, or else I’ve just wasted a decade of my life), we should… Continue Reading
Latest in: Early American History
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Julia Lewandoski [This essay kicks off a Borealia series on Cartography and Empire-on the many ways maps were employed in the contested imperial spaces of early modern North America.] After the 1763 Peace of Paris, British officials embarked on an ambitious project to probe and depict the territories—many in reality still under indigenous sovereignty—that they now considered… Continue Reading
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Ann Little’s The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (Yale University Press, 2016; paper, 2018) traces the remarkable story of a woman from her New England childhood to Wabanaki captivity and adoption to adulthood as an Ursuline nun in eighteenth-century Quebec. The book’s innovative use of sources and narrative provokes conversation about what a biography could be.… Continue Reading
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Michael J. Davis “We are at present working on the establishment of New Orleans, thirty leagues above the entry of the Mississippi,” wrote the newly-commissioned commandant-général of Louisiana, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on June 12, 1718 to the Council of the Marine at Versailles.[1] Work on New Orleans, however, had been underway since the… Continue Reading
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Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy In the September 28, 2017 issue of the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole explained Brexit as the consequence of a rebirth of English nationalism: “Brexit is a peaceful revolution but it is unmistakably a nationalist revolt. It is England’s insurrection against … the belief that contemporary nationality must be fluid, open,… Continue Reading
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Ann Little Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Critical Perspectives on Empire series. If you’re on Twitter this summer of 2017, perhaps your timeline is like mine: full of #Canada150 (insert Maple Leaf emoji here) mentions this summer, both filiopietistic from the settler colonial perspective… Continue Reading
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This is the third of a three-part conversation between historians Claire Campbell, Alexandre Dubé, Jeffers Lennox, and Christopher Parsons, on being “early Canadianists” in the United States. You can find the rest of the series here. Borealia: We have talked about what you bring to your U.S. setting from a Canadian background, but what about the… Continue Reading
