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
Latest in: Early American History
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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
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This is the second 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: What do your U.S. students know about early Canada? How do you think that compares with what Canadian students… Continue Reading
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About a year ago, Christopher Parsons suggested the idea that Borealia host an online conversation about being “early Canadianists” in the United States. He observed that there are a growing number of such cross-border historians, and still more Canadian PhDs are looking for jobs at American schools. It would be interesting, he said, to compare… Continue Reading
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Alan Corbiere The Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potowatomi) have always revered the island of Michilimackinac, so much so that at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the Odawa tried to keep it in their possession. The Odawa suggested that the British negotiators offer the Americans a greater quantity of Anishinaabe land on the mainland as… Continue Reading
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Alan Corbiere The Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potowatomi) have always revered the island of Michilimackinac. So much so that at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the Odawa tried to keep it in their possession. The Odawa suggested that the British negotiators offer the Americans a greater quantity of Anishinaabe land on the mainland in… Continue Reading
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Isaac Land Perhaps you’ve heard the one about Reviewer 2? Danny Vickers had one of those stories. As a young scholar, he got a response back from (of course) an anonymous peer reviewer who dismissed his submission on these grounds: “This article reads as if it was written in a third-rate university library.” This story… Continue Reading
