EAS Summer 2023 issue available now
Histories of the fraught interactions between Indigenous peoples and whites feature prominently in the summer issue (21.3) of Early American Studies. In keeping with the theme, our featured article is Tom Arne Midtrød’s, “‘A People Before Useless’: Ethnic Cleansing in the Wartime Hudson Valley, 1754-1763,” which explores the timely topic of ethnic cleansing and its relation to genocide. It will be freely available on Project MUSE for a limited time. Midtrød examines how mid-Atlantic officials attempted to surveil, intern, and then remove Hudson Valley Indigenous peoples from their homelands as strategies of their purported wartime security measures. You can also read an interview we did with Midtrød about his work on EAS Miscellany.
Eric Toups’ “Indian Men and French ‘Women’: Fragile Masculinity and Fragile Alliances in Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1741,” takes a different tack. Toups examines how notions of masculinity affected diplomacy between Choctaw headmen and French officials in early Louisiana, shaping how they understood war, status, and alliance.
Daniel Bottino and Hannah Peterson shift the focus to New England in their essay, “‘I hope I have a Treasure in Heaven, because my Heart is there’: Salvation and Damnation in the Conversion Narrative of Patience Boston.” They analyze the 1738 conversion narrative of Patience Boston, an Indigenous woman executed for murder, to explore the meaning of salvation and her relationship with the father and son ministers who took down and published her account.
Moving back to the South, Jacob F. Lee’s “‘Do you go to New Orleans?’: The Louisiana Purchase, Federalism, and the Contingencies of Empire in the Early U.S. Republic,” explores the planned but aborted invasion of New Orleans to enforce the Louisiana Purchase treaty to analyze how western state governments aided federalism and empire-building.
The issue then concludes on a lighter note with a “Consider the Source” piece, “Liberty or Death: Patrick Henry, Theatrical Song, and Transatlantic Patriot Politics,” by Amy Dunagin. She creatively traces the origins of Patrick’s Henry’s famous “liberty or death” speech to a popular English theatrical song performed on Drury Lane.
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