Encyclopedia of American Studies

Early America

American studies research on the colonial period represents a field of uncertain dimensions. Since the subject precedes the founding of the United States, what is its real scope and extent? If it takes into account only North America, then Spanish, French, Swedish, and Dutch colonies must be considered, as must substantial German and African populations as well as myriad Native American cultures. Given that scholars of contemporary America have come to devote more attention to Native, African American, Latino, Chicano, and ethnic immigrant communities in the United States, early American studies too has a very strong mandate to do so. After all, even some canonical figures from the colonial era have transcultural dimensions, such as Jean de Cr�vecoeur and his Lettres d'un Cultivateur Am�ricain (1782; Letters from an American Farmer); Olaudah Equiano and his position on the margins of African, Caribbean, and British identities; and Benjamin Franklin and his relationship with Pennsylvania's large German-speaking population. Moreover, non-Anglo colonial histories endured in regional enclaves such as Spanish New Mexico, French Cajun country, Dutch New York, and German Pennsylvania, and the folklore and material culture of these areas reward study. A few pioneers, such as Howard Mumford Jones, practiced a kind of pluralistic scholarship in the founding days of American studies, and the field continues to move in that direction.

When American studies began in higher-education curricula, colonial American literary and historical studies were dominated by Puritan New England and by scholars who worked there, notably Harvard's Kenneth Murdock, Perry Miller, and, later, Sacvan Bercovitch. Many historians saw the Puritan colonists, in their quest for religious freedom and self-determination, as anticipating the American Revolution. But a revisionist strain, exemplified by William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain and visible also in many works of nineteenth-century literature by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Catherine Sedgwick, critiqued the patriarchal and repressive nature of Puritan New England society. Against the context of nineteenth-century sectionalism, the colonial legacies of New England and Virginia also became the ground of fierce cultural contests, such as debates over the status of Jamestown founder John Smith and his relationship to Pocahontas.

Perry Miller heroized the Puritan ministers and shared their conservative theology at the height of the cold war in the 1950s, but even revisionists must acknowledge the influence of colonial-era religion in modern society. The Great Awakening, which pitted Calvinist "Old Lights" against more evangelical "New Lights," has arguably endured in contemporary styles of Protestantism, with established sects constantly competing with more itinerant, charismatic, and affective revivalists.

The landmarks of English colonization and its history remain well-established in public history and school curricula, notwithstanding more recent efforts toward fostering a multicultural pluralism. The growing emphasis of this pluralism in early American studies necessitates a brief review of non-English colonial America.

In the Southwest �lvar N��ez Cabeza de Vaca and three companions traveled in the 1530s through numerous Native communities by an undetermined route. Hopeful misinterpretations of his reports led Fray Marcos de Niza and then Francisco V�squez de Coronado to search for the mythical Seven Cites of Cibola from 1539 to 1542. They attacked Natives at Tiguex, and these Pueblo peoples later became the focus of the missions and colonies of Nuevo Mexico, established by Juan de O�ate in 1598. Santa Fe in 1610 became the capital of Spanish settlements in the Rio Grande Valley. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove all Spaniards south to El Paso for nearly twenty years, until a reconquest replanted the roots of Hispanic Catholicism still powerful today. Modern studies of western and frontier history have come to recognize the importance of Spanish influence, from ranching to architecture. Spanish efforts in the Southeast were less successful, remembered largely for the paths of destruction left by Hernando de Soto, 1539�1543, and P�nfilo de Narv�ez, with whom Cabeza de Vaca landed in 1528. However, the short-lived French and Spanish colonies at Charlesfort near Savannah and at Fort Caroline near St. Augustine in the 1560s left a few monuments and valuable texts.

In the Northeast and Midwest, French colonists actually covered a larger land area than did the English until the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. The settlement at Quebec, founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608, became the entry point for a network of missions and fur-trading posts stretching across the Great Lakes. Historical sites at Fort Niagara and Mackinac are just a couple of the many vestiges of this empire. Beginning with the explorations of Jacques (P�re) Marquette and Louis Jolliet (1673) and Ren�-Robert La Salle (1678�1686) this network extended down the Mississippi River and created Louisiana. New Orleans was founded as its capital in 1718. Although the English claimed it by the treaty of 1763, the French population received an infusion of exiles from the war in Acadia, the origin of Cajun culture. Historians of early Canada also devote much study to the fur traders of the Hudson's Bay Company and other organizations, and the resulting m�ti or mixed-blood culture in Canada.

American studies can draw on other interdisciplinary methods, such as ethnohistory, environmental studies, and feminist, ethnic, and postcolonial studies to renew interest in the pre-1800 era. Studies of Native American cultures can draw on the revival of indigenous languages and the historical value of oral literature. The work of historians William Cronon and Richard White acknowledges the ways that Native peoples shaped the landscape. The voluminous texts of the French Jesuit Relations and of Spanish missionaries represent early interactions with Native subjects of the missions. The personal narratives of women such as Elizabeth Ashbridge and Esther Edwards Burr offer fresh perspectives on Anglo-American life in the 1700s. Historians of African American culture have examined how both free and slave communities forged autonomous patterns of expression in the South and mid-Atlantic.

The future of colonial American studies may lie in approaches that integrate the later emphasis on race and ethnicity with a multilingual and cross-regional perspective. For example, work on the Caribbean colonies often has been pursued by specialists in British or French literature and history, and yet could be regarded as American. Latin America and the United States are increasingly connected by hemispheric ties of immigration and investment, yet scholarship is still working to catch up with this vision of the proliferating borderlands. If theories of the neocolonial nature of globalization are correct, America's future may resemble its past; therefore, this past needs to be better known.

Gordon Sayre

Bibliography

Anderson, Jennifer L., Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Harvard Univ. Press 2012).

Bruckner, Martin, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Univ. of N.C. Press 2006).

Hinderaker, Eric and Peter C. Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 2003).

Kazanjian, David, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Univ. of Minn. Press 2003).

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Cornell Univ. Press 2000).

Morgan, Edmund S., American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America (Norton 2009).

N��ez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, Castaways: The Narrative of Alvar N��ez Cabeza de Vaca, trans. by Frances M. L�pez-Morillas (Univ. of Calif. Press 1993).

Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill & Wang 1983).

Jones, Howard Mumford, O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years (Viking 1968).

Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Macmillan 1939).

Richter, Daniel K., Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard Univ. Press 2003).

Silver, Peter, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (Norton 2007).

Thwaites, Ruben Gold, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610�1791 (Burrows Bros. 1896).

Walters, Kerry, Revolutionary Deists: Early America's Rational Infidels (Prometheus Bks. 2010).

Weidensaul, Scott, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012).