BiblioVault - Books about New Worlds

Journeys in New Worlds

Early American Women's Narratives

William L. Andrews

University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

Four early American women tell their own stories: Mary Rowlandson on her capture by Indians in 1676, Boston businesswoman Sarah Kemble Knight on her travels in New England, Elizabeth Ashbridge on her personal odyssey from indentured servant to Quaker preacher, and Elizabeth House Trist, correspondent of Thomas Jefferson, on her travels from Philadelphia to Natchez. Accompanied by introductions and extensive notes.

"The writings of four hearty women who braved considerable privation and suffering in a wild, uncultivated 17th- and 18th-century America. Although confined by Old World patriarchy, these women, through their narratives, have endowed the frontier experience with a feminine identity that is generally absent from early American literature."—Publishers Weekly

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Life at the Margins of the State

Comparative Landscapes from the Old and New Worlds

Alicia M. Boswell

University Press of Colorado, 2022

Life at the Margins of the State examines the sociopolitical and cultural nuances, negotiations, and strategies of resistance developed by marginal communities—including frontiers, borderlands, borders, and other locations where there was a substantive difference in scale from more hegemonic political entities. The volume explores not just the nature of interactions in the political margins but the political, social, and economic trajectories of the societies that formed there.

Case studies from the New and Old Worlds—including historic California, medieval Iceland, ancient Mesoamerica, ancient Nubia, colonial El Salvador, the prehistoric Levant, pre-Columbian Amazon, Africa’s historic central Sahel, and ancient Peru—offer novel perspectives on how borderland societies adapted to the unique human and natural environments of these liminal spaces. Contributors draw on archaeological evidence as well as historical documents and linguistic data to facilitate the documentation of local histories and the strategies employed by communities living in or near ancient states and empires.

This close study of groups on the margins shows that peripheral polities are not simply the by-products of complexity emanating from a political core and demonstrates that traditional assumptions and models need to be reconsidered.

Contributors:
Tara D. Carter, Mikael Fauvelle, Elena A.A. Garcea, Esteban Gomez, Scott MacEachern, Claire Novotny, Bradley J Parker, Erin Smith, John H. Walker

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New Worlds, Ancient Texts

The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery

Anthony Grafton

Harvard University Press, 1992

Describing an era of exploration during the Renaissance that went far beyond geographic bounds, this book shows how the evidence of the New World shook the foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that had guided Europeans so far afield. What Anthony Grafton recounts is a war of ideas fought by mariners, scientists, publishers, and rulers over a period of 150 years. In colorful vignettes, published debates, and copious illustrations, we see these men and their contemporaries trying to make sense of their discoveries as they sometimes confirm, sometimes contest, and finally displace traditional notions of the world beyond Europe.

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New Worlds of Violence

Cultures and Conquests in the Early American Southeast

Matthew Jennings

University of Tennessee Press, 2011

From the early 1500s to the mid-1700s, the American Southeast was the scene of continuous
tumult as European powers vied for dominance in the region while waging war on Native American communities. Yet even before Hernando de Soto landed his expeditionary
force on the Gulf shores of Florida, Native Americans had created their own “cultures of violence”: sets of ideas about when it was appropriate to use violence and what sorts of violence were appropriate to a given situation.

In New Worlds of Violence, Matthew Jennings offers a persuasive new framework for understanding the European–Native American contact period and the conflicts among indigenous peoples that preceded it. This pioneering approach posits that every group present in the Southeast had its own ideas about the use of violence and that these ideas changed over time as they collided with one another. The book starts with the Mississippian era and continues through the successive Spanish and English invasions of the Native South. Jennings argues that the English conquered the Southeast because they were able to force everyone else to adapt to their culture of violence, which, of course, changed over time as well. By 1740, a peculiarly Anglo-American culture of violence was in place that would profoundly influence the expansion of England’s colonies and the eventual southern United States. While Native and African violence were present in this world, they moved in circles defined by the English.

New Worlds of Violence concludes by pointing out that long-lasting violence bears long-lasting consequences. An important contribution to the growing body of work on the early Southeast, this book will significantly broaden readers’ understanding of America’s violent past.

Matthew Jennings is an assistant professor of history at Macon State College in Macon, Georgia. He is the author of “Violence in a Shattered World” in Mapping the Shatter Zone: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Shuck-Hall. His work has also appeared in The Uniting States, The South Carolina Encyclopedia, A Multicultural History of the United States, and The Encyclopedia of Native American History.

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Rural Images

Estate Maps in the Old and New Worlds

Edited by David Buisseret

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Just when private property materialized as an important social institution, a new kind of map appeared—the estate map. Prepared for private owners rather than national powers, these maps have been a little-studied strain of cadastral mapping until now. Here a group of leading historians—Sarah Bendall, David Buisseret, P. D. A. Harvey, and B. W. Higman—follow the spread of estate maps from their origin in England around 1570 to colonial America, the British Caribbean, and early modern Europe.

Generously illustrated with reproductions of rare manuscripts, including 8 color plates, these accounts reveal how estate maps performed vital economic and cultural functions for property owners until the end of the nineteenth century. From plans of plantations in Jamaica and South Carolina to a map of Queens College, Cambridge, handsome examples show that estate maps formed an important part of the historical record of property ownership for both individuals and corporations, and helped owners manage their land and appraise its value. Exhibited in public places for pleasure and as symbols of wealth, they often displayed elaborate cartouches and elegant coats-of-arms.

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Think to New Worlds

The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers

Joshua Blu Buhs

University of Chicago Press, 2024

How a writer who investigated scientific anomalies inspired a factious movement and made a lasting impact on American culture.

Flying saucers. Bigfoot. Frogs raining from the sky. Such phenomena fascinated Charles Fort, the maverick writer who scanned newspapers, journals, and magazines for reports of bizarre occurrences: dogs that talked, vampires, strange visions in the sky, and paranormal activity. His books of anomalies advanced a philosophy that saw science as a small part of a larger system in which truth and falsehood continually transformed into one another. His work found a ragged following of skeptics who questioned not only science but the press, medicine, and politics. Though their worldviews varied, they shared compelling questions about genius, reality, and authority. At the center of this community was adman, writer, and enfant terrible Tiffany Thayer, who founded the Fortean Society and ran it for almost three decades, collecting and reporting on every manner of oddity and conspiracy.

In Think to New Worlds, Joshua Blu Buhs argues that the Fortean effect on modern culture is deeper than you think. Fort’s descendants provided tools to expand the imagination, explore the social order, and demonstrate how power is exercised. Science fiction writers put these ideas to work as they sought to uncover the hidden structures undergirding reality. Avant-garde modernists—including the authors William Gaddis, Henry Miller, and Ezra Pound, as well as Surrealist visual artists—were inspired by Fort’s writing about metaphysical and historical forces. And in the years following World War II, flying saucer enthusiasts convinced of alien life raised questions about who controlled the universe.

Buhs’s meticulous and entertaining book takes a respectful look at a cast of oddballs and eccentrics, plucking them from history’s margins and spotlighting their mark on American modernism. Think to New Worlds is a timely consideration of a group united not only by conspiracies and mistrust of science but by their place in an ever-expanding universe rich with unexplained occurrences and visionary possibilities.

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