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90 books match the query 'Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775' and 7 start with b

cover of Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World

Becoming Brothertown

Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World

Craig N. Cipolla

University of Arizona Press, 2013

Histories of New England typically frame the region’s Indigenous populations in terms of effects felt from European colonialism: the ravages of epidemics and warfare, the restrictions of reservation life, and the influences of European-introduced ideas, customs, and materials. Much less attention is given to how Algonquian peoples actively used and transformed European things, endured imposed hardships, and negotiated their own identities. In Becoming Brothertown, Craig N. Cipolla searches for a deeper understanding of Native American history.

Covering the eighteenth century to the present, the book explores the emergence of the Brothertown Indians, a "new" community of Native peoples formed in direct response to colonialism and guided by the vision of Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian and ordained Presbyterian minister. Breaking away from their home settlements of coastal New England during the late eighteenth century, members of various tribes migrated to Oneida Country in central New York State in hopes of escaping East Coast land politics and the corrupting influences of colonial culture. In the nineteenth century, the new community relocated once again, this time to present-day Wisconsin, where the Brothertown Indian Nation remains centered today.

Cipolla combines historical archaeology, gravestone studies, and discourse analysis to tell the story of the Brothertown Indians. The book develops a pragmatic approach to the study of colonialism while adding an archaeological perspective on Brothertown history, filling a crucial gap in the regional archaeological literature.
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cover of Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Beyond Settler Time

Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Mark Rifkin

Duke University Press, 2017

What does it mean to say that Native peoples exist in the present?  In Beyond Settler Time Mark Rifkin investigates the dangers of seeking to include Indigenous peoples within settler temporal frameworks. Claims that Native peoples should be recognized as coeval with Euro-Americans, Rifkin argues, implicitly treat dominant non-native ideologies and institutions as the basis for defining time itself. How, though, can Native peoples be understood as dynamic and changing while also not assuming that they belong to a present inherently shared with non-natives? Drawing on physics, phenomenology, queer studies, and postcolonial theory, Rifkin develops the concept of "settler time" to address how Native peoples are both consigned to the past and inserted into the present in ways that normalize non-native histories, geographies, and expectations. Through analysis of various kinds of texts, including government documents, film, fiction, and autobiography, he explores how Native experiences of time exceed and defy such settler impositions. In underscoring the existence of multiple temporalities, Rifkin illustrates how time plays a crucial role in Indigenous peoples’ expressions of sovereignty and struggles for self-determination.
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cover of Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England

Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds

A History of Slavery in New England

Jared Ross Hardesty

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area's indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region's economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New England has been little told.

In this concise yet comprehensive history, Jared Ross Hardesty focuses on the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life. He also explores larger issues such as the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England's deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of New England.
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cover of Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England

Black Yankees

The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England

William D. Piersen

University of Massachusetts Press, 1988

This book examines the development of an Afro-American subculture in eighteenth-century New England. Piersen concerns himself not with the machinery of slave control or the political and social disabilities of bondage, but with the processes of cultural change and creation from the black bondsman's point of view. What was it like to be an African immigrant in colonial New England? What attitudes and assumptions underlay the Afro-American response to Yankee culture? What does the development within the confines of a predominantly white and ethnocentric New England of an Afro-American folk culture in religion, public rituals, folk arts and crafts, social mores, and daily behavior say about the creation of American culture?

On the face of it, the master class called the tunes and slaves danced the beat. Blacks who were taken into New England's bondage were clearly engulfed in a pervasive, narrow-minded Euro-American society that had no interest in fostering Afro-American autonomy. The New England experience was often cruel, and the numbers alone suggest it was among the most unequal of black/white cultural contacts in the New World. Nonetheless, despite the strictures of bondage, the black Yankees of eighteenth-century New England created a sustaining folk culture of their own.
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cover of Boston and the Dawn of American Independence

Boston and the Dawn of American Independence

Brian Deming

Westholme Publishing, 2013

How a New England Port City Became the Site of the Revolution That Changed the History of the World
In 1760, no one could imagine the American colonies revolting against Great Britain. The colonists were not hungry peasants groaning under the whip of a brute. They lived well. Land was cheap, wages were good, opportunities abounded. While many colonists had been in the New World for generations, they identified with Britain, and England was still “home.” Yet in the space of just fifteen years these sturdy bonds snapped. Boston—a town of just 16,000—lit the fire for American Independence. Brian Deming explains how and why in his lucid, lively, and deeply researched Boston and the Dawn of American Independence.
To dodge British taxes, Boston merchants for as long as anyone could remember had routinely smuggled in molasses from French and Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. Boston distillers transformed this sweet cargo into rum, the liquid gold traded around the world. But British authorities cracked down on smuggling and imposed the Sugar Act to help pay for the debts incurred during their wars against France. Then came the hated Stamp Act, a tax on documents, newspapers, and printed materials of all kinds. In courtrooms, in the press, and in the streets, Bostonians rallied in protest against taxation without representation. As anger swept America, Boston was at the center of the storm, which burst forth with the infamous massacre and the Boston Tea Party. By 1775, open warfare erupted at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Boston and the Dawn of American Independence ties these scenes together with the people of the time, including John and Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere, as well as Thomas Hutchinson, the beleaguered Massachusetts royal governor, and James Otis, the bombastic, unstable early patriot. Readers hear their voices, but also those of many amazing, colorful, and memorable personalities— feisty mob leaders, defiant Tories, terrified townspeople. Deming illuminates this epic story with views of everyday life inside taverns, outside newspaper offices, and along the wharves, and the political dramas in London and Philadelphia that shaped the destiny of an empire and gave rise to the world’s first modern democracy.
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cover of Braddock's March: How the Man Sent to Seize a Continent Changed American History

Braddock's March

How the Man Sent to Seize a Continent Changed American History

Thomas E. Crocker

Westholme Publishing, 2009

Winner of the 2011 New York Society of Colonial Wars Distinguished Book Award

“The strength of this book lies in Crocker’s presentation of the battle and the complicated logistics involved.”—Times Literary Supplement “Braddock’s March is arguably the first truly comprehensive history devoted exclusively to the calamitous march that remade North America. . . . Braddock’s story is superb history.”—Weekly Standard “Drawing on original sources, Crocker grittily reconstructs the advance of Edward Braddock’s army on Fort Duquesne. . . . Attentive to detail, Crocker will engage colonial-history readers in this well illustrated book.”—Booklist

“Both Braddock’s epic march and subsequent destruction are brought to life by Thomas E. Crocker in Braddock’s March, his impeccably researched account of an important but largely forgotten chapter in American history. . . . It all adds up to a stirring tale.”—Washington Times 

“Before we parted, the General told me he should never see me more; for he was going with a handful of men to conquer whole nations; and to do this they must cut their way through unknown woods. He produced a map of the country, saying at the same time, ‘Dear Pop, we are sent like sacrifices to the altar.’” - George Anne Bellamy on General Edward Braddock’s departure

In January 1755, Major General Edward Braddock was sent by Great Britain on a mission to drive France once and for all from the New World. Accompanied by the largest armed expeditionary force ever sent to North America, Braddock’s primary target was the Forks of the Ohio, where he planned to seize Fort Duquesne (at present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), and then march north into Canada. After landing in Alexandria, Virginia, and organizing his troops and supply chain, Braddock and his expedition began its nearly 250-mile trek, heroically cutting through uncharted wilderness, fording rivers, and scaling the Appalachian mountains, all while hauling baggage and heavy artillery. Braddock was joined on this epic mission by a young Virginia colonel, George Washington, and others who would later play major roles in the American Revolution, including Horatio Gates, Thomas Gage, and Charles Lee; among those driving the expedition’s wagons were Daniel Boone and Daniel Morgan. Having withstood the harsh frontier and finally marching upon Fort Duquesne on a hot July morning, Braddock’s exhausted column was ambushed by a combined French and Indian force. Over two-thirds of Braddock’s British and colonial troops were killed or wounded, including Braddock himself, struck by a bullet in the chest while attempting to rally his disoriented troops. George Washington miraculously escaped harm despite four bullet holes through his clothing. With this battle, North America became the greatest stake in the global war between France and Great Britain.

In Braddock’s March: How the Man Sent to Seize a Continent Changed American History, Thomas E. Crocker tells the riveting story of one of the most important events in colonial America. Not only did Braddock’s expedition have a profound impact on American political and military developments, this fateful march laid the foundation for the “National Pike,” the major road for westward expansion, launched the career of George Washington, and sowed the seeds of dissent between  England and its colonies that would ultimately lead to the American Revolution.

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cover of British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America

British Atlantic, American Frontier

Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America

Stephen J. Hornsby

University Press of New England, 2004

Reflecting the growing scholarly interest in transnational and comparative approaches to studying the past, British Atlantic, American Frontier offers a geographical perspective on the development of British America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It covers in detail not only the American eastern seaboard, but also eastern Canada and the West Indies, as well as the trans-Atlantic links to Western Europe and West Africa. At one level, the book synthesizes much of the current historical and geographical scholarship on these regions; at another level, it offers a provocative interpretation of British America, arguing that profound and long-standing differences existed between the American eastern seaboard and the Atlantic regions of eastern Canada and the West Indies. These differences ultimately led to the break-up of British America, the creation of the United States, and the reconfiguration of the British Empire. British Atlantic, American Frontier is illustrated with more than one hundred photographs, maps, and historical illustrations.
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