Results by title

3 books match the query 'Early Modern Atlantic'

cover of Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1715

Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1715

Kimberly C. Borchard

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021

While political activists have long decried the cultural and economic marginalization of Appalachia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Appalachia has similarly been excluded from the study of colonial expansion, transatlantic conflict, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world. Drawing on sources in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Latin, and English, this monograph underscores the chaotically international, polyglot nature of early Appalachian history and foregrounds the region as a locus of imperial conflict during the early modern period. It likewise explores the European obsession with Appalachian mineral resources from 1528 to 1715, reframing Appalachian history within the fields of Latin American, early American, and Atlantic history. Ultimately, Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic provides new perspectives for scholars and students and suggests new directions for research in Native American and Indigenous studies, environmental studies, and Appalachian studies.
[more]
cover of Genoese Immigration and Iberian Anxiety in the Early Modern Atlantic

Genoese Immigration and Iberian Anxiety in the Early Modern Atlantic

Richard Ibarra

University of Delaware Press, 2027

This book explores the experiences of Genoese immigrants in the sixteenth-century Iberian Atlantic, focusing on how they navigated issues of identity and community membership across generations and transnational movement. Moving to cities like Seville, as well as Santo Domingo and Mexico City, Genoese families encountered both tremendous opportunities and significant challenges in establishing their lives, reaching a communal apogee—the “Genoese Century”—while they faced increasing Iberian anxieties. While some found ways to integrate into Iberian society through religious and charitable activities, retaining references to their Genoese past, others dissimulated or renounced their Genoese identity. Through a combination of notarial and inquisition records, litigation to prove nobility (hidalguía) and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), literary narratives, and funerary monuments, Richard Ibarra provides insights into the changing identity claims of Genoese families and the broader attitudes toward foreigners in Iberian society that reached beyond perceived religious and ethnic difference. 
 

[more]
cover of To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic

To Feast on Us as Their Prey

Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic

Rachel B. Herrmann

University of Arkansas Press, 2019

Winner, 2020 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award, Edited Volume

Long before the founding of the Jamestown, Virginia, colony and its Starving Time of 1609–1610—one of the most famous cannibalism narratives in North American colonial history—cannibalism played an important role in shaping the human relationship to food, hunger, and moral outrage. Why did colonial invaders go out of their way to accuse women of cannibalism? What challenges did Spaniards face in trying to explain Eucharist rites to Native peoples? What roles did preconceived notions about non-Europeans play in inflating accounts of cannibalism in Christopher Columbus’s reports as they moved through Italian merchant circles?

Asking questions such as these and exploring what it meant to accuse someone of eating people as well as how cannibalism rumors facilitated slavery and the rise of empires, To Feast on Us as Their Prey posits that it is impossible to separate histories of cannibalism from the role food and hunger have played in the colonization efforts that shaped our modern world.

[more]