A Post Exceptionalist Perspective On Early American History

This book argues that early American history is best understood as the story of a settler-colonial supplanting society—a society intent on a vast land grab of American Indian space and driven by a logic of elimination and a genocidal imperative to rid the new white settler living space of its existing Indigenous inhabitants. Challenging the still strongly held notion of American history as somehow exceptional or unique, it locates the history of the United States and its colonial antecedents as a central part of—rather than an exception to—the emerging global histories of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide. It also explores early American history in an imperial, transnational, and global frame, showing how the precedent of the North American West and its colonial trope of Indian wars were used by like-minded American and European expansionists to inspire and legitimate other imperial-colonial adventures from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.

How is American history written? Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alan Taylor answers this question in this collection of his essays from The New Republic, where he explores the writing of early American history.

Described as "the New York Review of Books for history," Historically Speaking has emerged as one of the most distinctive historical publications in recent years, actively seeking out contributions from a pantheon of leading voices in historical discourse. Recent Themes in Early American History represents the best writing on colonial and revolutionary-era American history to appear in its pages the past five years. This collection of recent essays and interviews from Historically Speaking demonstrates that traditional approaches still foster fresh understanding of the early American past and that original contributions to traditional topics continue to be made.

Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies is the first collection of essays to argue that fear permeated the colonial societies of 17th- and 18th-century America and to analyse its impact on the political decision-making processes from a variety of angles and locations. Indeed, the thirteen essays range from Canada to the Chesapeake, from New England to the Caribbean and from the Carolina Backcountry to Dutch Brazil. This volume assesses the typically American nature of fear factors and the responses they elicited in a transatlantic context. The essays further explore how the European colonists handled such challenges as Indian conspiracies, slave revolts, famine, “popery” and tyranny as well as werewolves and a dragon to build cohesive societies far from the metropolis. Contributors are: Sarah Barber, Benjamin Carp, Leslie Choquette, Anne-Claire Faucquez, Lauric Henneton, Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, Susanne Lachenicht, Bertie Mandelblatt, Mark Meuwese, L. H. Roper, David L. Smith, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Christopher Vernon, and David Voorhees.

A fresh, original history of America’s national narratives, told through the loss, recovery, and rise of one influential Puritan sermon from 1630 to the present day In this illuminating book, Abram Van Engen shows how the phrase “City on a Hill,” from a 1630 sermon by Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, shaped the story of American exceptionalism in the twentieth century. By tracing the history of Winthrop’s speech, its changing status throughout time, and its use in modern politics, Van Engen asks us to reevaluate our national narratives. He tells the story of curators, librarians, collectors, archivists, antiquarians, and often anonymous figures who emphasized the role of the Pilgrims and Puritans in American history, paving the way for the saving and sanctifying of a single sermon. This sermon’s rags-to-riches rise reveals the way national stories take shape and shows us how those tales continue to influence competing visions of the country—the many different meanings of America that emerge from its literary past.

This book takes a new approach by synthesizing the work of scholars of military and Indigenous history to provide the first chronologically ordered, region-wide, and long-term narrative history of conflict in the Early American Northeast. War and Colonization in the Early American Northeast focuses on war and society, European colonization, and Indigenous peoples in New England from the pre-Columbian era to the mid-eighteenth century. It examines how the New English used warfare against Native Americans as a way to implement a colonial order. These conflicts shaped New English attitudes toward Native Americans, which further aided in the marginalization and the violent targeting of these communities. At the same time, this volume pays attention to the experiences of Indigenous peoples. It explores pre-Columbian Native American conflict and studies how colonization altered the ways of warfare of Indigenous people. Native Americans contested New English efforts at colonization and used violent warfare strategies and raids to target their enemies—often quite successfully. However, in the long run, depending on time and geographic location, conflict and colonization led to dramatic and violent changes for Native Americans. This volume is an essential resource for academics, students, academic libraries, and general readers interested in the history of New England, military, Native American, or U.S. history.

New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.