Colonial Frontiers | American Conquest and Consolidation
1. Indian peoples were often defeated militarily, but their dispossession and demoralization resulted primarily from peaceful encounters and exchanges. Discuss. Which had the more destructive impact on Indian peoples and cultures: war or peace? Why?
2. Historians have frequently classified the responses of indigenous peoples around the globe to the invasion of Europeans as either "nativist" or "accommodationist." How useful are these terms in describing and evaluating the strategies of Indian peoples in the post-contact period? Can you propose an alternative typology which more accurately characterizes the reactions of indigenous peoples to European invasion?
3. It has been said that the Spanish came to the Americas for "gold, god, and glory," the French for "fish, fur, and the faith," and the English for "land, land, and land." Do you agree? How might you amend any or all of the above trilogies?
4. In the nineteenth century, historian Francis Parkman asserted that "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian, French civilization embraced and cherished him, [while] English civilization scorned and neglected him." Do you agree with these characterizations? How might you append, amend, and/or entirely upend them? Can you offer a better typology of the intercultural relations between the three major European competitors and the various Indian peoples with whom they cohabited in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
5. The influence of Richard White's work on North American history cannot be overstated, but perhaps it has gone too far. Indeed, what might be called "the middle grounding of early American history" has led scholars to exaggerate the extent of "ethnic mixing" in colonial North America. "Ethnic cleansing," after all, was the chief legacy of European colonialism in North America -- both before and after 1776.
Evaluate the above position, assessing the soundness of its thesis and the validity of its critique of recent scholarship on colonial and national North American frontiers (including ones which do not lie within the present boundaries of the United States).
6. In 1965, a leading historian of colonial New England described the meeting of Indians and Europeans in early America as follows: "One [the English] was unified, visionary, disciplined, and dynamic. The other [Native American] was divided, self-satisfied, undisciplined, and static. It would be unreasonable to expect that such societies could live side by side indefinitely with no penetration of the more fragmented and passive by the more consolidated and active. What resulted, then, was not--as many have held--a clash of dissimilar ways of life, but rather the expansion of one into areas in which the other was lacking." How does this characterization hold up in a larger analysis of the history of Indian-Euroamerican relations in the colonial era? (Try to restrain yourself.)
7. When Europeans began their invasion of America, they sought to understand, legitimize, and elevate their actions through a mythology in which they juxtaposed themselves as 'civilized' Christians to the 'savage,' heathen natives. In so doing they maximized the differences between themselves and the Indians in moral, biological, and cultural terms. But the mythology has obscured the striking parallels between the worlds of Early Modern European peasants and North American woodland villagers. Even more striking was the degree to which colonial (or at least a segment of colonial) and Indian cultures grew more alike over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Discuss with particular attention to delineating the contrasts and (increasing) confluences between Euro-American and Amerindian cultures in the Colonial and Early National periods.
8. In the eighteenth century, British America witnessed the progress of two processes: "Anglicization" and "Americanization." What were the sources of each? What were their significances? What were their limits? In what ways were the two processes contradictory?
9. The Columbian quincentenary called a great deal of attention to the fate of Indian peoples in the five hundred years since 1492. Less studied were the developments in Indian America that preceded the Columbian encounter. What would you characterize as the major themes in Indian history in the five centuries prior to 1492? How did these pre-colonial trends shape the colonial history of North America?
10. "The historical reality of traditional societies is locked together for the rest of time with the historical reality of the intruders who saw them, changed them, destroyed them. There is no history beyond the frontier, free of the contact that makes it." Discuss.
11. Discuss the following quotation in the context of colonial American frontiers: "Human populations construct their cultures in interaction with one another and not in isolation."
AMERICAN CONQUEST AND CONDOLIDATION
1. The history of American westward expansion can be summarized as "the
middle ground that was not found." Explain and evaluate.
2. When Karl Marx suggested that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, he was not thinking about the Ohio Valley. But the history of the "western country" in the second half of the eighteenth century provides striking evidence of Marx's dictum. Explain by comparing and contrasting British colonial policy in the 1760s with Federalist policy in the 1790s.
3. John Mack Faragher's work emphasizes the overlaps between the world of Daniel Boone and that of neighboring Indian peoples, yet the larger history of American westward expansion was characterized more by ethnic cleansing than by ethnic mixing. If the ways of American pioneers and neighboring Indians were in some respects growing more alike, what explains their inability to find and hold common ground? How in particular does Daniel Boone's life exemplify the confluences and conflicts between frontier cultures?
4. What factors shaped the character of frontier relations between various Europeans and Indians across the North American continent? Why were some frontiers more "inclusive" than others?
5. In American foreign policy, "appeasement" has become a dirty word. Yet in the two centuries after 1607 the expansion of British America and of the United States was unwittingly abetted by the appeasement strategies pursued by woodland Indians. What evidence supports this interpretation? How might the statement be modified to more accurately describe the diplomatic strategies of woodland Indians?
6. In his essay "Colonial America without the Indians," James Axtell registers the indispensibility of the Indians for understanding America's past by speculating how Early American history would have looked had the New World truly been a "virgin land." Drawing on Axtell's conception of adaptive and reactive changes, extend the counterfactual speculation into the nineteenth century, considering one or more of the following topics: "Revolutionary America without the Indians," "Jeffersonian America without the Indians," "Jacksonian America without the Indians," and "Post-bellum America without the Indians."
7. The myth of the "vanishing Indian" has a long history in North America and (unfortunately) shows considerable vitality. What were the origins of the myth? How did it evolve during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What influence has the myth of the vanishing Indian had on the policies of the American federal government?
8. How would you organize a lecture on "the Indian as symbol in American thought and culture"? On what themes would you focus? What periodization would you use? How would a gendered analysis complicate and enrich your presentation?