History 533
Readings in Early American History


Fall 2006                                          Prof. Erik Seeman
Mon. 4-6:40, Park 532                     Park 534, 645-2181 x534
seeman@buffalo.edu                        Office hours: Mon. 1-3

Goals:  This course will introduce graduate students to the major themes and methodologies in colonial American history.  The course will serve as a foundation for those students wishing to prepare an examination field in colonial America or for anyone who wants to gain a broad perspective on the most important developments in the field.  This course will be organized as a series of "updates":  we will examine five topics for two weeks each (in one case for three weeks), and for each topic the first work is a classic and the second is a more recent contribution that builds on or departs from the classic text in important ways.  The lengthy lists of recommended books are meant to aid students preparing exam lists and those who wish to study a particular topic in greater depth.  Class sessions will consist of analytical discussions of the week's readings; as a result careful reading of the texts is imperative.  In addition, this course will allow students to hone some professional skills:  how to write (and critique) book reviews and review essays, how to find primary sources, and how to discuss historical materials critically yet fairly.

Assignments:  There are several assignments required of students in addition to active and informed class discussion.

•Review of Reviews.  Find three substantial reviews of the book for Sept. 11 (White), Sept. 18 (Merrell), Sept. 25 (Morgan), or Oct. 9 (Brown).  Look for longer reviews, such as those in the William and Mary Quarterly and Reviews in American History, not the very short reviews in the American Historical Review.  Write a critical assessment (5 pages) of those reviews in light of your reading of the book.  How do the reviews differ in style?  How do the review authors indicate their own preferences for method and interpretation?  What are the strengths and weaknesses of the reviews?  Would you add critiques of the book that the review authors overlooked?

•Oral Presentation and Book Review.  Each student will choose a week to read one book from the list of recommended books for that week's topic.  Class will begin with a five-minute presentation in which the student summarizes the book for the rest of the class and relates it to the readings for that week.  Students will have one week after presenting the oral report to hand in a formal three-page book review.

•Historiographical Paper.  Each student will choose a topic for an in-depth review of the recent literature in 12 to 15 pages, due Dec. 11 by noon.  Students should consult with me during office hours no later than Nov. 13 about an appropriate topic.  Students may use the lists of recommended books to get started, though other subjects not covered by the lists may also be studied.  The additional reading for the paper should amount to about three books and two articles (though these are not hard and fast figures).  This paper may be used as a prospectus for a later research project or as the first step toward a dissertation topic.

Grading:  Class discussion will constitute the majority of the final grade, with the written assignments making up the balance.

Readings:  The following books are required reading and are available for purchase at the University Bookstore.

Richard White, The Middle Ground:  Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991)

James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods:  Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York, 1999)

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom:  The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975)

Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs:  Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996)

Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956)

David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment:  Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989)

Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery:  A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 3d ed. (1959; Chicago, 1976)

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone:  The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)

Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire:  Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, 2004)

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed.  (1967; Cambridge, Mass., 1992)

T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution:  How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004)


 Reading Schedule:

Aug. 28:  Introduction

Sept. 4:  Labor Day – Class Cancelled

Sept. 11:  Indians I

White, Middle Ground

Sept. 18:  Indians II

Merrell, Into the American Woods

Sept. 25:  Chesapeake I

Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

Oct. 2:  Yom Kippur – Class Cancelled

Oct. 9:  Chesapeake II

Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

Oct. 16:  New England I

Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness, ch. 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10

Oct. 23:  New England II

Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment

Oct. 30:  Primary Sources

Nov. 6:  Slavery I

Elkins, Slavery

Nov. 13:  Slavery II

Berlin, Many Thousands Gone

Nov. 20:  Slavery III

Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire

Nov. 27:  American Revolution I

Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Dec. 4:  American Revolution II

Breen, Marketplace of Revolution


Mon. Dec. 11:  historiographical paper due by noon


Recommended Readings

Indians

James Axtell, The Invasion Within:  The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 1985)

William Cronon, Changes in the Land:  Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983)

Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade:  The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, 2002)

Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700 (Lincoln, Neb., 1995)

Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away:  Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, Calif., 1991)

Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America:  Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York, 1976)

Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680:  Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (Norman, Ok., 1995)

Jill Lepore, The Name of War:  King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998)

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling With the Indians:  The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totowa, N.J., 1980)

James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World:  Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (New York, 1989)

Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas:  First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, 2003)

Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse:  The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, 1992)

Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country:  A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001)

Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence:  Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York, 1982)

Gordon Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains:  Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill, 1997)

Ian K. Steele, Warpaths:  Invasions of North America (New York, 1994)

Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians:  British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia, 2004)

Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers:  Canada's "Heroic Age" Reconsidered (Kingston, Ont., 1985)

Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy:  The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992)


Chesapeake

T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture:  The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, 1985)

T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, "Myne Owne Ground":  Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York, 1980)

Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole's World:  Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, 1991)

April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia:  Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2004)

James P. Horn, Adapting to a New World:  English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, 1994)

Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves:  The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986)

Kenneth A. Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674-1744 (New York, 1987)

Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony:  Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton, 1982)

John Ruston Pagan, Anne Orthwood's Bastard:  Sex and Law in Early Virginia (New York, 2002)

Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time:  Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (New York, 1984)

Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century:  Essays on Anglo-American Society and Politics (New York, 1979)

Anne E. Yentsch, A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves:  A Study in Historical Archaeology (New York, 1994)


New England

David Grayson Allen, In English Ways:  The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century     (New York, 1981)

Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed:  The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974)

Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee:  Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)

Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith:  Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)

Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar:  Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1995)

Richard Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion:  Magic and Religion in Early New England  (New York, 1992)

Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations:  Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970)

Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion's Glory:  Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660 (Middletown, Conn., 1984)

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety:  Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, 1982)

Christine Leigh Heyrman, Commerce and Culture:  The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 (New York, 1984)

Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue:  The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York, 1997)

Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman:  Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987)

Perry Miller, The New England Mind:  From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953)

Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints:  The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963)

Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption:  The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, 1997)

Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women:  Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca, 1997)

Erik R. Seeman, Pious Persuasions:  Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore, 1999)

David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death:  A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York, 1977)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives:  Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York, 1980)

Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics:  Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (Princeton, 2002)


Primary Sources

Robert J. Allison, ed., The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself (New York, 1995)

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (New York, 1981)

Elaine G. Breslaw, ed., Records of the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, 1745-1756 (Urbana, Ill., 1988)

Colin G. Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down:  Indian Voices from Early America (New York, 1994)

John Demos, Remarkable Providences:  Readings on Early American History, rev. ed. (Boston, 1991)

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1788)

Jack P. Greene, ed., The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752-1778 (Richmond, Va., 1987)

David D. Hall, ed., Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England:  A Documentary History, 1638-1692 (Boston, 1991)

Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, eds., The Puritans in America:  A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge, Mass., 1985)

Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker, eds., The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757 (New Haven, 1984)

William G. Mcloughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus (Providence, R.I., 1979)

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776)

Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, edited by Neal Salisbury (New York, 1997)

M. Halsey Thomas, ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewell, 1674-1729 (New York, 1973)

Francis G. Walett, ed., The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1703-1782 (Worcester, Mass., 1974)


Slavery

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone:  The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)

T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, "Myne Owne Ground":  Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York, 1980)

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966)

Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion:  African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998)

Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom:  Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York, 2004)

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana:  The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992)

Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York, 1993)

Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, Ill., 1999)

Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black:  American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (New York, 1968)

Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women:  Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004)

Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint:  Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998)

Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects:  The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, 1998)

Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together:  Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, 1987)

Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit:  African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1983)

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York, 1992)

Shane White, Somewhat More Independent:  The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (Athens, Ga., 1991)

Peter H. Wood, Black Majority:  Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974)


American Revolution

Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana, Ill., 1983)

Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel, Jr., The Way of Duty:  A Woman and her Family in Revolutionary America (New York, 1984)

Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country:  Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York, 1995)

David W. Conroy, Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, 1995)

Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence:  Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif., 1993)

Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims:  The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (New York, 1982)

Susan Juster, Disorderly Women:  Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994)

Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic:  Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York, 1980)

Jean B. Lee, The Price of Nationhood:  The American Revolution in Charles County (New York, 1994)

Pauline Maier, American Scripture:  Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997)

Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible:  Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)

Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters:  The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800, 2d ed. (1980; Ithaca, 1996)

Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War:  The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (New York, 1979)

Garry Wills, Inventing America:  Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York, 1979)

Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York, 1969)

Gordon S. Wood., The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991)

Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution:  Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (Dekalb, Ill., 1976)

Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman's Dilemma:  Marcy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, Ill., 1995)