The Travels of Richard Traunter

by Richard Traunter

Author	: Richard Traunter
Publisher	: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages	: 190
Release	: 2022-10-10
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0813947804

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In the final years of the seventeenth century, Richard Traunter—an experienced Indian trader fluent in three Indigenous languages—made a number of trips into the interior of Virginia and the Carolina colonies, keeping a record of his travels and the people he encountered. This primary-source edition of Traunter’s account makes his crucial text, held in private collections for more than three hundred years, widely available for the first time. Traunter’s journals shed light on colonial society, Indigenous cultures, and evolving politics, offering a precious glimpse into a world in dramatic transition. He describes rarely referenced Native peoples, details diplomatic efforts, and relates the dreadful impact of a smallpox epidemic then raging through the region. In concert with Eno Will, the head man at Ajusher who accompanied Traunter on both treks, Traunter also helped establish trade pacts with eight Indigenous nations. Part natural history, part adventure tale, all expertly contextualized by Sandra Dahlberg, Traunter’s narrative provides a unique vantage point through which to view one of the most important periods in the colonial South and represents an invaluable resource for students and specialists alike.

Plain Paths and Dividing Lines

by Jessica Lauren Taylor

Author	: Jessica Lauren Taylor
Publisher	: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages	: 421
Release	: 2023-08-11
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 081394936X

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It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined by connection, Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and into the continent for centuries. As Taylor finds, their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland’s planters erected fences and forts, policed unfree laborers, and dispatched land surveyors. By chronicling English and Algonquian attempts to move along paths and rivers and to enforce boundaries, Taylor casts a new light on pivotal moments in Anglo-Indigenous relations, from the growth of the fur trade to Bacon’s Rebellion. Most important, Taylor traces the ways in which the peoples resisting colonial encroachment and subjugation used Native networks and Indigenous knowledge of the Bay to cross newly created English boundaries. She thereby illuminates alternate visions of power, freedom, and connection in the colonial Chesapeake.

Cherokee Power

by Kristofer Ray

Author	: Kristofer Ray
Publisher	: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages	: 276
Release	: 2023-09-26
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0806193549

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In 1754 South Carolina governor James Glen observed that the Tennessee River “has its rise in the Cherokee Nation and runs a great way through it.” While noting the “prodigious” extent of the corridor connecting the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys—and the Cherokees’ “undoubted” ownership of this watershed—Glen and other European observers were much less clear about the ambitions and claims of European empires and other Indigenous polities regarding the North American interior. In Cherokee Power, Kristofer Ray brings long-overdue clarity to this question by highlighting the role of the Overhill Cherokees in shaping imperial and Indigenous geopolitics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. As Great Britain and France eyed the Illinois country and the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys for their respective empires, the Overhill Cherokees were coalescing and maintaining a conspicuous presence throughout the territory. Contrary to the traditional narrative of westward expansion, the Europeans were not the drivers behind the ensuing contest over the Tennessee corridor. The Overhills traded, negotiated, and fought with other Indigenous peoples along this corridor, in the process setting parameters for European expansion. Through the eighteenth century, the British and French struggled to overcome a dissonance between their visions of empire and the reality of Overhill mobility and sovereignty—a struggle that came to play a crucial role in the Anglo-American revolutionary debate that dominated the 1760s and 1770s. By emphasizing Indigenous agency in this rapidly changing world, Cherokee Power challenges long-standing ideas about the power and reach of European empires in eighteenth-century North America.

A Delicious Country

by Scott Huler

Author	: Scott Huler
Publisher	: UNC Press Books
Total Pages	: 262
Release	: 2019-02-05
Genre	: Travel
ISBN	: 1469648296

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In 1700, a young man named John Lawson left London and landed in Charleston, South Carolina, hoping to make a name for himself. For reasons unknown, he soon undertook a two-month journey through the still-mysterious Carolina backcountry. His travels yielded A New Voyage to Carolina in 1709, one of the most significant early American travel narratives, rich with observations about the region's environment and Indigenous people. Lawson later helped found North Carolina's first two cities, Bath and New Bern; became the colonial surveyor general; contributed specimens to what is now the British Museum; and was killed as the first casualty of the Tuscarora War. Yet despite his great contributions and remarkable history, Lawson is little remembered, even in the Carolinas he documented. In 2014, Scott Huler made a surprising decision: to leave home and family for his own journey by foot and canoe, faithfully retracing Lawson's route through the Carolinas. This is the chronicle of that unlikely voyage, revealing what it's like to rediscover your own home. Combining a traveler's curiosity, a naturalist's keen observation, and a writer's wit, Huler draws our attention to people and places we might pass regularly but never really see. What he finds are surprising parallels between Lawson's time and our own, with the locals and their world poised along a knife-edge of change between a past they can't forget and a future they can't quite envision.

Time of Anarchy

by Matthew Kruer

Author	: Matthew Kruer
Publisher	: Harvard University Press
Total Pages	: 353
Release	: 2022-02-08
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 067426956X

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A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England’s fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America. In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. Dissidents in northern Carolina launched a revolution, proclaiming themselves independent of any authority but their own. English America teetered on the edge of anarchy. Though seemingly distinct, these conflicts were in fact connected through the Susquehannock Indians, a once-mighty nation reduced to a small remnant. Forced to scatter by colonial militia, Susquehannock bands called upon connections with Indigenous nations from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, mobilizing sources of power that colonists could barely perceive, much less understand. Although the Susquehannock nation seemed weak and divided, it exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its size, often tipping settler societies into chaos. Colonial anarchy was intertwined with Indigenous power. Piecing together Susquehannock strategies from a wide range of archival documents and material evidence, Matthew Kruer shows how one people’s struggle for survival and renewal changed the shape of eastern North America. Susquehannock actions rocked the foundations of the fledging English territories, forcing colonial societies and governments to respond. Time of Anarchy recasts our understanding of the late seventeenth century and places Indigenous power at the heart of the story.

Republic of Indians

by Bradley J. Dixon

Author	: Bradley J. Dixon
Publisher	: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages	: 317
Release	: 2024-12-03
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 151282643X

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A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who challenged European empires from the inside, Republic of Indians tells the story of Indigenous leaders who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law. While in the Spanish Empire, Natives were a recognized part of “la república de indios,” the “republic of Indians,” other Natives across the early American South understood themselves to be joined with European colonists in larger polities, each jealously guarding their own bodies of liberties under royal sanction. Thus, rather than simply rejecting European pretensions to rule them as subjects and vassals, Native Southerners as diverse as the Apalachees, Pamunkeys, Powhatans, and Timucuas redefined their status to become political players in legislative assemblies and the courts of distant monarchs. They pushed for incorporation in larger political systems in which they had a say and were themselves instrumental in creating. Adapting pre-invasion practices to the technology of writing and the challenges of colonialism, Indigenous petitioners sought exemptions from labor and protection for “the lands that God gave to them,” as well as the right to install preferred leaders, avoid enslavement, ally with the Crown against colonists, ease harsh colonial laws, and even amend the terms of treaties and compacts. Bradley J. Dixon shows how their petitions also stand as enduring contributions to American political thought and how it was these “vassals” and “subjects” who gave meaning to the modern idea of tribal sovereignty. In the South, the Spanish and English empires came to resemble one another precisely because they were both dependent to a remarkable degree on maintaining Indigenous political consent and were founded in large part on Indigenous conceptions of law.

Anglo-Native Virginia

by Kristalyn Marie Shefveland

Author	: Kristalyn Marie Shefveland
Publisher	: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages	: 185
Release	: 2016
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0820350257

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Shefveland examines Anglo-Indian interactions through the conception of Native tributaries to the Virginia colony, with particularemphasis on the colonial and tributary and foreign Native settlements of thePiedmont and southwestern Coastal Plain between 1646 and 1722.

The Chicken Trilogy

by Michael J. Heitzler Ed. D.

Author	: Michael J. Heitzler Ed. D.
Publisher	: AuthorHouse
Total Pages	: 490
Release	: 2017-12-14
Genre	: Education
ISBN	: 1546215891

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Three books comprise The Chicken Trilogy. The first volume in this collection is George Chicken, Carolina Man of the Ages; the second book is George Chicken Jr., Son of Carolina; and the third is Little Mistress Chicken, A Veritable Happening of Colonial Carolina. These three books examine the challenges, successes, and failures of the principals in each of the three generations of the George Chicken family as they engaged the dynamically evolving eighteenth-century Carolina frontier. The first book examines Colonel George Chicken, Indian Commissioner, backwoods trader, planter, and a bold political leader during the era of the Goose Creek Men. That fierce cadre of frontiersmen in the Goose Creek community near Charleston dominated South Carolina leadership for fifty years and led the first political revolution in Carolina. The Berkeley County South Carolina Chamber of Commerce published a brief edition of the first book of this trilogy in 2011. That exposed the need to expand that work, as well as unravel the mysteries of the two subsequent generations of Chicken personalities during the formative frontier decades. The second expos divulges the story of Captain George Chicken Jr., son of Colonel George Chicken, and an Indian trader, militia captain, parish commissioner, and formative personality in his own right. He mightily contributed to improved relations with distant Native American tribes that hardened the British hold on colonial Carolina. That research knitted the sagas of Colonel George Chicken with his son, George Chicken Jr., and begged to tell the tale of Catharine Chicken, heroine of the third generation. The third book divulges a sorrowful episode in the life of Catharine Chicken, daughter and granddaughter of the principal personalities of the earlier epochs. This final work of the trilogy vividly describes a colonial-era community; tells of the exploits, challenges, and transgressions of colorful townspeople of that place; and grimly recalls the trials and narrow survival of a tortured seven-year-old heroine, Catharine Chicken. The Chicken Trilogy vividly and dramatically illuminates bold personalities from each of three generations of the Chicken family and recounts their trials and tribulations as they persistently engaged the challenges of the evolving Carolina frontier.

The Specter of Peace

by

Author	:
Publisher	: BRILL
Total Pages	: 293
Release	: 2018-06-26
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 9004371680

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Specter of Peace advances a novel historical conceptualization of peace as a process of “right ordering” that involved the careful regulation of violence, the legitimation of colonial authority, and the creation of racial and gendered hierarchies. The volume highlights the many paths of peacemaking that otherwise have hitherto gone unexplored in early American and Atlantic World scholarship and challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence. Early American peacemaking was a productive discourse of moral ordering fundamentally concerned with regulating violence. The historicization of peace, the authors argue, can sharpen our understanding of violence, empire, and the early modern struggle for order and harmony in the colonial Americas and Atlantic World. Contributors are: Micah Alpaugh, Brendan Gillis, Mark Meuwese, Margot Minardi, Geoffrey Plank, Dylan Ruediger, Cristina Soriano and Wayne E. Lee.