164: Louis Hunter's Steamboats on the Western Rivers

In Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History, Louis Hunter situates a detailed history of the development of steamboat technology in the social, technological, and economic context in which it developed; he argues that "the growth of the West and the rise of steamboat transportation were inseparable; they were geared together and each was dependent upon the other."

Using contemporary newspapers, census documents, traveller accounts, and other primary sources form about the 1780s to the end of the 19th century, Hunter shows that steam transportation technology was the result of many people's contributions (both English and American), not just those of a few great men.  He also shows that in America, steam navigation started on the Atlantic seaboard but quickly moved inland to the Western rivers, where steamboats dominated inland transportation and commerce for a generation; and he argues that from 1925 to 1850 the steamboat was the main technological agent in developing the Mississippi basin from a "raw frontier society" to "economic and social maturity."  Finally, he claims that the Western steamboat was known worldwide as the "typical" American steamboat partly because it was so important to the economy of the region and partly because it was unique in its design, construction, and operation.  Published in 1949, this book was the scholarly survey of the development of steam navigation on the Western rivers that pulled together technology, operations, and governmental intervention into a consistent whole.

154: Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire

Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West is a history of the development of the American West through the lens of water management technology.  Building on substantial archival research, Worster argues that

The West, more than any other American region, was built by state power, state expertise, state technology, and state bureaucracy.  That is another way of saying that it has been, and is, the most thoroughly modern of American regions, and therefore that its experience, particularly in the matter of water, has been most instructive for deciphering the confused messages of that modernity.

By positioning water as technology rather than nature and the West as a federally-funded, man-made landscape, Worster both deconstructs the West's self-image as independent and free of government control AND reconstructs the region not as a colony of the East but as the seat of a global American empire.

99: Domosh & Seager's Putting Women in Place

In Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, Mona Domosh and Joni Seager show that space and place are both gendered and integral to the construction of gender.  In providing an overview of feminist geographical scholarship (up to 2001), they argue that this gendering has historically (and is currently) integral to processes of segregation, dominance, and resistance, in places like work and home as well as in the actions of everyday life.  Further, they situate this discussion of gender and geography within both local urban historical geographies in Western Europe and the US AND a structural analysis of global gender issues.  Their book is divided into six parts:

Home: history and analysis of a space almost universally associated with women.  Focusing on England and the US form the 17th century on, they show how the emerging capitalist system separated the male world of production from the female world of reproduction, from the Victorian cult of domesticity to mid-century suburbia.  They then interrogate the raced and classed connections between notions of domesticity and turn-of-the-century social engineering projects aimed at "Americanizing" urban working-class and immigrant women and rural Native American women.

97: Penny Von Eschen's Race Against Empire

In Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957, Penny Von Eschen locates radical black American thought within the larger tradition of politics of the African diaspora, and she traces the rise and fall of the relationship between the two in the decades surrounding WWII.  The international politics of the African diaspora (or the Black Atlantic) combined local struggles against racism and colonialism with a broad critique of imperialism.  International black leaders found support in Pan-Africanism, the Popular Front, labor movements in the US and the colonies, and a very vocal independent black press in the US; they viewed WWII as a unique opportunity to pursue their anti-colonial activism because they felt the racism and imperialism of the Axis powers would force the Allies to recognize and join their mission.  This international context for radical black American thought provides context for the Civil Rights movement while detaching race from its American context and reconfiguring it as the internal contradiction in global capitalism.

45: David Lovejoy's Glorious Revolution in America

In The Glorious Revolution in America, David Lovejoy compares the effects of the Glorious Revolution in three different English colonies, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York, to see how colonists reconceptualized their rights as English citizens during a time of political instability in England.

After 1660, England became aggressively involved in colonial affairs, which led settlers from Maryland and Virginia to ask what, exactly, it meant to be a colonist.  The Glorious Revolution was the 1688 overthrow of James II and the House of Stuart by English Parliamentarians, Dutch William III of Orange, and his wife, Mary II, who was the protestant daughter of James II.  James was authoritarian, and his wife was Catholic; the Glorious Revolution reduced the power of the monarch (and the threat of mandatory Catholicism) by creating a constitutional monarchy where the monarch was constrained in all decisions by Parliament.  Per Lovejoy, this political coup was emulated by colonists in America during the revolution of 1689, when they overthrew their arbitrary governments and demanded equality within the empire.

The colonists' attempts to gain equality with Englishmen ultimately failed in all of Lovejoy's three case studies, largely because of the logical impossibility of gaining equality while remaining within an inherently unequal imperial system.  Ultimately, being Englishmen was more important to them than being equal.  However, Lovejoy argues that fighting for equality with England did foster communication and cooperation among the colonies, and thus this book shows that the colonies were becoming a single, interconnected unit much earlier than scholars had thought.  (Previously, scholars thought that the Great Awakening in the 1700s was the first intercolonial experience.)  Perhaps the fight for equality within the Empire did more for colonial unity than any imperial policy could have done.

Although Lovejoy says he's not reading the American Revolution into this study, and although he relies heavily on primary sources, I'm not sure why else he would be so intent on figuring out when the colonies started to form a unified identity that was both predicated on a relationship with England and uniquely American... especially since that unified identity is based on assertions of equality, equal rights and liberty.

36: Virginia Anderson's Creatures of Empire

In Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Virginia Anderson argues that in seventeenth-century Chesapeake and New England, domestic animals put English settlers and Native Americans into close contact and thus actively shaped the history of early America and settler/ native relations.  By putting livestock at the center of early American history, Anderson contributes to a growing body of literature in animal studies, which, like environmental history, decenters human historical agency by elevating the broader environmental context.  Because colonists and Indians related to animals very differently and because these relationships had a huge impact on the landscape, focusing on animals also allows Anderson to investigate the imposition of one worldview over another in a holistic way.

Anderson divides her book into three sections: a discussion of the many ways Algonquians and English settlers thought about different kinds of animals at the beginning of the 17th century; a history of the introduction of livestock into the Chesapeake colonies and New England and the development of regional husbandry practices; and a comparison of two near-simultaneous conflicts in the 1670s, Bacon's rebellion and King Philip's War, with an emphasis on the relationship between disputes over livestock and the outbreak of violence in both regions.  Building on Bill Cronon's Changes in the Land, she argues that the English settlers sought to turn the New World into England, which included imposing their view of animals as property on the landscape and on Native Americans.  There were regional differences: Chesapeake farmers, with tobacco as their cash crop, let pigs and other animal run free and go semi-feral; New England farmers, who had to deal with colder climates and rocky soils, ran family farms rather than large plantations, and kept a closer eye on their herds.  However, in both regions, Native American responses to new animals and practices ranged from cautious acceptance of pigs (which seemed like deer or dogs) to outright rejection of environmental destruction by animals.

In some ways, this book is a continuation of the spatial turn in American Studies: English attitudes toward animals were closely linked to their attitudes about property, and Algonquian attitudes toward animals were linked to their more holistic view of humans, animals, and the environment, so disputes over animals spatialize and materialize conflicting worldviews.  By broadening the concept of agency to include environmental and non-human actors, it also presents a more contextual (and thus possibly more complete and less biased, or at least differently biased) history of early America.

35: Patricia Limerick's Legacy of Conquest

A Westerner studying at Harvard, Patricia Limerick wrote The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West with three main goals: to knit together the Old West of frontiers, cowboys, and conquest and the complex, 20th century west into a coherent history; to warn against the dangers of the narrative of Progress for the West, environmentally and culturally; and to finally overturn the Turner thesis and shift the focus of Western history from the frontier-as-process to the West-as-place.  She achieves these goals by synthesizing existing scholarship in a variety of historical subdisciplines, including urban, social, business, labor, Chicano/a, Indian, and environmental, and by taking the West's many regions and perspectives into account.

Much of the book, then, involves dispelling myths of the Old West by retelling the history of the West from a variety of perspectives.  Limerick investigates the ideology of Western independence, which can only exist in a national and international context; real estate and property as the emotional center of Western history; and writing mining as labor history.  Most importantly - she spends the second half of the book writing a history of the West from Native Americans' perspective.  While she pulls from Native sources somewhat, her main strategy is to read Anglo sources from a Native American perspective; the result is a portrayal of resentful  people reduced to dependency on a single centralized agency, choosing rationally from among a dwindling number of opportunities.

With this new, synthetic history of the West as a place instead of a mobile frontier or a cowboys-and-indians fantasyland, Limerick argues that the West is a "place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences," and that "Western history has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy - for the right to claim for oneself and sometimes for one's group the status of legitimate beneficiary of Western  resources."  In other words, the West has long been shaped by a competition between different ethnic groups for property rights, even as the Western frontier functions as a kind of creation myth for white America.  This book thus complicates American narratives of Progress and manifest destiny even as it reclaims the West for historical study.

34: Kaplan and Pease's Cultures of United States Imperialism

Cultures of United States Imperialism helped usher in the international turn in American Studies, and got AMS folks thinking about America's place in the world many years before 9/11 forced pop culture to come to terms with America as an empire, and not a particularly nice one, either.

In her introduction, Kaplan is straightforward: she argues that we cannot understand American culture without looking at the interconnections between internal and external colonization, because in America, empire-building and nation-building go hand-in-hand.  If Deloria argues that Indians are at the heart of American national identity, Kaplan takes that argument a step further and says that empire is at the heart of America; and unlike Deloria, who focuses on cultural play, Kaplan anchors her argument in the very real world of foreign relations, economics, and cultures of subjugating and subjugated peoples.  In other words, taking over other countries and colonizing them is part and parcel of what it means to be America, and it has been that way since the colonial era.