Oliver Perry Chitwood was one of the greatest early 20th century colonial historian scholars, though he looks more at the evolution of political institutions and religious communities more than ethnology, which David Hackett Fisher is a good but incomplete study.
Another thing I imply is that British history, English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish history in specific regards to Ulster is key to the colonial American ethnos, some of that has to involve reading British history to modern times and colonial immigration waves.
Charles Andrews, Herbert Osgood, and Henry Lawrence Gibson dig further into early American history within a continental and European political context and most are on archive right now, these are the men the Fonerites and the Gordon Woods replaced.
Lastly, you should look into the history specifically of the peopling of the state or region within the state your ancestors moved to. Every area is different, every area has a story you can tie back to the wider colonial and ultimately European context for why it was settled.
Our history is not limited to within the states that have survived to this day, nor the political movements that have emerged from UK devolution, we don’t need them, but we can and should use regional history to create a national American history beyond the continent.
On our Continent, we have our own traditions of regional history as well, New England, the Old Northwest, The South, and the West. Each of these is worth remembering against “global” or “social” new schools of historiography.
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This is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it as a precursor to American or Canadian history, or if you are interested in early modern maritime history.
It details the inner workings of the Hakluyt commercial circle and Sebastian Cabot before Virginia.
The rise of Antwerp had severely undercut revenues from England’s wool and manufactured cloathing export. Exports had fallen by 85% and the Baltic/Atlantic trades were already too busy. The envisioned Northeast Passage to Cathay was hoped to save the English export economy.
Sebastian Cabot, the son of the Venetian explorer John Cabot, was the brainchild of the first 🏴exploration Joint Stock Company: “The Company for the Exploration of Unknown Lands” later the Muscovy Company.
After the St Lawrence, voyage, Cabot’s life had been a bitter failure.
I think, having finished this book, Pekka has failed in many aspects of his sell by leaning too heavily into pan-nativism to tie his narrative together in the 19th century and beyond. The first part of his book, the 17th-18th century, handled this better.
What is believable power for the Iroquois to posses in the 18th century is imperfectly transferred to the Lakota in the 1880s. His other books probably have more room to describe the apex and decline of the pastoralists, but they feel rushed and confused here.
Imo, he’s probably aiming for undergraduate intro to American history with this book, which is a shame, because I think his separate portraits of individual tribes or coalitions are more useful than the meta narrative, which fails except for those with emotional connection to it
Listening to Pekka Hämäläinen’s books rn. Will post a few excerpts below, so far really good for ethnographic-national history angle to early American (ethnic) history, because it restores geopolitical power to the history of peoples like Iroquois, Creek, Lakota etc.
Despite the title, this is no “Pan-Native” look into a “Indian vs White” moralistic framework. This book is summarizes a lot of important points about Amerindian warfare and struggles for power before, after, and centuries after contact with Europeans.
On the brutality of the Pequot War, and the realpolitik of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which chose to sponsor the Narragansetts and found ready Allie’s while the colony was still in a very fragile state.
Mexica nobility acquired their tastes for human flesh as a ritual staple food after the empire had been solidified and ritual sacrifice became formulaic. Earlier this practice would have been less systematic.
Sexual morality was strictly enforced in Mexica society.
When the Mexica conquered the Valley of Mexico, and became the dominant power. Emperor Itzcoatl ordered all pictographic histories of previous city states to be destroyed. This ensured a Mexica monopoly on memory within in the Empire.
It’s definitely one of the hardest problems in the history of the English or Americans to get over, since the ethno-confessional aspects of the national divide, taken as a given from the 17th- early 19th centuries, have lost much of their relevance in the wider masses since.
Perhaps just a natural occurrence from the ever wider scope ascribed to “political nationality” and “national history” in the English speaking world, combined with ever intensifying and amorphous dissent against dissent supplanting both papacy as it was and dissent as it was.
So now what can an American or an Englishman make of Hastings or Anglo-Saxon liberty and jurisprudence beyond sentimental but hollow callbacks at best or isolation inside a splinter of a splinter of the Continuing Anglican movement or the “true” Presbyterian Church?
Enjoyed being on for this, one point I didn’t make but wish I had is that Jefferson and a number of other founders could easily tell you of the significance of Edward the Elder, Æthelstan, and Edmund and had their own ideas of “alt history” where William was defeated at Hastings.
Despite their dislike of the Plantagenets and Toryism, both formed a fundamental viewpoint in what America should be as an inversion of “Normanism” and everything associated with it. Jefferson banned and then rewrote Hume’s History of England before reintroducing it to UVA.
This was the level of importance of England to America on any level of educated discourse of the early Republic, but you’d be hard pressed to find many grads (outside of those focused on this period) who could name an Anglo-Saxon King or a state in the Heptarchy.