Contested Spaces of Early America: (Early American Studies)

Colonial America stretched from Quebec to Buenos Aires and from the Atlantic littoral to the Pacific coast. Although European settlers laid claim to territories they called New Spain, New England, and New France, the reality of living in those spaces had little to do with European kingdoms. Instead, the New World's holdings took their form and shape from the Indian territories they inhabited. These contested spaces throughout the western hemisphere were not unclaimed lands waiting to be conquered and populated but a single vast space, occupied by native communities and defined by the meeting, mingling, and clashing of peoples, creating societies unlike any that the world had seen before. Contested Spaces of Early America brings together some of the most distinguished historians in the field to view colonial America on the largest possible scale. Lavishly illustrated with maps, Native art, and color plates, the twelve chapters span the southern reaches of New Spain through Mexico and Navajo Country to the Dakotas and Upper Canada, and the early Indian civilizations to the ruins of the nineteenth-century West. At the heart of this volume is a search for a human geography of colonial relations: Contested Spaces of Early America aims to rid the historical landscape of imperial cores, frontier peripheries, and modern national borders to redefine the way scholars imagine colonial America. Contributors: Matthew Babcock, Ned Blackhawk, Chantal Cramaussel, Brian DeLay, Elizabeth Fenn, Allan Greer, Pekka HÄmÄlÄinen, RaÚl JosÉ Mandrini, Cynthia Radding, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Alan Taylor, and Samuel Truett.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. Maps and Spaces, Paths to Connect, and Lines to Divide -Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman PART I. SPACES AND POWER Chapter 1. The Shapes of Power: Indians, Europeans, and North American Worlds from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century -Pekka HÄmÄlÄinen Chapter 2. Dispossession in a Commercial Idiom: From Indian Deeds to Land Cession Treaties -Allan Greer PART II. SPACES AND LANDSCAPES Chapter 3. The Mandans: Ecology, Population, and Adaptation on the Northern Plains -Elizabeth Fenn Chapter 4. Colonial Spaces in the Fragmented Communities of Northern New Spain -Cynthia Radding Chapter 5. Transformations: The Rio de la Plata During the Bourbon Era -RaÚl JosÉ Mandrini PART III. SPACE AND RESETTLEMENTS Chapter 6. Blurred Borders: North America's Forgotten Apache Reservations -Matthew Babcock Chapter 7. The Forced Transfer of Indians in Nueva Vizcaya and Sinaloa: A Hispanic Method of Colonization -Chantal Cramaussel Chapter 8. Remaking Americans: Louisiana, Upper Canada, and Texas -Alan Taylor PART IV. SPACES AND MEMORY Chapter 9. Blood Talk: Violence and Belonging in the Navajo-New Mexican Borderland -Brian DeLay Chapter 10. Toward a New Literary History of the West: Etahdleuh Doanmoe's Captivity Narrative -Birgit Brander Rasmussen Chapter 11. Toward an Indigenous Art History of the West: The Segesser Hide Paintings -Ned Blackhawk Chapter 12. The Borderlands and Lost Worlds of Early America -Samuel Truett Notes List of Contributors Index Acknowledgments

About the Author :
Juliana Barr is Associate Professor of History at Duke University and author of Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Edward Countryman is University Distinguished Professor at Southern Methodist University and author of several books, including The American Revolution, Americans: A Collision of Histories, and most recently Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era.

Review :
"Bold, innovative, and ambitious, Contested Spaces of Early America is an excellent volume that engages with the state of the field like few others." -Andres Resendez, University of California, Davis