History 4110    MacKay    Summer 2005

Unit 1 Heritage

   

May 16:

Activities:

Tribal Lands at the Time of Contact (From Encyclopedia of North American Indians)

James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of European Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Daniel Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Major Trade Routes   (From the Encyclopedia of North American Indians)

William E. Meyer, Indian Trails of the Southeast Bureau of American Ethnology, Forty-second Annual Report (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1928); William R. Swagerty, Handbook of North American Indians "Indian Trade in the Trans-Mississippi West to 1870," ed. William C. Sturtevant, vol. 4, History of Indian-White Relations, ed. Wilcomb E. Washburn (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1988); Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast "The Land and Water Communications Systems of the Southeastern Indians," ed. Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

May 17:

Readings:

Activities:

Map courtesy of the Perry-Castenada Library Map Collection of the University of Texas at Austin.

map

The explorations of Sieur de La Salle through North America strengthened France's hopes for a great empire in the New World. La Salle claimed the Mississippi River Valley for France. (From: The World Book)

May 18:

Readings:

Activities:

The Frontier--both the shifting places defined as the frontier and changing concepts of the frontier--has come to define for subsequent generations of Americans who "we" are and who is "over there" on the other side.

From the beginnings of Puritan settlement, English settlers established the "pale," a line which divided their own communities from what was "beyond the pale": a nature which may have been the province of evil as well as Native populations who were thought of and dealt with in a variety of ways.

The frontier as place and as process emerges as powerful themes in American culture-- think, for example, of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, the Western dime novel, Mark Twain's Roughing It, Henry Nash Smith's The Virgin Land, Theodore Roosevelt's memoirs of life as a cowboy, or the films of John Ford. By the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Jackson Turner's delineation of the Frontier Thesis provided a definition of what made Americans "American." Turner argued that encounters with wilderness on the frontier--and its human analogies, Native Americans--transformed Europeans into Americans. Not surprisingly, this definition of "American exceptionalism" emerged in other forms, through Western films, cowboy culture, and even in the Space Race and in American foreign policy.

More recently there has been a pointed examination of the impact of the Frontier idea on American ideology. This has especially focused on Turner's thesis, whose delineation of the frontier as a "line between civilization and savagery" is certainly problematic in a pluralistic society made up of people from both sides of that "line." In recent studies of America, scholars have discussed the role of the "borderland"--the region of interaction between varied communities--in shaping the nation; borderlands can be geographic as well as intellectual, and can be zones of interaction, cultural exchange, and contestation.

(See: Catherine Lavender's Honors Seminar, 2000 Honors Seminar, 2000)