The Virginia History Blog today looks at Early Colonial contact and culture Virginia through the reviews of five titles. “A Briefe and True Report” is a facsimile of a 1590 Latin edition with English translation and illustrated contemporary lithographs, reporting initial contact with native Algonquins, plants and animals found in the Chesapeake region.
“Deadly Politics of Giving” explores the reasons for violence stemming from misunderstandings between Algonquins and Spanish and English in the Chesapeake region. “Epidemics and Enslavement” explains the spread of the smallpox epidemic of 1676-1700 from the Chesapeake throughout the Southeast.
“Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives” explores the dynamics of conflict and adaptation among elements of ethnics, class, race, and gender. “Claiming the Pen” takes the story of Southern elite women’s literacy and literature from early colonial times into the Great Awakening, Enlightenment and Revolution.
A Briefe and True Report
Thomas Hariot edited A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: the 1590 Theodor de Bry Latin edition, in facsimile form, accompanied by the modernized English text, in 2007. It is available on Kindle and online new and used.
This is a scholarly explication of how Europeans gained support for colonization efforts in the New World. After Sir Walter Raleigh’s forays along Virginia’s shores in the 1580s, adventurers and investors sought to establish military bases to support English privateers.
Expeditions carried scientists, naturalists, cartographers and artists to describe potential sites for colonization. They used visuals of North American plants, animals and the Algonquins they met to report what they knew, or what they wanted others to believe. Chief among these were the hand-tinted engravings of John Whites watercolors, included in this reproduction. The Roanoke venture is described as well as the context of the Latin edition among the English, French and German editions published in the same year.
To buy “A Briefe and True Report” at Amazon, click here.
*James Horn wrote A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America in 2005. Previously reviewed as a Bibliography Top 300 title at TheVirginiaHistorian.com. To buy “A Land as God Made It” at Amazon, click here.
*Helen C. Rountree wrote Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown in 2005. Previously reviewed as a Bibliography Top 300 title at TheVirginiaHistorian.com. To buy “Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough” at Amazon, click here.
Deadly Politics of Giving
Seth Mallios wrote The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke and Jamestown in 2006. It is available from the University of Alabama Press, on Kindle and online new in paperback.
This anthropological history of Algonquin, Spanish and English gift exchange in the early contact period of the Spanish Jesuits on the Roanoke River in North Carolina and the English in the Chesapeake region at Roanoke and Jamestown. Mallios attributes the violence on both sides as a consequence of unwitting violations of each other’s cultural norms.
To Algonquins, gifts to Europeans created an obligation for reciprocity and mutual allegiance. To Europeans, gifts were either taken as something-for-nothing tribute, or a commodities exchange related to acquiring impersonal wealth. When Europeans traded with other tribes, the aggrieved tribe would withhold food or strike in retribution. When Natives sought “forced reciprocity” by stealing tools or weapons, the Europeans would strike.
To buy “Deadly Politics of Giving” at Amazon, click here.
Epidemics and Enslavement
Paul Kelton wrote Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715 in 2007. It is available at the University of Nebraska Press, and online new and used.
This book is an inquiry into a particular time, place, disease and community associated with the Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1696-1700. The deadliest of European diseases were not easily introduced into Native American society. Smallpox normally completed its contagion cycle during the Atlantic crossing. Endemic native warfare in the 1500s and 1600s limited contact between groups, creating large uninhabited quarantine zones outside the exception of the Spanish Catholic mission system.
English colonialism in the Southeast began changing the vectors of disease in Native American communities, first by the 1650s Virginia deerskin trade stretching into the Carolinas, then via the far-flung trade in Native slaves captured in intra-Indian wars after 1675. The chain of infection ran from the James River to the Gulf Coast, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi Valley. When small pox struck Virginia in 1696, it spread throughout the Southeast. The English colonists did not give the Native communities an opportunity to recover from a series of aftershocks.
To buy “Epidemics and Enslavement” at Amazon, click here.
Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives
Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault edited Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives in 2006. It is available from Lexington Books, on Kindle and online new in paperback.
This collection of nine essays on the social history of the colonial Chesapeake in its Atlantic context explores ethnic, race, class, and gender aspects of the colonial story. These early experiments in English North American colonization created significant cultural, intellectual and social norms that shaped the diverse world of subsequent settlement. The essays are supplemented with companion documents.
Two historiographic models are framed in the editor introductions. The first characterizes Virginia and Maryland colonies as highly exploitive, socially conflicted and marked by rampant individualism amidst unstable political and religious institutions. The second model alternatively interprets an adaptive colonial English society of evolving economic, social and political stability.
To buy “Colonial Chesapeake” at Amazon, click here.
Claiming the Pen
Catherine Kerrison wrote Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South in 2006. It is available from the Cornell University Press, on Kindle, and online new and used.
Elite Southern women in the colonial South lagged behind contemporaries in England and New England in literary intellectual development. Although expected to read the Bible and male-authored prescriptive sermons and conduct literature that emphasized Eve’s transgressions and the need for female obedience to male guidance by fathers and brothers, husbands and sons. Boys were taught to fashion pens, girls were not; they were not instructed in writing.
During the Great Awakening, Baptists and Methodists granted women a measure of “selfhood” that expanded among women elites of Enlightenment households and more generally in the early republic. After 1750 the Southern women increasingly turned to novels, where females as central figures with active roles of authority could protect themselves from male predators. The novels themselves urged women to expand their education. They responded by writing journals, memoirs and advice literature.
Unlike the English and New England women invested in economic authority in the household, the Southern women stressed moral authority and self-discipline over family members and initiated benevolent movements in political society.
To buy “Claiming the Pen” at Amazon, click here.
Additional history related to Virginia during this time period can be found at the Table of Contents of TheVirginiaHistorian website on the page for Early and Late Colonial Eras, 1600-1763. Titles are organized by topics related to Powhatan Virginia, Political and Economic Virginia, Social, Gender, Religious, African American and Wars in Virginia.
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.