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Introduction. Maps and Spaces, Paths to Connect, and Lines to Divide
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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introduction Maps and Spaces, Paths to Connect, and Lines to Divide Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman ‘‘In the last decades of the twentieth century,’’ argued David J. Weber, ‘‘American historians discovered America.’’ Scholars of New Spain, New France, and New England began to look toward other colonial regions for connections and comparisons. Ethnohistorians explored the commonalities and contrasts in histories of indigenous people from Peru to Greenland. We cannot speak of ‘‘early America’’ anymore with only the East Coast British colonies, the St. Lawrence River Valley, or Mexico and Peru in mind. The topic has grown vastly larger. This volume suggests that we should think of ‘‘early’’ or ‘‘colonial’’ America on the largest possible scale.1 In its own historical time, our subject stretched from north of Quebec to south of Buenos Aires and from the Atlantic littoral to the Pacific coast. It needs to stretch just as far in modern understanding. This book brings together scholars and scholarly perspectives from the entirety of that zone around the organizing theme of contested spaces, places throughout the hemisphere where people who had been total strangers met, mingled, and clashed, creating colonial societies unlike any that the world had seen to that time. Our original intention was to honor David Weber’s career and achievements upon his retirement, but his death in August 2010 turned this project into a memorial. The book thus has emerged both from Weber’s lifework and from a larger turn in the study of early America to which he contributed mightily. David offered a bridge—in scholarship and among scholars—to link together the historic Americas and to see beyond borderlands, borders, and territorial crossings 2 Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman to imagine that history as a hemispheric project. The authors here are based at institutions not just across the United States but also in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Great Britain, and we hope that the essays will in some way embody the scope and breadth of David’s vision to bring together the histories of early America. In geographical terms, our writers deal largely but not exclusively with the areas that now compose the U.S. Southwest and the northern parts of Mexico. But their discussions also extend to what now forms Canada; the western, northern, and eastern United States; and Argentina. Our interest is with contestation over places that did not yet bear their modern names, not with any kind of precursor to the modern nation-states whose seemingly timeless boundaries are the main subject of conventional classroom and textbook political maps. For our purposes those nations and their internal divisions into states and provinces do not exist. Instead, a really good map of the colonial situation of the early western hemisphere would show a set of sometimes fluid, sometimes unbending fields of force, all of them dealing with the issue of space. We need not look for such an ideal map. Instead, we can turn to the maps that people who were caught up in colonial interactions generated as they tried to make sense of one another. The potential set of such maps is enormous, and no single map within that set is perfect. But taken together they bring out the theme of contested spaces that is our subject here. Let’s first look at the map that appears on the cover of this book and also in Figure I.1, drawn by the Portuguese adventurer-soldier Antonio Pereira half a century after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Pereira certainly saw America all of a piece, as did most cartographers of his age. His depiction of the western hemisphere as a single extensive landmass is part of an illuminated vellum map of the world in his time. What Pereira showed represented the sum of knowledge gained from Spanish and Portuguese explorers, primarily by sea, and from travel reports, notably regarding the Amazon River, and that information dates the map almost precisely to the year 1545. Scattered throughout North, South, and Meso-America appear three Portuguese flags, two flags sporting the French fleur-de-lis, and thirteen Spanish standards—all along the coastlines. To Pereira the vast interior remained unknown and apparently undeveloped, uncontrolled, or simply unpopulated. A caravel carries the Portuguese cross of Christ across to South America, another approaches the Strait of Magellan, and five Spanish ships navigate the Pacific Ocean. This is a space preeminently about Europeans [54.205.179.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13...