In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • A Regional Run-up to Revolution
  • Gregory H. Nobles (bio)
Eric Nellis . An Empire of Regions: A Brief History of Colonial British America. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. xxiv + 366 pp. Maps, tables, and index. $70.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).

Years ago, when I first started teaching the U.S. history survey, I used to devote four or five minutes of lecture time to the Halfway Covenant. It seemed almost de rigeur in those days, a way of explaining what was going wrong with New England Puritanism in the second half of the seventeenth century, and I figured maybe my students should know something about it. So I tried to explain, perhaps a bit too quickly, how spiritual conversion was central to church membership and therefore to the social cement of community, how Puritans began struggling to meet the standards of spiritual conversion, why they placed so much emphasis on having their children baptized and brought into the ecclesiastical fold, and so forth. Hence the Halfway Covenant—and hence the collective look of "Whatever" on most of the faces in the room. I eventually became a little half-hearted about the Halfway Covenant, and I started to skip past it in lecture and just refer students to the textbook, where they would surely find a decent enough discussion of it, usually under a subheading called "Declension." Still, I felt a bit of pedagogical, if not Puritanical, guilt.

I began to feel better when I read James Hijiya's 1994 essay in the William and Mary Quarterly, "Why the West Is Lost," which called for breaking the Anglocentric, East Coast hold on American history. Hijiya's essay was decidedly provocative, sometimes a little precious, but it made an important point: to talk about a truly American history, and particularly about early American history, we could no longer portray New England Puritans, much less Pennsylvania Quakers or Chesapeake planters, as the central figures in the unfolding story. Instead, teachers and textbook authors needed to bring a truly continental view of American history into the curriculum; and to do so, Hijiya insisted, they would have to jettison all sorts of traditional issues from the syllabus to make room for necessary additions. What was the first entry on his list of items "intended for the revisionist's compost heap"? The Halfway Covenant.1 [End Page 25]

Coverage is always a concern: what gets cut and what still counts in the historical narrative? How do we get our minds—not to mention our students' minds—around early America? What do we mean by "early America" anyway?

By the time Hijiya cut the Halfway Covenant, in fact, a few scholars had already been leading us toward a larger, less Anglocentric overview of early America. Twenty years earlier, Gary Nash's Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (1974) essentially laid out the agenda in the title and then made the point clear in the introduction: the book "looks at the land mass we know as 'North America' as a place where a number of different cultures converged during a particular period of history—between 1550 and 1750, to use the European system of measuring time." The notion of cultural convergence took a sharper turn the following year, with Francis Jennings' The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975), in which the use of the term "invasion" recast the traditional east-to-west, European-over-Indian narrative. Less than a decade later, writing about The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (1984), Jennings' use of the term "empire" put Native Americans' military and diplomatic power on a comparable conceptual level with that of the European invaders. With just a few well-chosen words, Nash and Jennings had initiated a shift in perspective that created a new emphasis on cultural convergence and narrative inversion

And so it soon went with subsequent synthetic treatments of early America, most notably Edward Countryman's Americans: A Collision of Histories (1996), Daniel Richter's Facing East from Indian Country (2001), and Alan Taylor's American Colonies (2001), all of which underscored the point about the shifts in scholarly emphasis in their very titles. "By design," Taylor...

pdf

Share