Abstract

Many of the best recent works in early American history investigate the lives of specific people in particular places, reconstructing the past "on the ground" and connecting this local analysis with larger geographic or conceptual spaces. These are neither macrohistories that descend to the ground only for illustrative anecdotes nor microhistories that merely make big gestures to give their small stories broader relevance. The four exemplary world-and-ground essays in this Forum take us to the native Southwest in the centuries before and after European arrival; watch the English, Spanish, and French as they mark the North American landscape for Christ; look over the shoulder of a merchant in eighteenth-century Philadelphia; and follow enslaved Africans as they endure the passage from the slave ship's hull through the port of Charleston, South Carolina. The authors ask us to rethink Indian "prehistory," European Christianization, Atlantic commerce, and the slave trade. The essays move between world and ground—between the Atlantic world, the continent, or the hemisphere and the lives of particular early American people and places—to interrogate the connections, and the disconnections, between these different levels of historical experience and change.

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