Project MUSE®: The William and Mary Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The William and Mary Quarterly.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 72 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: The William and Mary QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®The William and Mary Quarterly1933-76980043-5597Latest articles in The William and Mary Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Schooling and Servitude: Menominee Children, Bound Labor, and the Struggle for Authority in Michigan Territory, 1827–34
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988615
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REVEREND Richard F. Cadle, the superintendent of the Protestant Episcopal Green Bay mission school that bore his name, never gained the confidence of his Menominee students. On Christmas Eve 1833, Cadle lost any remaining goodwill he had with the Menominees when teachers acting under his direction whipped eleven male students who boarded there. As news of the punishment spread through Green Bay, the guardian of two of the victims instituted criminal proceedings against the missionary. To defend himself against these charges, Cadle drew upon an unexpected body of laws. He requested that his attorney, Henry S. Baird, investigate what powers territorial statutes gave to “masters of apprentices & Teachers of children.”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallSchooling and Servitude: Menominee Children, Bound Labor, and the Struggle for Authority in Michigan Territory, 1827–342026-04-16text/htmlen-USSchooling and Servitude: Menominee Children, Bound Labor, and the Struggle for Authority in Michigan Territory, 1827–342026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®2273872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16“To and Fro by Canoo and Boat”: How Enslaved Workers Created the Transport Canals That Launched South Carolina’s Export Economy, 1690–1740
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988616
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NO issue proved more crucial to colonial South Carolina’s survival and growth than the creation of reliable water routes for conveying plantation commodities to Charleston’s docks. Native nations, enslaved Africans, and European newcomers all played distinctive roles in the creation of the earth-banked canals, or “cuts,” that enabled this vital transportation framework.1 They developed the colony’s first waterborne shipping routes over the half century before 1740. The topic has remained obscure, even though historians have examined later “hydraulic” projects that expanded the reach of this early eighteenth-century canal and river transportation system.2 By the time South Carolina’s dramatic Stono Revolt erupted in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmall“To and Fro by Canoo and Boat”: How Enslaved Workers Created the Transport Canals That Launched South Carolina’s Export Economy, 1690–17402026-04-16text/htmlen-US“To and Fro by Canoo and Boat”: How Enslaved Workers Created the Transport Canals That Launched South Carolina’s Export Economy, 1690–17402026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®1688842026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Mary Glass and the Meaning of Freedom in the Revolutionary Gulf South
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988617
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ON a summer day in 1781, a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Mary Glass was led in chains to the Plaza de Armas in New Orleans, where a gallows stood in the center of the public square, overlooking the Mississippi River. She was, by all accounts, a tall and imposing woman, quick to anger and contemptuous of the social conventions that were supposed to constrain the behavior of a free woman of color like herself. The previous year, in a hastily arranged trial, Glass had been convicted of torturing and murdering Emilia Davis, a fifteen-year-old white indentured servant who had lived in Glass’s home in Pointe Coupée, a small settlement just north of Baton Rouge. After reading aloud the jury’s sentence of death, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallMary Glass and the Meaning of Freedom in the Revolutionary Gulf South2026-04-16text/htmlen-USMary Glass and the Meaning of Freedom in the Revolutionary Gulf South2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®1778282026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Men’s Biography in the Age of Microhistory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988618
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Biography is back. Actually, it never left. The traditional school of American biography attended largely to the white and male, usually wealthy and powerful. The contention that one individual life could initiate political, social, and cultural change—and also somehow serve as an exemplar of that transformation—underlay most Great Men (and a few Great Women) biographies. “All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons,” Ralph Waldo Emerson declared in 1841, and that practice still held true well into the late twentieth century (and continues today in some circles). Biography in this vein celebrates an individual life and offers grand lessons, most often about the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallMen’s Biography in the Age of Microhistory2026-04-16text/htmlen-USMen’s Biography in the Age of Microhistory2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®349122026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth-Century British America by Matthew P. Brown (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988619
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The Novel and the Blank drops in on primal scenes of eighteenth-century British American “publication culture” (3)—and in developing his argument, Matthew P. Brown places emphasis on public to signal the interdependence of printers and readers. The episodes he examines include the printer Samuel Keimer’s losing competition with Benjamin Franklin in the 1720s and 1730s; the New England minister Thomas Prince’s evangelizing during the 1730s and 1740s; and printer Robert Bell’s modernizing showmanship in the 1770s. The novel of the gnomic title—with its suggestion of all things new—emerges fully in the closing chapters, where it functions as something like an allegory of the relational qualities of print culture
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallThe Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth-Century British America by Matthew P. Brown (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USThe Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth-Century British America by Matthew P. Brown (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®326382026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Traitor: The Life and Assassination of John Dunn Hunter, American Radical by Andy Doolen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988620
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In early 1823, an extraordinary autobiography appeared from a London publisher. Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America, from Childhood to the Age of Nineteen told a story that seemed almost too amazing to be believed.1 The obscure author, a man named John Dunn Hunter, claimed that as a young child in what is now Illinois he had been kidnapped by Kickapoo people, his white family likely murdered. Adopted as a Native son, Hunter grew to manhood among multiple Native communities: the Kickapoo, then the Pawnee, the Kansa, and finally the Osage, mostly in the region that became Missouri and Kansas. As a young man, he earned a reputation (and his new last name) as a hunter and explorer and even visited
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallTraitor: The Life and Assassination of John Dunn Hunter, American Radical by Andy Doolen (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USTraitor: The Life and Assassination of John Dunn Hunter, American Radical by Andy Doolen (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®221662026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700–1827 by Michael J. Douma (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988621
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In The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York, Michael J. Douma calculates that as many as 40 percent of enslaved people in New York during the eighteenth century spoke Dutch. These Dutch speakers and those who claimed ownership over them clustered disproportionately in the Hudson Valley, where colonial rural farmers had figured out how to make slavery profitable in this northern breadbasket. From the end of the Revolutionary War to the 1827 legal conclusion of slavery in New York, Dutch slaveholders proved reluctant to give up their human property.The book’s titular periodization may at first seem anomalous, given that the study begins in 1700, a full generation after the English supplanted Dutch rule. But Dutch
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallThe Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700–1827 by Michael J. Douma (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USThe Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700–1827 by Michael J. Douma (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®295762026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16The Audiencia of Santo Domingo in the Seventeenth Century: Justice and Royal Authority in the Spanish Caribbean by Marc Eagle (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988622
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Marc Eagle’s The Audiencia of Santo Domingo in the Seventeenth Century is a significant contribution to a body of scholarship that has demonstrated the crucial ties and tensions between royal and local authorities, government and society, and politics and economic undertakings in Spain’s American territories. The term audiencia could refer to a court’s territorial jurisdiction as well as its judicial functions, and most studies of audiencias are grounded in the courts’ relations with the larger territories over which they sought to extend their authority.1 The scholarship on Spanish American audiencias is substantial, including studies of the courts and their personnel and operations as well as volumes of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallThe Audiencia of Santo Domingo in the Seventeenth Century: Justice and Royal Authority in the Spanish Caribbean by Marc Eagle (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USThe Audiencia of Santo Domingo in the Seventeenth Century: Justice and Royal Authority in the Spanish Caribbean by Marc Eagle (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®242192026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina by D. Andrew Johnson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988623
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With the publication of Alan Gallay’s The Indian Slave Trade in 2002, the mass capture and sale of Indigenous people emerged as a central topic in the study of the colonial Southeast. Although earlier works recognized the existence of a trade in captive Native Americans, Gallay showed that it “was at the center of the English empire’s development in the American South.” At the same time, he and others have revealed the far-reaching consequences of the slave trade for the region’s Indigenous inhabitants, some of whom became captives, captors, or a combination of the two. Indeed, it was through the slave trade that many southeastern Native people first became integrated into the Atlantic world economy, leveraging
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallEnslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina by D. Andrew Johnson (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USEnslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina by D. Andrew Johnson (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®211802026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico by Martin Austin Nesvig (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988624
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Martin Austin Nesvig’s The Women Who Threw Corn inaugurates a projected trilogy on the creolization of faith and superstition in sixteenth-century New Spain. Drawing on his familiarity with diocesan inquisitorial records—the same corpus that anchored his earlier book, Promiscuous Power—Nesvig shifts from a political and social history of ecclesiastical power to a cultural and linguistic history of adaptation.1 Centered on less than thirty episcopal inquisitorial investigations of non-Indigenous women accused or suspected of superstition, healing, or love magic—women who were Spanish, Basque, Canarian, Maghrebi (of North African or Morisca descent), and Senegambian-descended Africans—The Women Who Threw Corn argues
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallThe Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico by Martin Austin Nesvig (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USThe Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico by Martin Austin Nesvig (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®221152026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution by Christopher R. Pearl (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988625
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Christopher R. Pearl’s Declarations of Independence recounts a little-known experiment in early American nation building: the creation of a settler colony calling itself the Fair Play republic. Established in western Pennsylvania in the tumultuous years between the issuance of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (which forbade colonial settlement west of the Appalachians) and the United States’ declaration of independence from the British Empire in 1776, this independent squatter settlement promised economic opportunity and community governance to poor white people at the expense of the lands and lives of Native peoples of the Susquehanna River Valley. According to its founders, Fair Play required allowing smallholders
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallDeclarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution by Christopher R. Pearl (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USDeclarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution by Christopher R. Pearl (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®258222026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Nicholas Radburn (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988626
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Anyone interested in the British slave trade at its height will want to spend time with Traders in Men, in which Nicholas Radburn presents merchants, ship captains, and colonial brokers at work primarily during the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century. Those were the years that straddled the final dissolution of the London-based joint-stock Royal African Company (RAC) in 1752 and the creation during the same year of its more loosely structured and outport-dominated Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. In Radburn’s telling, institutional change led to transformations in the practice of trading in human beings. These he details in chapters devoted to the different aspects of the trade: its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallTraders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Nicholas Radburn (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USTraders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Nicholas Radburn (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®218202026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Fragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645–1720 by Justin Roberts (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988627
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Justin Roberts’s Fragile Empire applies Geoffrey Parker’s comprehension of a seventeenth-century environmental “global crisis” to a “torrid zone” (2) stretching from Sumatra to Jamaica that constituted “the heart of the embryonic English empire” (16).1 In his new book, Roberts argues that the enervating effects of the hot, mosquito-infested, disease-ridden climate of this region determined the “process of empire building” (16). It did so by deterring European migration and by creating severe economic pressures in Africa and around the Indian Ocean that forced more non-Europeans into the system of racial slavery that prevailed by 1720. Together, these circumstances facilitated the emergence of “the most
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallFragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645–1720 by Justin Roberts (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USFragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645–1720 by Justin Roberts (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®226652026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16The Course of Human Events: The Declaration of Independence and the Historical Origins of the United States by Steven Sarson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988628
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During Joe Biden’s short campaign for reelection to the U.S. presidency in 2024, he frequently said that “America is an idea.” His inability to communicate the meaning and significance of that idea is perhaps one of the reasons that his campaign was unsuccessful. He cannot, however, be completely blamed for this, since many contemporary historians have also found it difficult to explain the idea of America, even in its original expression in the Declaration of Independence. Instead, when scholars discuss the declaration, they often minimize the importance of its abstract ideas and focus on its political importance as an announcement of American independence from Great Britain.1 When they do focus on those
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallThe Course of Human Events: The Declaration of Independence and the Historical Origins of the United States by Steven Sarson (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USThe Course of Human Events: The Declaration of Independence and the Historical Origins of the United States by Steven Sarson (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®392022026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Uncovering America’s First War: Contact, Conflict, and Coronado’s Expedition to the Rio Grande by Matthew F. Schmader (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988629
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The expedition led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado into the northern frontiers of New Spain from 1540 to 1542 is one of the most thoroughly studied early Spanish colonial explorations. Over the past three decades, historians Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint have edited, translated, and published thousands of pages of primary documents from archives and libraries in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, analyzing and interpreting these sources through numerous monographs, edited volumes, essays, and a recent website.1 Much of this work has built upon and often surpassed the groundbreaking efforts of George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey from the 1940s through the 1960s, when the Coronado Cuarto Centennial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/664/image/coversmallUncovering America’s First War: Contact, Conflict, and Coronado’s Expedition to the Rio Grande by Matthew F. Schmader (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USUncovering America’s First War: Contact, Conflict, and Coronado’s Expedition to the Rio Grande by Matthew F. Schmader (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®369282026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16