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Go West:
Mapping Early American Historiography
Claudio Saunt
| IN August 1720 William Hill of Philadelphia placed an advertisement in the American Weekly Mercury. He offered "to serve any Gentlemen as a swift and Trusty Messenger on Foot or Horse, to any of the Kings Colonies on the Continent upon reasonable terms." Those wishing to send word to places beyond George I's dominion—say Tuskawillas town in the Chickasaw Nation or even more distant settlements such as New Orleans or Santa Fe—apparently had to apply elsewhere. By contrast, when Isaac Cannon advertised the services of the sloop Lovely Peggy in the Newport Mercury in June 1766, he announced that it was available for freight or charter to "any Part of the Continent."1 He meant, as readers at the time would have understood, any part of the British colonies on the continent, but by 1766 there was no longer a need to specify because the king's colonies and the continent now signified the same thing. |
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By the outbreak of the Revolution, the continent, or America as it was often called, existed awkwardly as both a figure of speech and a literal expression, as the British colonies and the plate of land that divided the Atlantic and Pacific. The double meaning continues to this day, for though we commonly think of the continent as stretching from coast to coast, in the prose of some leading scholars it still denotes the British colonies. Used figuratively, the term is a convenient and contextually appropriate shorthand that adopts the perspective of British colonists. Yet, at the same time, it reflects a deep-seated habit of thought that shapes the very substance of early American historiography. As a result of that habit, the America of early American historians more closely resembles the truncated continent of British colonists in the 1760s than the expansive one of multiethnic Americans today.2 |
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The peculiar mental geography of early American historians demands investigation. To explore the subject, this article presents a series of maps based on the geographic distribution of articles published from 1944 to 2006 in the ongoing third series of the William and Mary Quarterly. The maps help us to visualize the changing mental geography of historians during the past sixty years. They suggest that, rather than staying true to the bearing charted by earlier generations, scholars might do well to plot a new course west.
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| The habit of conflating the vast territory stretching from the Bering Sea to the Gulf of Mexico with Britain's colonial toeholds on the continent's easternmost edge dates to the late 1700s. Until the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, it was uncommon for British colonists to confuse their small but growing settlements with all of North America. For the first half of the eighteenth century, British American newspapers consistently referred to the king's colonies or the "British Colonies on the Continent of America." Colonists were well aware that native peoples and the French (and, less threateningly, the Spanish) controlled more of the continent than they did, a fact never more conspicuous than in the 1750s, when newspapers were rife with reports of the French and Indians who "hold the Command of the Continent." After the French ceded their North American claims at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, however, British colonists assumed that the continent was theirs. As one gentleman from Georgia reported, the French cession was "a very favourable Event." The Spanish, he explained, "have no Influence with the Indians, and are by no Means that enterprizing People which the French are; and in short, we are under no Kind of Apprehension of their disturbing our Settlements." He went on to clarify, "By this Cession the French have now no Possession of any Part of the Continent of North-America." The implication was clear: the continent now lay open to British colonists.3 |
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