Abstract
The book’s Introduction briefly discusses the historical problem of understanding the history of early America, a problem which has been complicated by the still strongly held notion (in both public perception and in some academic circles) of an American historical exceptionalism. It sketches recent historiographical developments and scholarly trends, and it introduces historian David Day’s notion of a supplanting society. It presents the book’s main idea: early American history is a central part of—rather than an exception to—the emerging global histories of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide. It also presents its main argument: early American history is best understood as the story of a supplanting society, a society intent on a land grab of Indigenous space and driven by a logic of elimination and a genocidal imperative to rid the new settler living space of its existing Indigenous inhabitants.
Other histories are implicated in American history, and the United States is implicated in other histories.
Thomas Bender (‘Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives’, in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002, 6.)
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- 1.
Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘Exceptionalism’, in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, eds. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 21.
- 2.
Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘American Exceptionalism Revisited’, Raritan 24, no. 2 (2004): 23–25.
- 3.
Ian Tyrrell, ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’, The American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991): 1031.
- 4.
Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 183.
- 5.
Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 2.
- 6.
Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 3.
- 7.
Paul A. Kramer, Review Essay, ‘Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World’, The American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1348–1391.
- 8.
For original historiographic essays that survey recent scholarship in every major temporal, geographic, and thematic field of American history, see the 18 essays in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History Now, American Historical Association (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011). Especially relevant for my topic are Alan Taylor’s essay on colonial American history, Stephen Aron’s essay on American western history, and Ned Blackhawk’s essay on American Indian history. See also Ned Blackhawk, ‘Currents in North American Indian Historiography’, Western Historical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2011): 319–324; William Deverell, ‘Western Vistas: Historiography, 1971 to Today’, Western Historical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2011): 355–360; and Colleen O’Neill, ‘Commentaries on the Past and Future of Western History: Multiple Strands of Inquiry in a (Still) Contested Field’, Western Historical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2011): 287–288. For engaging and accessible overviews incorporating much of the new scholarship, see Alan Taylor, Colonial America: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Stephen Aron, The American West: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For a recent survey of a generation of scholarship on the historiography of colonial America, see Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006). For an historiographic overview of the concept of borderlands (as a cross-cultural contact zones where no one group rules supreme) and North Americans’ borderlands history, see Daniel H. Usner, Jr., ‘Borderlands’, in A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), 408–424.
- 9.
For a collection of essays on the New Western History, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds. Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991).
- 10.
On the New Indian History and its themes, see Frederick E. Hoxie, ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–14; see also Joy Porter, ‘Imaging Indians: Differing Perspectives on Native American History’, in The State of U.S. History, ed. Melvyn Stokes (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 347–366.
- 11.
For an important collection of essays on this historiography (written by Indigenous scholars firmly rooted in North American Indigenous thought and other Indigenous worldviews), see Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, eds., Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2011).
- 12.
Rodgers, ‘Exceptionalism’, 30, 35.
- 13.
For a collection of studies on empires in world history, see the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Richard Drayton and Saul Dubow, series editors, published by Palgrave Macmillan.
- 14.
For the deep history of settler colonialism , see Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005); see also Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).
- 15.
For essays in the field of genocide studies, see Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For world histories of genocide, see Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); and Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 3rd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).
- 16.
For a brief overview, see Taylor, Colonial America, 5–7; and Paul W. Mapp, ‘Atlantic, Western, and Continental Early America’, in The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook, ed. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 321.
- 17.
On Atlantic history, see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, ed., The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
- 18.
On the continental approach, see Andrew R.L. Cayton, ‘Writing North American History’, Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 1 (2002): 105–111; Claudio Saunt, ‘Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography’, William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2008): 745–778; Peter H. Wood, ‘From Atlantic History to a Continental Approach’, in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 279–298; and Julianna Barr, ‘Beyond the “Atlantic World”: Early American History as Viewed from the West’, OAH Magazine of History 25, no. 1 (2011): 13–18.
- 19.
David Day, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3, 5–6, 8, 182. As Pekka Pitkänen points out, Day essentially calls a ‘settler colonial society’ a ‘supplanting society’. See Pekka Pitkänen, ‘Pentateuch-Joshua: A Settler Colonial Document of a Supplanting Society’, Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 3 (2014): 253. In this study, I use the terms ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘supplanting society’ interchangeably, as two sides of the same coin.
- 20.
For an introduction to the question of the genocide of American Indians and the American genocide debate, see Alex Alvarez, Native American and the Question of Genocide (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Benjamin Madley, ‘Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods’, The American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (2015): 98–139; and Jeffrey Ostler, ‘Genocide and American Indian History’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.3 (accessed 30 October 2018).
- 21.
John Mack Faragher, ‘Introduction: “A Nation Thrown Back Upon Itself”: Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier’, in Frederick Jackson Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ and Other Essays, with commentary by John Mack Faragher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 1.
- 22.
Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893), reprinted from the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC, 1894) in Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 31–33, 60.
- 23.
The historian Warren Susman as quoted in John Mack Faragher, ‘Afterword: The Significance of the Frontier in American Historiography: A Guide to Further Reading’ in Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 230.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
After two decades of Turner-bashing by scholars of the New Western History, Turner and his concept of the frontier are re-entering the historical conversation and debate due to the centrality of the frontier for the growing field of settler-colonial studies. For an exchange of views on the historiographic trajectories of both American western history and settler-colonial studies, see the scholarly roundtable on ‘The Significance of the Frontier in an Age of Transnational History’, Settler Colonial Studies, 4, no. 2 (2014): 127–191.
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Kakel, C.P. (2019). Introduction: Explaining Early America. In: A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_1
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