Claiming Land, Claiming Water : Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic / Rachel B. Herrmann, Jessica Choppin Roney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Herrmann, Rachel B.

Series:

Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

LaVergne : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026.

Summary:

Explores how and why people manipulated borders in the early modern Atlantic world Claiming Land, Claiming Water shares what historians and geographers wish readers knew about maps and borders before, during, and after the founding of the United States. The essays collected in this volume model how people can learn to interpret maps as arguments, rather than as historical facts, and to read maps for evidence of people and places that were elided, renamed, or destroyed. Contributors travel through the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in the place known by many names: the Atlantic World; the North American continent; borderlands; and homelands. Onto this place where people exercised power over space by forging relationships, colonizers came and imagined borders onto maps. Featuring reproductions of twenty historical maps, the book takes readers through this era of immense disruption to teach them strategies for reading and interpreting these maps critically. Essays attend carefully to water alongside land and land alongside water in search of new interpretive avenues that reframe what we know about space, control, and sovereignty. By using historical examples of people—farmers, fishers, hunters, religious leaders, colonial projectors, traders, sailors, soldiers, diplomats, and cartographers, it becomes possible to resist the temptation to impose modern geographical constructs backwards onto the histories we read, teach, and write. Claiming Land, Claiming Water investigates why some of these people imagined and made claims to bounded space, and how and why other people confounded and challenged those claims. Contributors: Sarah Chute, Edward G. Gray, Kim M. Gruenwald, Rachel B. Herrmann, Christian J. Koot, Chad McCutchen, Jennifer Monroe McCutchen, John Morton, Paul Musselwhite, Charles Prior, Karen Rann, Jessica Choppin Roney, Samuel Truett, Harvey Amani Whitfield, Alex Zukas.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Introduction. Borders, Places, and Movement / Rachel B. Herrmann, Jessica Choppin Roney

Part I. Ways to Think About Borders

Chapter 1. Toward a Prehistory of Territory: Thomas Hobbes, the Maryland Palatinate, and the Colonial Boundary Problem / Edward G. Gray

Chapter 2. Things to Think With: The Use of Borders on a Seventeenth-Century Map of New England / Christian J. Koot

Chapter 3. Lines on a Map: Crafting and Contesting Borders in Guillaume Delisle's and Herman Moll's Early Eighteenth-Century Maps of North America / Alex Zukas

Chapter 4. Data Maps of Downeast Maine: Missionary Records from the Early Republic Borderlands / John Morton

Part II. Creating Place

Chapter 5. Depicting and Defining the Plantation in the Early English Caribbean, 1625-1675 / Paul Musselwhite

Chapter 6. When a River Is a Border: Rivalries and Commercial Networks in the Riverine West / Kim M. Gruenwald

Chapter 7. Military Lines: How the Introduction of Contours Affected Maps and Movement / Karen Rann

Part III. Movement

Chapter 8. Indian Centers, Colonial Peripheries: Locating the International in Early America / Charles W. A. Prior

Chapter 9. "Playing the Old Game of Double": Navigating Creek and Spanish Geopolitics in the Post-Revolutionary Gulf South / Chad McCutchen, Jennifer Monroe McCutchen

Chapter 10. Comercio Libre: Revisiting a Concept on Trade and Borders in Creek Homelands / Rachel B. Herrmann

Chapter 11. Possibilities and Peril: Exploring the Transnational Experiences of Black People in the Maritimes, 1783-1792 / Harvey Amani Whitfield, Sarah Chute

Chapter 12. Amphibious Tales: Villagers and Strangers in a Border-Crossing World / Samuel Truett

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Title from eBook information screen..

This eBook is made available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

ISBN:

1-5128-2926-9