North American Studies in France and Europe : State of the Art and Future Prospects

Présentations : (texte & vidéo)

North America from the Top Down: Visions of New France, par Catherine Desbarats et Allan Greer

North American Studies or United States of America Studies? Since the organization of scholarship in France places Mexico firmly under the aegis of Latin American Studies and treats Canada as, at best, an afterthought, a field that seems to encompass a continent tends, in practice, to focus on a single nation-state. This imbalance seems quite understandable in view of the continued ascendancy of the United States in today’s world. (There is both a rational dimension – understanding the history, culture and society of the USA is of great consequence to everyone – and a less conscious component – scholars gravitating to the glamour of the superpower – to this fascination.) However, for historians interested in the centuries of North American history that preceded the American Revolution, a narrow focus on the Thirteen [British, continental] Colonies distorts our understanding.

When we contemplate the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, many of the most significant zones of contact and colonization were located in the north, in territories now under Canadian jurisdiction: the fisheries of “Terre-neuve” that attracted more transatlantic shipping than any other part of North America, the Arctic coasts where Inuit and European mariners converged, Hudson Bay and its vast interior watersheds. And for 150 years, New France was the one imperial project of continental dimensions, entangled with British and Spanish ventures, as well as with indigenous polities. Centered on the settlements of the St Lawrence Valley, it sent out commercial and diplomatic tentacles stretching from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico and as far west as the Rocky Mountains. This amorphous space of contact and colonization was, we argue, the joint creation of indigenous and French peoples, and it conditioned later developments across half a continent.

Our paper takes the form of a plea and an invitation: expand the geography of North America; temper the United-States-centric view with a more multi-centered approach to the continent’s past.

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Among Empires: Jurisdictional Enclaves and Interpenetration in the American Southwest, par Pekka Hämäläinen

The history of the American Southwest is crusted with interpretations. A crossroads of three major American historiographies—Latin, North, and Native—it is a subfield that pulls in many directions, spawning diverging narratives. Instead of recognizable state of the art, we have a historiographical jigsaw puzzle of oddly shaped pieces with incompatible tabs and blanks. We have an ancient indigenous world that persevered under New Spain that nearly crumbled into expansionist indigenous realms that lost momentum against a reinvigorated Bourbon Spain—and yet continued to make mockery of colonial and national schemes deep into the nineteenth century, shaping events and outcomes as the Spanish North became the Mexican North and then the U.S. Southwest, an imperial extension of national space that had already morphed into a fluid transnational borderland when a formal boundary line was drawn on the ground.

This convoluted history draws our attention precisely because it unsettles received notions of how history unfolds. Interpretations multiply by the telling, each offering a novel solution to the narrative puzzle, but they share a basic tenet: they present the history of the American Southwest as a sequence. They explain its apparent oversupply of possibilities through chronology, focusing on how power dynamics shift, how societies ascend over others, and how historical layers pile up. The historiographical pieces do not really need to fit because they can be stacked. This essay proposes a different dynamic. Instead of chronology, it emphasizes spatiality, and instead of focusing on how societies rise and fall in relation to one another, it traces how they expand, elide, interpenetrate, and creatively ignore one another. North American historiography has a long tradition in the study of intercultural contact and coexistence and it has generated a series of spatial models—the frontier, the borderland, the middle ground, and the Native ground—that help conceptualize hybrid social spaces. A set of axioms runs through this scholarship: that a collision of expanding powers results in either retreats or borderlands where power is constantly contested; that empires can overlap at their edges and only at their edges; that mutual weakness is the essential ingredient of sustained cross-cultural coexistence. This essay challenges all those axioms. It uncovers an enduring world of coexistence grounded in mutual strength rather than mutual weakness. It shows how several expanding powers and empires survived in the same space, interpenetrating each other far beyond narrow borderlands zones. And it illuminates an apparently paradoxical situation where societies expand, feel powerful, and yet either fail or choose not to forge inviolate territorial domains.

To understand the seemingly paradoxical world of the American Southwest, we need to think about power and space in new ways. Like other contested worlds of natives, newcomers, and empires, the Southwest was a world made of fragments. There, as elsewhere, political spaces—homelands, villages, colonies, empires, places of refuge—were not, and often were not meant to be, masses of undifferentiated territory, the solid, color-coded blocks found in most maps, both ancient and modern. Instead, they were made of enclaves and corridors, key economic and ecological nodes that marked out jurisdictions and projected power in space. They were politically patchy entities wrapped in irregular borders and punctured with holes. Those holes are the thing that matters: they were interstitial spaces where competing societies and empires could thrust their presence into the realms of others and become spatially and politically tangled. This is what happened in the American Southwest from the seventeenth into nineteenth century, and tracing that dynamic helps unpack one of America's most contested spaces.

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Is There Such a Thing as a European Perspective on United States History?, par Maurizio Vaudagna

The history of Europe-based Americanist historians is one of tension between national, regional and cultural backgrounds on the one hand and American public and scholarly life on the other. Most scholars attempting to reconstruct “Old World” American history writing have focused on individual nations and have applied the notion of Europe as a “geographical expression,” with an emphasis on its variety of national entities. The search for Europe-wide points of view on American history by “Old World” scholars and narrators is in fact still quite new, despite the fact that “Europe” is understood as an identity, a historical idea and a process of political and institutional unification imbued with profound, common meaning.

For Europeans, “America” and the United States has never been a distant, neutral subject but rather a hotbed of fears and attractions that have influenced “Old World” Americanists and permeated their work.Concomitant issues related to European environments have therefore been more important for understanding“Old World” approaches to American history than the specifics of specialized historical methods and procedures. Two factors in particular make it difficult to find European perspectives on the subject: the tortured nature of the ongoing debate over European identity; and the need to relate this identity to the ups and downs of the transatlantic relationship, which in the twentieth century saw Europe move from world ruler to “second pillar” of the Atlantic exchange while the United States moved from “distant mirror” to “European power”. We therefore need both Europeanists and Americanists to present Europe-wide visions of the American past, which have been deeply affected by the tragedies and revivals of twentieth-century European history.

Europe now represents the tension between variety and sociocultural approximation. As a result, we historians who deal with the European perspective on the American past must take two important steps. First,we need to build a geo-cultural and geo-historical map of how Americanists have reconstructed United States history in light of their national/regional contexts. Those located in the United Kingdom, the Iberian Peninsula and the former socialist world are just some of the more visible among many. Second, we must use the existing fragments of a pan-European vision of American history, including historical subjects and approaches, as our starting point for studying the phenomenon in greater depth. “Connection history” –involving everything from migration and foreign relations to popular culture – has responded to the specifically European need to explore interactions between the “free world colossus” and “Old Europe.” Subjects like the American Revolution, the Civil War, the industrial take-off, the Great Depression and the Cold War have stimulated Europe-wide scholarly and public attention from a post-Eurocentric, transnational perspective. “American exceptionalism” has been largely criticized throughout Europe for having built a nationalist hierarchy of civilizations. Finally, “Old World” Americanists were among the first to start reconsidering and redefining the transatlantic relationship within a global context – an important subject from both a historical and a contemporary perspective.

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The Impact of Francophone Historiography on the Writing of United States History, par Greg Robinson

This paper examines the influence of francophone scholarship on the writing of North American history (i.e. historical writing about the United States) and uses several different methods to evaluate it. First, there is the author’s own experience as a US-born and -educated Americanist teaching in a French-language university in Montréal, and compiling course syllabi. Next, there is a study of various areas of US history in which the first important contributions were made by scholars writing in French, including foreign relations, immigration and the history of Louisiana. Ethnic studies, a category long marginalized within the US academy, is marked by the work of a succession of francophone scholars, even as the history of Native Americans bears a powerful French influence. Finally, this paper examines in quantitative terms the visibility of francophone scholars on the U.S. historical profession by using library and book review databases to trace readership.

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Recasting Relegation: Foibles and Fruits of Studying Urban Marginality in America, par Loïc Wacquant

In the postindustrial city, relegation takes the form of real or imaginary consignment to distinctive sociospatial formations variously and vaguely referred to as “inner cities,” “ghettos,” “enclaves,” “no-go areas,” “problem districts,” or simply “rough neighborhoods.” How do we characterize and differentiate these spaces, what determines their trajectory (birth, growth, decay and death), whence comes the intense stigma attached to them, and what constellations of class, ethnicity and state do they both materialize and signify? These are the questions I pursued in my book Urban Outcasts through a methodical comparison of the trajectories of the black American ghetto and the European working-class peripheries in the era of neoliberal ascendancy. In this talk, I revisit this cross-continental sociology of “advanced marginality” to tease out its broader lessons for our understanding of the tangled nexus of symbolic, social and physical space in the polarizing metropolis at century’s threshold in particular, and for comparative urban studies in general. I also reflect on the scientific distortions attendant upon the unreflective adoption by European scholars of images, tropes, and categories constitutive of the scholarly and policy common sense of the United States.

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Toward a Reciprocal Anthropology: A Dialogical and Comparative Approach between France and the United States, par Anne Raulin

Anthropology is now reconsidering its objects and methods since it is no longer a discourse of the West on the rest of the world. How can it be recast when it tries to seize specific features within the Western world, contrasting Europe and North America? This paper traces back an experimental project, which brought together five American anthropologists doing fieldwork in France and five French anthropologists working on the United States. The purpose was to share experiences of surveys not close to home but in seemingly close societies and cultures well informed on each other; more basically it aimed to launch new studies benefitting from those cross perceptions and knowledge. In this dialogic process, common concern emerged for specific notions, such as healing, clearly understated in France but perhaps overstated in the United States. Besides, the comparative approach stemmed from the peculiar interactions between anthropologists being at the same time foreign experts and native subjects expressing their own reflexivity. Whatever the processes, the endeavor implied a collective concern for interrogating basic categories circulating between both academic worlds, and for deciphering their common sense usages in specific social contexts, therefore revealing their singularity, which may not disclose a radical otherness but bring forth a significant otherness.

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Discussant: Sébastien Chauvin

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Law, History, and the American State, par William J. Novak

My paper draws attention to the vital role of interdisciplinary perspectives in law, history, sociology, and political science in redirecting our understanding of the origins, development, and nature of the American state. It also highlights the particularly formative role of an emerging French and American dialogue concerning the character of statecraft in largely democratic regimes. The paper begins with an acknowledgment of the difficulty of the state concept as articulated in the diverse theoretical contributions of John Dewey, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. It goes on to question the predominance of the essentially Weberian model of the state that has governed thinking about and controlled discussion of the American state for the last two generations. It concludes by using the interdisciplinary perspectives that have recently emerged in socio-legal studies in the United States to generate an alternative approach to American state development that takes account of the nature of democratic rule as well as the fungibility of the state/society boundary.

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Contemporary African American History (1870s-1970s), par Nicolas Martin-Breteau

This paper seeks to redefine the coherence of contemporary African American history, from the first to the second Reconstruction. It has three main objectives. The first one concerns the chronology of African American history since the 1870s. I argue that the origins of the Movement have to be sought in the abandonment of Reconstruction, that is, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This period led to the set up of new political tactics to gain equal dignity and rights. The second objective relies on the concept of perfectionism in order to address the long coherence of African American political struggles after the Civil War. I consider that these struggles, under their different tactical forms, were oriented by a common perfectionist goal even when they were aimed at racial separatism. Thus, this presentation hopes to suggest a conclusion to the endless debate in African American historiography: The accommodation versus assertion argument, that is, the never-ending opposition between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. The third objective intends to show the fecundity of a transdisciplinary approach for a renewed study of African American history. I shall try to show that the study of the strategic coherence of the Movement cannot be undertaken within the frame of the sole historical discipline. In this task, historians must resort to tools and methods designed by other social sciences, like philosophy, sociology, and political science.

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Discussant: Daniel Sabbagh

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Whatever Happened to (American) Economic History—and Could the “History of Capitalism” Become the “Newer” Economic History?, par Colleen Dunlavy

It is a curious paradox, as William H. Sewell, Jr., has noted, that historians’ attention to economic affairs has declined precipitously since the 1970s, just as dramatic changes beset the global economy. Precisely a century earlier, Frederick Jackson Turner, too, urged his colleagues to pay more attention to the dramatic changes then underway in the American economy. “The transformations through which the United States is passing in our own day,” he noted, “are so profound, so far-reaching, that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the birth of a new nation in America.” How is it that a century later historians again find themselves ill-equipped to make sense of the economic transformation going on around them? The conventional understanding is straight-forward: economic history took a “cliometric” turn in the 1960s, embracing the theories, methods, and concerns of economics and radically separating itself from the discipline of history. But a fatal flaw underlies this rendering of the field’s history: a version of presentism that defines the field of economic history in terms of what it became and searches backwards in time for its roots. This essay restores a fuller, more useful memory of economic history by recalibrating our vision in two ways. It defines the field not in terms of what it became but as it stood before the “new” economic history emerged. Tracing the decline of this broader, more capacious field reveals a hitherto unnoticed “fragmentation” in American history, the fragmentation of economic history into an array of subfields, some of which now, a half century later, seem to be coalescing into the newly emerging field called the “history of capitalism.” It also “follows the money,” paying attention to the research funding that gave birth to the broader field, periodically pushed it in new directions, and ultimately helped to bring about its demise. The last section of the essay asks whether the emerging field called the “history of capitalism” could become the next-generation—the “newer”—economic history. My answer, in brief, is yes, maybe.

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Cliometrics Today, par Alexia Blin et Pierre Gervais

Cliometrics refers to the application of economic methods and models to historical questions. It was developed in American universities in the late 1950s, and has generated contrasted reactions on both sides of the Atlantic, among historians and economists, ever since. The evolution of cliometrics, which borrows its methods both from historians and economists, has to be understood in precise institutional contexts.

This paper intends to analyze current debates about the status of cliometrics, and its evolution since the pioneers’ works of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the framework of the response to its diffusion in France. This method, the ways it has been applied, and the debates it triggered in both countries raise the question of the role of economic “models” in historical research, and of the tension and possible bridges between the two scientific fields of economics and history. We show that this debate is still very much alive today, beyond the apparent divergence of economic history and the historical mainstream.

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Discussant: Alice Kessler-Harris

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Philanthropy and American History, par Olivier Zunz

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin tells how he had advised a Rev. Gilbert Tennent “in procuring a subscription for erecting a new meeting house.” Franklin told him: “In the first place, I advise you to apply to all those whom you know will give something; next to those you are uncertain whether they will give anything or not, and show them the list of those who have given; and lastly do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing, for in some of them you may be mistaken. He laugh’d and thank’d me, and said he would take my advice. He did so, for he asked of everybody, and he obtained a much larger sum than he expected.”

This important counsel by a Founding Father, dutifully followed, sums up the large role philanthropy has played—and continues to play—in building a strong civil society in the nation. Philanthropy, however, appears only episodically and incompletely in the large narrative of American history. Why a large and enterprising part of American governance has not been more prominent in successive accounts of American history is the problem that will occupy me in this essay. I intend to focus on philanthropy as a critical part of capitalism and a key building block of civil society.

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Discussants: Pierre Gervais et Pauline Peretz

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From Analytical Narratives to Cliometric Models, par Jean Heffer

Most of my personal research has to do with quantitative history. If one considers history as a scientific inquiry, there are two legitimate ways of writing it: the first one, which is also the traditional one, is narrative and emphasizes the chronological sequence of events; the other one, which is called analytic, borrows from the social sciences to search how one can partly or totally explain such a sequence. Usually historians mix both approaches, narrative and analytic, in various proportions. As for me, I am inclined to think analytically, when I have to deal with a historical problem, and I shall show the scope and the limitations of this way of writing history. Treating of a “big problem” like the origins of the Civil War implies that one accounts for a very complex sequence of events, even for a more limited subject as the political realignment of the 1850’s, with many branching points, where the future may take different directions. In modeling such complex dynamic interactions, Nobel Prize winner Robert W. Fogel (Economics and Politics, 1992) presents a diagram of sequential and path-dependent choices too difficult to interpret and acknowledges the transition matrices that govern the past are not easy to estimate. The quantitative historian must choose a less ambitious task. Analytic narratives are one of these approaches. It is “a social science research method seeking to combine historical narratives with the rigor of rational choice theory, particularly through the use of game theory” (en.wikipedia.org). The analytic narrativist describes the facts to be explained and then seeks the element(s) that account for the rise and the decline of the system. Usually rational choice institutionalism, based on neoclassical economics models balancing costs and benefits, is the framework of analysis. I’ll comment the paper by Barry R. Weingast (1998) that explains how the balance rule (the number of Slave and non-Slave states should be equal) was the key institution that protected the political stability until the 1850’s, and why its demise contributed to the Civil War. By focusing on a key factor, an analytic narrative throws light on a complex question, but not without limitations. That is the reason why in my personal research I would rather deal with more limited topics that may be formalized as models and estimated by cliometric methods. As an example, I’ll analyze my last two papers on the price of land in Lincoln County (Missouri), 1860-1870, and the productivity of French whaling in the nineteenth century, 1817-1867. Both models are descriptive and explicit; they try to explain the price and productivity factors, estimating data collected in the archives. I speak in favor of such an approach so that the historians do not give up the academic field to the economists, as it happened in American universities.

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At the Urban Scale: The Control and Appropriation of Social Space, par Yann Philippe et Aurélien Gillier

How was urban space produced, appropriated and controlled in the twentieth-century American city? To address such a broad question at the intersection of history, sociology, political science and geography, this paper will focus on the construction of order at the city level. Given the centrality of coercion in order maintenance, a special attention will be given to policing. Moreover, municipal police departments can be defined by their capacity to regulate space at the city-level. Police officers thus encounter on a daily basis the city population in its various groups and neighborhoods. This interaction that creates social space will be the main object of our inquiry and will be considered from different angles. Using a vertical perspective, city space will be considered as a territory to be patrolled and controlled by the police. A more horizontal perspective will unearth the role and agency of the community in the co-production or counter-production of urban order. Finally we will examine the idea of a fragmented urban order resulting from the various dynamics of a negotiated process.

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Constructing Space at the Regional Scale: The Case of the Midwest, par Nicolas Barreyre et Tangi Villerbu

This paper will propose an exploration of what it means to think of US history at the regional scale. Taking up the case of the Midwest throughout the nineteenth century, it follows two closely-intertwined but separate threads. One is historical: how did the Midwest emerge as a region in the long century, and what made this mid-scale relevant for Americans? The other is historiographical: can historians study what we know today as the Midwest even before the word existed? Or, putting it another way, what is the relevance of the regional scale for historians, even outside historical actors’ expressions? In an historiography where “regionalism” is often keyed to the South, we propose to explore the benefits and pitfalls of analyzing American history at midscale, half-way between the local and the national.

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Discussant : Renaud Le Goix

Intertwining Scales: The Caribbeanization of the Americas, par Manuel Covo et Romy Sánchez

The so-called “global turn” has recently tended to create a narrative in which the Caribbean embodies an episteme for a global reading of the Americas. Deeply influenced by cultural and postcolonial studies, the social and political history of the Caribbean made the region a melting pot and a living symbol of a supposed American creole identity. The history of the Caribbean, however, has to navigate between North American—mostly U.S.—and Latin American historical narratives, making it both peripheral and difficult to nail down.

In this paper, we want to question the Caribbean’s location within American history as an unlikely whole. Focusing on scales and timelines enables us to rethink Caribbean history without resorting to narratives of exceptionalism. Indeed, a few historiographical assumptions should be questioned: the “modernity” of the region, or its multiculturality. Our hypothesis of a spatial and temporal arrhythmia calls for a re-interpretation of Caribbean history in an American context. By intertwining scales of analysis—global, imperial, Atlantic, hemispheric—we address the relevance of customary spatial models.

We argue here that the Caribbean is a spatial and chronological counterpoint. However, its definition and its delimitation constitute an historiographical challenge. Its geographical limits can be broadened from New Orleans to Salvador de Bahía, or narrowed to a range of islands and its close coastlands. The mobility of a “Caribbean diaspora” makes the borders even more blurry. At the same time, the timeline of the region—as much as a general one can be discerned—does not reflect “conventional chronologies” of the Americas. While a fluid definition of the region can be heuristic in many contexts, we claim as well that historicizing the Caribbean and emphasizing its complex geography helps redefine its position as part of, and apart from, the Americas.

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Rethinking Continental Space: North America as Imperial Playground, par Alexandre Dubé

The North American spaces of early-modern empires are now many. The continent which bears the scars of faded Frontiers and the almost-fleeting memories of centers and peripheries, is now fractured into boundless oceans and blurry borderlands; it has been composed of varied “grounds” (Middle or Native), hybrid corporations, rebellious coves, plazas of order and chaos, societies of distant forts, enclaves of sovereignty, diasporic polities, regimes of concentration on the plantation, and geographies of intimacy. Everywhere, the liquid ghost of empire seems to insinuate itself, filling voids, adding a measure of meaning to countless daily gestures.

Early-modern imperial discourses haunt and shape institutions, structure resistance, organize knowledge. They could potentially be everywhere, waiting for the historian to reveal their presence, often (but now always) hidden from their contemporaries’ gaze, as Trevor Burnard recently reminded us.

What do historians gain, by such revelatory manifestation? What becomes of these myriads of “colonial realities” when they are rather labeled as “imperial”? Can they be differentiated from other forms of power relations? By marking the potential pervasiveness of empires, and especially of empire-as-composite-state, the current historiography has imported some of the persistent problems of elusive state-definition into imperial history: should empires be defined by a specific monopolistic claim? by their imprint on territory? by particular forms of knowledge?

This communication, using the example of the eighteenth-century “market” as a playground for empire in French North America, will explore some of the challenges in reconciling empires as institutions, law, networks, and place by revisiting some of the insights of a growing body of work on “imperial formations.

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Discussant:Jean-Frédéric Schaub

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Petitions, Local History, and National Narrative, par Daniel Carpenter et Romain Huret

We outline a proposed study of the practices and uses of petitioning in the United States from the Early Republic to the late twentieth century. We seek to avoid both a functionalist analysis that views petitions as important only to the extent they induce different policy outcomes, as well as a nostalgic or celebratory reading that sees them as only a ritual tapping on the memory of the Revolution and the Founding. Beyond their vitality as sources for social scientists, petitions compose a central institution of contest and resistance in the United States. Practices of petitioning have often organized those at the margins of American society, mobilized authorities and concentrations of power to counter-organize and counter-attack, and have set the stage for broader organizational initiatives that came later. The power of the petition, we argue, lay in the flexibility and plasticity of complaints and requests sent to authorities. Petitions have been undertaken to redress real or perceived inequalities, which explains why the practice has been appropriated and re-appropriated by different social groups, from Native Americans, African-Americans, women both atomized and organized, religious minorities and majorities, new organizations of labor and landholders, and even corporations and rich businessmen. We explore the potential of petitioning to help social scientists write a different national narrative of American democracy.

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The Paradigmatic City? Chicago and the American Urban Experience, par Andrew J. Diamond

Chicago has served as a laboratory for some of the most important studies on the postwar American city over the past several decades, from Arnold Hirsch’s classic Making the Second Ghetto to Rob Sampson’s more recent Great American City. As a result (and as the title of Sampson’s book aptly suggests), it is considered by many, tacitly or explicitly, to be a paradigmatic city that illuminates critical qualities and trends of the urban experience more clearly than other cities. In particular, historians and sociologists alike have exploited Chicago’s neighborhoods to demonstrate that neighborhoods, in themselves, matter a great deal. This paper will reflect on the generalizability of such claims by examining some rather exceptional features that shaped the dynamics and political possibilities of Chicago’s neighborhoods over the postwar decades—the strong state, which brought fierce political repression and aggressive neoliberal governance to the grassroots, and the centrality of race within the city’s political culture.

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Discussant: Thomas Sugrue

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North American History from a West Coast/Pacific Perspective, par Emmanuelle Perez

The United-States grew spatially after their independence, so historians have to choose between telling a history of what eventually—until today—became the territory of the United States or focus on what they were geographically at any moment of their history. Looking from the Pacific coast offers an alternative, by enhancing the distinction between space and territory as defined by the geographers. North America then becomes a space into which imperial formations tried to carve a territory. This perspective offers a way to close the gap between U.S. expansion on the continent and overseas and also allows to compare between the British, Spanish, Mexican and U.S. empires in North America. It also connects settler colonialism and economic imperialism with the Pacific as the new frontier. As such, California set out to be at the same time a place of expansion and investment for the center—with boom and bust—and a place of temptation, of exoticism, which could offer a counter-model, an alternative. For a long time a periphery, California, the far West and the Pacific Coast started to tell central things about what the U.S. was becoming from urban shapes to a more complex color line.

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Writing the History of North America from Indian Country. The View from the North-Central Plains, 1800-1870, par Raymond J. DeMallie et Gilles Havard

Historians have not generally taken into account “Indian countries” when writing about North America. In this essay, we argue that writing from Indian Country means integrating different spaces, different peoples, but also, using anthropological methods and theories, confronting different types of behaviors and rationalities. For our purposes we will look at the north-central plains, along the Missouri River, northward through Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, during the years 1800-1870. Specifically, we will raise questions about community and territoriality, taking into consideration the extent to which Indian societies and environments were impacted by Euro-Americans.

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Discussant : Richard White

Where Is Gender In North American Studies?, par Nancy Cott

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