Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village (1963)
John Demos, A Little Commonwealth (1970)
Paul Wallace Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (1968)
William Cronon, Changes in the Land (1983; 2003)
Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (2004)
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun (2001)
Hildegard Binder Johnson, Order Upon the Land (1976)
Andro Linklater, Measuring America (2002)
Note the riddling structure of Changes in the Land: it opens with the January 24, 1855 entry from Henry David Thoreau's famous journal, in which Thoreau reflected on his reading of William Wood's 1635 book New England's Prospect and what it suggested to him about how the countryside he knew so well had changed in the intervening 220 years. Changes in the Land uses this journal entry to compare two moments in time, contrasting the native landscapes of New England prior to European colonization with the ways those landscapes looked to Thoreau in the middle of the nineteenth century.
If you'd like to read Thoreau's actual journal entry (this is not a requirement for our course), you'll find a transcription here: http://www.williamcronon.net/courses/460/handouts/460_handout_thoreau_journal_on_william_wood_1-25-1855.html
The two-point riddling structure of Changes creates a dramatic contrast which emphasizes difference more than similarity, so that the story of the book becomes a question: how and why did these ecological transformations of the regional landscape occur?
This contrast establishes the tension that drives the book forward, but only at the expense of reduced cultural complexity: the book tends to deemphasize similarities between groups in order to highlight causal differences that might explain landscape change.
Whatever the costs of this simplification, it does offer some useful perspectives: material cultures and relationships with different environments become windows for understanding different ways people situate themselves geographically and culturally, and how they make their livings within in relation to the natural world.
The lecture offers as one key image of contrasting cultures: a fixed wooden frame house of the colonists vs. the much lighter and more mobile wigwam. These two structures imply very different degrees of fixity and mobility of the two groups, a dichotomy that Changes in the Land uses to explain many of the differences between New England's native peoples and the English colonists.
Indian horticulture was intimately integrated into seasonal movements of hunting and gathering: communities migrated to locations where food and other resources were most abundant at any given time.
Native material cultures hinged on the ability to move when ecological cycles made doing so attractive.
This was in stark contrast to colonists, who sought to bring ecological cycles close to the sites of their fixed homes and farmsteads. In effect, the colonists sought to modify and regulate the seasonal cycles within the boundaries of their homesteads and villages.
Please note an important challenge I face in putting together illustrated lectures for this course, especially during the early part of the semester. I've just finished giving you two lectures in which I showed you no images at all, justifying their absence with two reasons:
1) The relative abstraction of some of the ideas I discussed, since abstraction often doesn't lend itself to illustration with concrete images; and
2) The dearth of contemporary visual evidence from the period we're discussing.
This latter problem is one I'll face in almost every lecture from now at least until we reach the era of photography. A great many of the topics I discuss have literally no contemporary images that depict them.
Under such circumstances, I have several choices:
I will in fact do all of these things when I illustrate these lectures with images. I some cases, I'll explicitly call attention to what I'm doing, especially if the image I'm using might run the risk of misleading you about the thing it purports to illustrate. At other times, I'll expect you to ask questions yourselves about whether the images I'm using might possibly distort the landscapes and human experiences I'm discussing.
The technical word historians use to describe this problem is anachronism. Although we often use this word as if it simply meant "old-fashioned," in fact it means anything that is "out of time." When I show you an image from the 19th century to illustrate something from the 17th century, I'm using that later image anachronistically. When I do so, it's usually because I've judged that the anachronistic image contains enough elements similar to the earlier period I'm discussing that it's better than no image at all; but that's always a judgment call, and I want to make sure of you're aware of it as we move forward in the course.
It's an example of the much wider problem we'll discuss all semester long of the distinction between primary and secondary sources, and the challenge we constantly face when studying the past about whether or not we can trust what sources tell us about the events and people of the past.
The cover of Changes in the Land is a good case in point: the publisher wanted an illustration that would capture some of the big themes of the course, but there are essentially NO images from the 17th or 18th century that depict that landscape transformations discussed in this book. So we took a photograph I had taken at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts and hired a modern artist to do a pencil sketch depicting a recently cleared colonial field. The drawing was made in the early 1980s, based on a photograph of a landscape that was itself a museum reconstrution of what a cleared 19th-century New England farm field might have looked like.
Notice how many layers of interpretation are involved...and yet when you look at the cover of this book, it would be all too easy to assume that it depicts something historical and real. And in a way, it does: we wouldn't have used this image if we hadn't believed it depicted some very important themes of this book. Nothing it shows is fundamentally inaccurate...and yet it's hardly a simple, transparent image of a 17th-century New England hillside. It's a reminder never to take anything at face value when reading historical sources.
Today's lecture uses the remarkable living history museum of Plimoth Plantation to exemplify its arguments and interpretations: to learn more about it, see http://www.plimoth.org and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimoth_Plantation
The museum is located in Plymouth, Massachusetts, itself enshrouded in myth because of its association with the Pilgrims, one of the foundational stories of American nationhood in the United States. Note the classical shrine that today sits atop the large stone that may or may not be (but likely is not) the original "Plymouth Rock" of legend.
I can illustrate the problem of anachronism by showing you one of the very few images of a Native American agricultural landscape of the kind that Changes in the Land discusses at length: this water color by John White made in the 1580s when White accompanied the colonists who tried to establish Sir Walter Raleigh's colony on Roanoke Island on the coast of what is today North Carolina. White painted this image in 1585-86, and it was then turned into a woodcut by Theodor de Bry in 1590 that became one of the most widely distributed images in Europe of what native life on the eastern seaboard of North America looked like. You can see these White / de Bry images for yourself here:
http://www.virtualjamestown.org/images/white_debry_html/white35.html
They are among the very few such pictures we have for nearly two centuries, so they're invaluable for helping you visualize what Algonquian Indian life in the 16th and 17th centuries might have looked like: but notice that they are situated hundreds of miles away from, and many decades earlier, than the people and places described in Changes in the Land.
Even so, we can still use them to illustrate some of the most important arguments that structure the larger ideas of that book, especially relating to native mobility in comparison with the relative fixity of English colonial settlements and their respective ideas about the relationships of people with the ecosystems that supported them. Other contemporary images, diagrams, and photographs of reconstructed landscapes can also convey something of the dynamism of native relationships with American landscapes.
Compare these images with a key image from New England colonial life: the post-and-beam timber structure symbolized by the Saugus ironmaster's much-restored wooden house (in Massachusetts) from 1680s: fixed, stolid, with ecological cycles and relations of production made to circle around this human center.
Across local ecological boundaries, on the other side of the Atlantic, there was an intricate web of expanding connections to world trade, with the ocean-going ship (symbolized by Pilgrims' restored Mayflower) as a central symbol. You can think of the ship as an example of a "capstone technology" embodying many of the most important differences between Indians and colonists: sawed wood, metals, textiles, ropes, navigation, guns, sails, etc.; these in turn imply outward linkages with the wider markets of the Atlantic world.
The earliest English settlements (also true of the French and the Spanish) were stockaded for defense, implying readiness for the military violence of colonial invasion. (Such violence had as much to do with threats relating to other European colonial powers as to native peoples.)
The military blockhouse of Plimoth was also its religious and political meetinghouse. Here's it's worth remembering a theme that Changes in the Land doesn't examine at much detail: the religious mission of the settlement, the famed "errand into the wilderness" of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans. This implied a view of the surrounding landscape with all the rich allusions implied by a Biblical wilderness: outside the village, beyond the domesticated landscape of the colonial settlements, wild nature was dangerous, savage, sinful. (Remember that the word "savage," which in modern English typically means "violent," derives from the French word sauvage, which means "wild" or "untamed.")
Inside the agricultural village, functional divisions of the landscape marked ecological relations of production.
Clearing land involved girdling bark from trees, planting amidst stumps, eventually cutting or burning to create fields for plowing.
Initial colonial settlements conducted agriculture much as New England Indians did: using hand tools (albeit with metal blades), planting corn (maize) as a crucial early crop. Compare also tobacco in the southern colonies as another early Indian crop brought to market within a system increasingly dependent on the forced labor of enslaved Africans (along with some English indentured servants and enslaved natives).
Woodworking was initially a key technological difference between natives and colonists, and what the colonists created was very much a wooden world. Saws, axes, froes, and other tools were used for cutting and splitting wood. Construction became increasingly wood-intensive compared with England, as did burning wood for fires: wooden clapboards replaced plaster, shingles replaced thatch, and firewood was used in much greater quantitites than was possible in England given the scarcity of wood there. (England was shifting toward burning coal during the same period that North American colonists were relying more heavily on fuel wood.) Colonists ultimately abandoned the half-timbered framing of houses that was so characteristic of wood-scarce Tudor England.
Livestock represented an enormous difference between Indians and Europeans, with much else in the landscape following from these co-invaders: cattle, horses, hogs, etc. Livestock implied ownership of animals, animal power for plowing and hauling goods to market, to say nothing of all the uses to which animals were put for food, clothing, by-products, and other purposes.
But because colonists were planting crops at the same time that they were keeping animals, they had an inescapable need to protect crops from animals. The fence became a powerful physical symbol of English vs. Indian land tenure and subsistence, with a growing body of laws requiring colonists to maintain their fences and impounding animals whose owners didn't adequately control them. All of these were driven by the need to bring animals and crops into close proximity while keeping them separate -- to keep the animals from eating the crops.
In order to feed animals throughout the seasons of the year, the landscape had to be partitioned into mowing and grazing lands, where alien European grasses and clovers were introduced: timothy, blue grass, clover, etc.
Accompanying the grazers and the grasses was an invasion of weeds: dandelions, nettles, plantain, mulleins, and many others. Indians even called plantain "Englishman's Foot" because it appeared wherever the colonists settled and kept animals.
Black stem rust (which colonists labeled "the blast") can serve as a metaphor for how profoundly Old World ecological relationships were being reproduced in the New: barberry bushes growing along weedy fence rows hosted rust that blighted wheatfields growing downwind. Serious failures in wheat crops began to occur by 1660s, thus making it ever more challenging for European farmers, raising European animals behind European fencerows that provided habitat for European weeds that in turn hosted a European fungal infection, to raise a key European crop.
Complex horticultures: the household gardens tended by colonial English women contained vegetables, herbs, flowers for dyestuffs, orchards for fruit. Men raised grain crops of maize, barley, rye, and wheat while working with larger (more dangerous) animals in fields that were located at some distance from the homestead.
(Note the gender division of labor here: care of small children, which tended to be assigned to women, required interruptibility, whereas field work with large dangerous animals could only safely be done with steady attention. Nothing required these different tasks to be split along gender lines in the ways they were, but avoiding the combination of early childcare with the handling of livestock had a kind of logic we might not notice today.)
These myriad activities needed to be carefully orchestrated and scheduled across the months of the year: reproducing seasonal knowledge of peasant agriculture eventually involved the publication of almanacs. These were based on the cycling wheel of the zodiac much like Indian subsistence, but here agricultural activity took place in close proximity to human settlements, within fixed property boundaries marked off by physical fences. Here was yet another example of our opening theme of mobility vs fixity.
The largest claim made by Changes in the Land is that linkage to distant markets encouraged a growing sense that land was a commodity bought and sold in the market. (This important argument is most fully developed in Chapters 4 and 8 of the book.)
This concept of "land as commodity" was reinforced by the act of surveying land into parcels which could then be bought and sold at market. Different cadastral systems were used in different parts of the colonies to organize this process of survey and sale.
Earlier land systems:
The United States preferred the abstract grid of Enlightenment--the Cartesian coordinate plane you learned in high school trigonometry--which was eventually codified in the important 1785 Land Ordinance. It imposed a grid of square mile units (one mile to a side, with each square mile containing 640 acres, 36 square miles constituting a township). This process of surveying land into a national "grid" began in the Seven Ranges of eastern Ohio, and was imposed on the Northwest Territory by government survey to facilitate sale to settlers and speculators. (It was accompanied by a process of treaty making with different Indian tribes to "clear title" so the U.S. federal government could sell the lands it surveyed.)
This grid pattern proliferated outward to entire landscape west of Ohio River, affecting everything from rural road systems to farmers' fields to city streets. You'll see it almost everywhere when you fly over the Middle West and western United States today.
The landscape of the grid defines much of the U.S.: how closely was this connected to Plymouth's "world of fields and fences"? (This is a question that History / Geography / Environmental Studies 469, "The Making of the American Landscape," explores in considerably more detail: