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• 1 media/Moll West Indies 1702 DETAIL Raremaps.jpg 2016-06-28T20:23:44+00:00 Europe's Empires Expand 63 What were the motivations of the private adventurers who claimed land for European countries? image_header 2020-10-21T16:02:41+00:00

  This week's big question

  What were the motivations of the private adventurers who claimed land for European countries?

  Video Introduction
  
  

  Learning outcomes

  At the end of this week you should be able to:
  • describe some of the major locations and bases for European overseas expansion in the 15th through 17th centuries;
  • explain something of the different motivations for overseas expansion;
  • explain the basis for the integration of the New World into the emerging Atlantic economy;
  • outline some of the major economic, political, and cultural reasons for overseas exploration and colonization.

  Questions to consider, and learning activity

  Remember what you've learned about secondary sources and "historiographical thinking" from the Lessons just before Reading Week on Agricultural Revolutions? Once you've read over this page, begin your preparation for the Week's Forum by reading the chapter from Appleby. In your discussions with your Forum colleagues, keep Appleby's perspectives and interpretations in mind as you use your reading and analysis of 3 to 4 of the primary sources to answer one or more of the questions below.
  
  Also remember to try your best to fulfill the criteria for a good Forum contributions that you can find in the course syllabus.
  • How would you characterize the motives of these writers for colonizing the New World? Drawing on the cultural and political ideas you’ve seen in the first module (e.g., the Great Chain of Being, or Catholic vs Protestant views about authority), do you see some of those influences at work in the discussions of colonization? Do you see patterns of similarity among the different writers? Differences?
  • What can the images included on this page tell us about early modern understandings of the New World? What did early modern viewers “see” when they looked at these images? Discuss different ways the maps can help us understand the process of imperial expansion. Do the maps speak to the same motivations as the texts?
  • How did these authors justify their plans to take over these newly discovered lands?
  • Why did Parkhurst urge English colonization of Newfoundland?  Why was he writing to Hakluyt? How is he similar/different from what we read in Hakluyt? Was Newfoundland different than the other cases?
  • Biard was a Jesuit missionary -- how does that influence how we should interpret this document?
  • None of our primary sources, including images, were produced by Indigenous Americans.  What does that tell us about the sources we use? Are they, in fact, primary sources? And if they are primary sources how might we qualify their importance? What does this mean for our (i.e. Western) understanding of early modern American history?
  • How was America drawn into the Atlantic world?

  Background

  Paralleling the development of the centralized state and the agricultural revolution, western European states also began utilizing improvements in map-making, navigation devices, and ship construction that allowed them to explore further along the coasts of Africa and ultimately to venture further to the west. We will not, in this course, pursue these technological questions relating to navigation. Instead we will focus on the question of what encouraged Europeans to venture further afield, and what motivated them to colonize the Americas.  An interesting dimension of this early exploration is who was leading these expansive movements.  While we often speak of these states as actors –- that is, that England (or France, or whatever) did things (explored, colonized, whatever) –- it was not the states themselves leading the way but private adventurers acting in the name of these states.  This in part explains why some of the most famous “explorers” were Italian seamen such as Cristoforo Columbo (who in English we call Christopher Columbus) and Giovanni Caboto (who we call John Cabot) sailing for Spain and England respectively.  ​Our questions this week focus on these adventurers’ motivations for exploring, what value they saw in the new lands, how they encouraged their sponsoring states to continue to support their endeavours, and ultimately what motivated the states to support expansion.
  
  In other words, our topic this week is the rise of European colonialism, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries.  This is very much one of those longer-term stories that we discussed in past weeks. But the exact parameters aren’t clear.  We might be tempted to say this story began with Columbus arriving in the Caribbean in 1492 –- and certainly in many ways it did –- but of course all that really happened on those voyages was that Europeans learned that there was another continent across the ocean, what they came to call the New World.  And while significant consequences began very quickly in places like Mexico and the Caribbean, the emergence of European power in the Americas, Africa, and Asia did not begin that day.  It took centuries to reach the point that we might now recognize as the colonial world being under the control, or domination, of Europe.  When we can begin to speak of a European dominance of the Americas is not clear.
  
  This raises several big questions: Why did the European empires form outside of Europe?  Why did European colonization take place? Why did it take so long? And if it took so long, and is not especially clear as to why it happened, how can we even understand it as a story?  We won’t answer that question this week.  Indeed, historians don't completely agree on the answers anyhow, but as we proceed over the next few weeks we’ll begin to see some patterns.
  
  This week, we’ll emphasize two features of this story. First, that much of the “imperial expansion” of Europe looked quite different on the ground than it did in the minds of (and as seen on the maps of) the European powers.  There are five early modern European powers that we should keep in mind: England, France, Holland, Spain, and Portugal.  While the Spanish and Portuguese did make significant inroads in terms of conquering and controlling territory in the Caribbean and South America, France, Holland, and England’s place on the ground in North America was much less impressive –- especially much less impressive than its cartographers imagined.  As we’ll see in a few weeks, New England and the other British colonies would grow quickly, but even by the time of the American revolution -– almost 300 years after Columbus! -– they remained tightly enclosed along the Atlantic seaboard.  Similarly, French maps depicted their control of much of eastern North America, but the actual place of French power was limited to a few enclaves along the St. Lawrence River.  
  
  Second, what the European states and their private adventurer-proxies thought the best actions on the ground were not always the same things, and often not at all compatible.  While private adventurers had to maintain the good graces of their Old World political supporters, in the New World they had a lot of latitude on the ground. There was no army –- i.e., no state force -– there in the New World or in Africa to enforce the expectations of Kings or legislators. Thus, these merchant-adventurers were taking risks if they tested their rulers' authority, but the lure of profit –- and power –- could be great.  Moreover, again as will become clear in future weeks, even that limited presence could have profound consequences.

  Toolbox

  Before you read this Lesson's sources, make sure you review the Toolbox entries from the Lessons of Module 1. In the First Module you practiced the effective analysis of primary and secondary sources, and you also learned about the importance of paying attention to the different perspectives historians take when they analyze sources. Don't forget what you've learned in these Lessons. Your goal should be to build on your skills throughout the course.
  
  In your Forum entries for this week's Lesson, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. In a way similar to historians having different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:

  • Who was the author and what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person have?
  • When did he or she create the source?
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?

  You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source. These are questions that are related to the skills of "sourcing" that you learned about in Module 1. To find our more about the general kinds of questions you should always have in mind when you consider a source's perspective, see the two Historical Thinking worksheets available through the link. The particular questions to think about for this week (in the Lesson above) will also help. Together, these general and particular questions will guide you as you look for differences (and similarities) in the perspectives of each primary source.

  Primary sources

  Read any 3 or 4 of the following documents (and, to be clear, 3 doesn’t allow you to read less –- it means read some of the longer docs). Pay attention to the bibliographical details below (e.g., page numbers).
  • Christopher Columbus to Luis de Sant Angel [a high-ranking minister to King Ferdinand of Spain], 1493.
  • Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: of the Commodities and of the Nature and Manners of the Naturall Inhabitants (1585), 5-9.
  • Richard Hakluyt, the elder, “Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended towards Virginia [1585]”, in David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, volume III (London, Macmillan, 1979), 64-69.
  • John Cotton, God’s Promise to his Plantation (1630).
  • Letters from Anthony Parkhurst, Newfoundland, 1577 and 1578, in David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, volume IV (London, Macmillan, 1979), 5-10.
  • Stephen Parminius to Richard Hakluyt the Younger, Newfoundland, 6 August 1583, in David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, volume IV (London, Macmillan, 1979), 21-2.
  • “Petition of Merchants of London and Bristol for a Newfoundland Charter, 1610”, in David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, volume IV (London, Macmillan, 1979), 131-2. [in the same file as Parminius]
  • Pierre Biard, “Reasons why the Cultivation of New France ought to be Undertaken in Earnest”, Rueben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, volume IV (Cleveland, 1894), 111-7.
  • John Brereton, A Briefe Relation of the Description of Elizabeth's Ile [Cape Cod] (London, 1602).

  Secondary sources

  John C. Appleby, "War, Politics, and Colonization"​, in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, vol. I of The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, Oxford University press, 1998), 55-78.
• 1 media/Samuel_de_Champlain_Carte_geographique_de_la_Nouvelle_France.jpg 2019-08-07T16:36:01+00:00 Assignments (Overview) 60 2021-22 image_header 2021-09-07T18:49:21+00:00 This page gives you an overview of the course assignments. The Term 1 assignment details will be linked here by the end of the beginning of the second week of the course. Term 2 assignment details will be available by the beginning of January 2022.
  
  In this full-year course, each of you will complete four assignments - two in the first term, and two in the second term - and you have some choices (fewer initially and more as the course progresses).
  
  Note: Unless we inform you otherwise, you will submit all assignments using the Assignments Tool in Sakai.

  TERM 1

  Assignment 1

  • Options: One option only, with some choice of which parts of a book to read closely
  • Topic: Transcription and analysis of Daniel Defoe's account of the plague in London
  • Length: 3 pages of transcription, plus 750 words of analysis
  • Due: Monday, Oct. 18 by 5 pm
  • Point value: 7.5 of the 15 points for Term 1 assignments
  • Details: Click HERE or go to the links at the bottom of the page

  Assignment 2

  Options: You choose 1 option from a choice of 2 topics.
  Topic 1: An 18th-century historian describes New England; involves close reading combined with "distant reading" using Voyant Tools
  Topic 2: "Reading" early modern maps of Africa
  Length: 750-1,000 words of analysis plus selected screenshots from Voyant Tools
  Due: Friday, Dec. 10 by 5 pm
  Point value: 7.5
  Details: Click HERE or go to the links at the bottom of the page

  TERM 2

  In Second term, there are two (2) possible assignments to choose from - do one (1) only.
  
  They have different dues dates, are on different topics, using different forms, and to some extent will be produced in different ways. Any or all of these may determine which you chose. 
   

  First Term

  
  Term 1's two assignments are worth 15 points (7.5 each) of your overall final grade.

  Assignment 1

  Option 1 - Text Analysis I:
  An eighteenth-century historian describes New England

  
  
   

  In our forum, we read an excerpt of from Amos Adams; here you'll use Voyant-tools as a way to explore the full-text.

  Amos Adams, A concise, historical view of the difficulties, hardships, and perils which attended the planting and progressive improvements of New-England (Boston, Dilly, 1770). 
  In this exercise, we want you to read a primary source related to colonial-era North America. It's a source by an 18th-century historian Amos Adams that we just discussed in our Forum on the Columbian Exchange.
  
  But in this assignment we want you to read it in a particular manner. You should already have read the excerpt in our forum. We now want you to do three things:
  • First "pre-read" the book, using only the titles, publication information and your now developing general knowledge.
  • Second continue pre-reading using text-mining software (Voyant) as a way to examine the patterns of topics and ideas present in the text. In particular, can these "pre-reads" allow you to hypothesize about these texts? That is, can you develop questions by which you might approach reading the text?
  • Then, finally, read the actual book. Do so with an eye to both reading it critically and intelligently (as you alway would) but also to testing the impressions/hypotheses you made in your pre-read. 
  You should include visuals (screenshots/URLs) to more clearly explain your read/hypotheses.
  
  The object here is to say something analytical about the book and how how Voyant might help that analysis. Have a look at this video for quick pointers on using Voyant.
  
  750 words, due May 30th

   

  Option 2 - Critical Map Reading, I:
  Early Modern maps of Africa

   

  An exercise in critical cartography: maps are not neutral data - they have points of view. Explore three maps' viewpoints.

  We love maps, especially but not only historical maps. And while we love google maps and all the GIS-based tools we have at our fingertips these days, we also still own map books. Prof Samson still carries road atlases in his car because while Google offers great directions the broader map allows him to see more context, to have a physical sense of where we're going, where we are, where we should be, what’s nearby, how did we get lost?

  Historical maps are packed with data. They give us a view of landscapes, territory, communication networks, political relationships – in short, views of the political and spatial organization of societies. The image link to this text is a detail from the Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese map made in 1502 outlining Europe, Africa, and the then newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. The detail shows Elmino castle, a large Portuguese trading centre and military installation in what is today Ghana. The size of the castle is obviously not to scale, and may never have been meant to be. Its size and style suggests it was meant to symbolize Portuguese power in Africa. But this unusual representation raises the question of what's meant to be accurate and what's meant to be symbolic - and for that matter if there's a difference. At minimum it asks us to read this map critically and carefully.

  It's clear that maps can give us good, hard data. But it's also true that we tend to assume that such data is objective: that these lines and objects marking places/spaces are real and beyond any substantial degree of interpretation. Over the past few years, historians and geographers have demonstrated that in fact maps are, like most texts, social constructs and thus can be read in different ways. They typically bear a relationship to power and are thus historically situated in particular political, economic, and social worlds. Maps, the geographer J.B. Harley reminds us, make claims to truth, but they almost always betray that they are constructions designed to support claims to truth, more than simply "true" in any objective sense.
  
  Maps are representations of space but because they often bear a powerful resemblance to concrete geographic features of the planet, we tend to think they are factual, or true. As we've seen, they do contain real concrete facts. But they also contain interpretations; the map makers often made choices in what to represent and how to represent it. This human process of interpreting and selecting data adds complexity to how we must understand maps as sources and ask the same critical questions we'd ask of any sources. Are maps biased? Of course they are, but so is all human-produced data. Almost all maps contain elements that are objective, as well as elements that are subjective. The trick is to read it carefully, and critically. How then do we "read" historical maps as data?
  
  There's lots to look for. Some maps have a lot of textual data in addition to the basic details of names and locations. Look, for example, at this detail from John Mitchell's famous map of the territory Britain and France claimed in North America on the eve of the Seven Years War. Here we're looking at a tiny section of the map which includes the area east and north of Lake Huron. The map is exquisitely detailed, but also contains over 3000 words of text (not including place names!) referring to history, territorial claims, navigation routes, distances, and much else. Such information was useful, practical information for someone (one might ask for whom?); it was also felt to add credibility, additional proof of its careful and accurate research. But is the information accurate? This text points to a real event - the Mississauga people were defeated in a war with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the 17th century, but neither they nor any other peoples ever became "the eighth nation" of the Iroquois League. Does this matter? Does it matter that this information is only partly true, or misleading at best? Would it have mattered to an eighteenth-century observer? What inferences might such an observer have about this and similar information on the map? Think too about its production. Remember that maps are authored, like any text, and are usually intended for a particular audience.There were literally 100s of maps of North America available in this period. Why commission another one? Why one with this level of detail? Who would have wanted such a map? Why? Why was this map produced when it was produced? What about that moment made this information important?
  
  Look, too, beyond the geographic features of the map itself. The legend, for example, often contains important information that can be helpful in understanding the map: what it records, where, when and by whom it was made. Legends are often inside more elaborate and artistic renditions that are called a cartouche. A cartouche is usually a frame or image designed both to add additional information - often the publication information or a legend - as well as artistic embellishments. Some are more ornamental than others, but all contain potentially useful information. One can often see themes being represented in the cartouche: a kind of key to thinking about the map. The planisphere on our header was one of the first to depict the North And South America in relation to Europe and Africa. At this point, only the Portuguese were actively venturing along the western coast of Africa and thus this map presents knowledge more or less completely new to other Europeans. It's also worth noting however that Portuguese explorers had travelled as far south as modern-day Ghana, but had gone no more than a mile or two inland - the rest is pure imagination. But these images shouldn't be dismissed as mere flights of fancy. They very often offer symbolic clues to how the mapmakers understood their subjects and the purposes of these maps.
  
  The Newberry Library offers a nice overview of questions and important issues for when approaching historic maps as primary sources. 
  
  The assignment: Write an 750-word essay on the following early modern maps of Africa. Devote roughly half of your text to a discussion of one of the maps, and the other half comparing that map with the other two. They were produced in different times and different places and probably for different purposes. Each sought to show an audience how to see Africa: how it was shaped, who its people were, how they lived and governed themselves, and so on. And yet they also made other claims of knowledge, ones rooted more in their authors and their authors' contexts than in Africa itself. What can these maps tell us about Africa? What can these maps tell us about the early modern Atlantic World? 
  
  Resist the urge to dismiss them as all being biased. They are, no doubt, but so are most sources. The real trick is to critically examine these texts so as to find as much useful information as possible. And what is useful information? Well, that depends on what question we're asking. If we're asking about the map's ability to convey accurate geographic information, then we head in one direction. If we're asking how the map tells more about the map makers and their societies, then that sends us in other directions. But if we think those questions are unrelated, then we may be missing a lot.
  
  Here, as in your Forum entries, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. Just as historians have different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:
  • When was the map made and by whom and for whom? i.e. who was the author? what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person serve?
  • When did the cartographer create the source? Is there a broader historical context? (The Mitchell map above was made on the eve of the Seven Years War, after decades of political-military struggles over North America - that context informs much of the information Mitchell included, and what he didn't include.) 
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?
  • What information did the author wish to communicate?
  • We're speaking of "an author" here by which we mean the mapmaker, or cartographer. Who that individual was, matters. But you shouldn't imagine that these maps are like a book that this mapmaker thought he'd make up on a Tuesday afternoon [and sadly the vast majority are "he"]. All these maps were commissioned. That is, someone hired this mapmaker to make this map. That's not always the case. Sometimes, particularly in some of the bigger more famous firms, they would produce something believing there to be a market for such a map. In either case, you should be thinking about that context - and why there would be a demand for, or a market for, that map - i.e. a map that portrays that place in this particular way.
  • Finally, two hints: (i) most of you will assume that the map reflects the mapmaker's personal knowledge: that the person surveyed that territory and produced this map. Sometimes that's true (and in a map we'll look at later in the course, that is true), but usually it's not. And in the case of these African maps, it's absolutely clear that none of these mapmakers had ever been to Africa. Thus, you should think about how the mapmakers knew what they put to paper. (ii) many of you will also assume that the maps will become more accurate with time. Sometimes that's true; sometimes that's not. Just don't assume that's true.

  You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source. 
  
  Are you required to do any outside research? The short answer is some, but not a lot and not fancy research. We're not giving you much outside resources to work with. What you'll need, you'll have to determine. Basic online googling, will get you a fair distance: be sure to cite what you use, and choose websites that don't appear random. Wikipedia's fine for many things. But try the library. There are lots of guides and handbooks that often contain quick high-quality information. But, to be clear, most fo your discussion should focus on the maps themselves.

  Tip: the images included here are fairly high quality, but the links take you to much better high-quality scans from the Library of Congress. Close reading of some of the details on the high-quality scans may be very helpful.

  John Senex, Africa: corrected from the observations of the Royal Society at London and Paris (London, 1725). Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Aaron Arrowsmith, Africa: to the committee and members of the British association discovering the interior parts of Africa this map is with their permission most respectfully inscribed. London: A. Arrowsmith, 1802. Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Emanuel Bowen, A new & accurate map of Negroland and the adjacent countries (London,1747). 
  
   

  
  (i)   Submit only one attachment
  (ii)  Only use file types: Word (docx), PDF, HTML, RTF, or plain text.
  (iii) Always include the file extension (.docx etc).
  
  

  Assignment 2

  Critical Map Reading (due Friday November 6th, 5 p.m. NEW: extended to Sun., Nov. 8 at the very end of the day)
   

  We love maps, especially but not only historical maps. And while we love google maps and all the GIS-based tools we have at our fingertips these days, we also still own map books. Prof Samson still carries road atlases in his car because while Google offers great directions the broader map allows him to see more context, to have a physical sense of where we're going, where we are, where we should be, what’s nearby, how did we get lost?

  Historical maps are packed with data. They give us a view of landscapes, territory, communication networks, political relationships – in short, views of the political and spatial organization of societies. The image link to this text is a detail from the Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese map made in 1502 outlining Europe, Africa, and the then newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. The detail shows Elmino castle, a large Portuguese trading centre and military installation in what is today Ghana. The size of the castle is obviously not to scale, and may never have been meant to be. Its size and style suggests it was meant to symbolize Portuguese power in Africa. But this unusual representation raises the question of what's meant to be accurate and what's meant to be symbolic - and for that matter if there's a difference. At minimum it asks us to read this map critically and carefully.

  It's clear that maps can give us good, hard data. But it's also true that we tend to assume that such data is objective: that these lines and objects marking places/spaces are real and beyond any substantial degree of interpretation. Over the past few years, historians and geographers have demonstrated that in fact maps are, like most texts, social constructs and thus can be read in different ways. They typically bear a relationship to power and are thus historically situated in particular political, economic, and social worlds. Maps, the geographer J.B. Harley reminds us, make claims to truth, but they almost always betray that they are constructions designed to support claims to truth, more than simply "true" in any objective sense.
  
  Maps are representations of space but because they often bear a powerful resemblance to concrete geographic features of the planet, we tend to think they are factual, or true. As we've seen, they do contain real concrete facts. But they also contain interpretations; the map makers often made choices in what to represent and how to represent it. This human process of interpreting and selecting data adds complexity to how we must understand maps as sources and ask the same critical questions we'd ask of any sources. Are maps biased? Of course they are, but so is all human-produced data. Almost all maps contain elements that are objective, as well as elements that are subjective. The trick is to read it carefully, and critically. How then do we "read" historical maps as data?
  
  There's lots to look for. Some maps have a lot of textual data in addition to the basic details of names and locations. Look, for example, at this detail from John Mitchell's famous map of the territory Britain and France claimed in North America on the eve of the Seven Years War. Here we're looking at the tiny section of the map which includes the area east and north of Lake Huron. The map is exquisitely detailed, but also contains over 3000 words of text (not including place names!) referring to history, territorial claims, navigation routes, distances, and much else. Such information was useful, practical information for someone (one might ask for whom?); it was also felt to add credibility, additional proof of its careful and accurate research. But is the information accurate? This text points to a real event - the Mississauga people were defeated in a war with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the 17th century, but neither they nor any other peoples ever became "the eighth nation" of the Iroquois League. Does this matter? Does it matter that this information is only partly true, or misleading at best? Would it have mattered to an eighteenth-century observer? What inferences might such an observer have about this and similar information on the map? Think too about its production. Remember that maps are authored, like any text, and are usually intended for a particular audience.There were literally 100s of maps of North America available in this period. Why commission another one? Why one with this level of detail? Who would have wanted such a map? Why? Why was this map produced when it was produced? What about that moment made this information important?
  
  Look, too, beyond the geographic features of the map itself. The legend, for example, often contains important information that can be helpful in understanding the map: what it records, where, when and by whom it was made. Legends are often inside more elaborate and artistic renditions that are called a cartouche. A cartouche is usually a frame or image designed both to add additional information - often the publication information or a legend - as well as artistic embellishments. Some are more ornamental than others, but all contain potentially useful information. One can often see themes being represented in the cartouche: a kind of key to thinking about the map. The planisphere on our header was one of the first to depict the North And South America in relation to Europe and Africa. At this point, only the Portuguese were actively venturing along the western coast of Africa and thus this map presents knowledge more or less completely new to other Europeans. It's also worth noting however that Portuguese explorers had travelled as far south as modern-day Ghana, but had gone no more than a mile or two inland - the rest is pure imagination. But these images shouldn't be dismissed as mere flights of fancy. They very often offer symbolic clues to how the mapmakers understood their subjects and the purposes of these maps.
  
  The Newberry Library offers a nice overview of questions and important issues for when approaching historic maps as primary sources. 
  
  The assignment: Write an 800-word essay (approximately three double-spaced pages) on the following early modern maps of Africa. Devote roughly half of your text to a discussion of one of the maps, and the other half comparing that map with the other two. They were produced in different times and different places and probably for different purposes. Each sought to show an audience how to see Africa: how it was shaped, who its people were, how they lived and governed themselves, and so on. And yet they also made other claims of knowledge, ones rooted more in their authors and their authors' contexts than in Africa itself. What can these maps tell us about Africa? What can these maps tell us about the early modern Atlantic World? 
  
  Resist the urge to dismiss them as all being biased. They are, no doubt, but so are most sources. The real trick is to critically examine these texts so as to find as much useful information as possible. And what is useful information? Well, that depends on what question we're asking. If we're asking about the map's ability to convey accurate geographic information, then we head in one direction. If we're asking how the map tells more about the map makers and their societies, then that sends us in other directions. But if we think those questions are unrelated, then we may be missing a lot.
  
  Here, as in your Forum entries, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. Just as historians have different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:
  • When was the map made and by whom and for whom? i.e. who was the author? what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person serve?
  • When did he or she create the source? Is there a broader historical context? (The Mitchell map above was made on the eve of the Seven Years War, after decades of political-military struggles over North America.) 
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?
  • What information did the author wish to communicate?

  You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source. 
  
  Are you required to do any outside research? See the "Planning Tip" below the images of the maps.
  
  Due Friday November 6th, 5 p.m. NEW: extended to Sun., Nov. 8 at the very end of the day
  
  John Senex, Africa: corrected from the observations of the Royal Society at London and Paris (London, 1725). Source: Library of Congress.
  Aaron Arrowsmith, Africa: to the committee and members of the British association discovering the interior parts of Africa this map is with their permission most respectfully inscribed. London: A. Arrowsmith, 1802. Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Emanuel Bowen, A new & accurate map of Negroland and the adjacent countries (London,1747). 
  
  
  Planning tip: in the weeks before this is due, we'll do lessons on European Expansion and Early Modern Africa, two topics that will both be useful for you in thinking about these maps and their construction. The story of these maps are very much related to their context in European expansion, Early Modern African politics, the slave trade, and the broader development of markets in the Atlantic World.  And no need for bibliographies, footnotes, etc - you're not doing any additional research (just looking at these maps). If you make direct use of the Newberry Library piece noted above, or materials from the course, just say so.

  
  * * *

  Assignment 3

  Comparing historiographical interpretations
  
  So far, each of the assignment options has required you to focus your attention on a kind or type of source used by historians: the first option, Wikipedia articles, a kind of tertiary source; and the second option, digital reproductions of early modern maps, a kind of primary source. This third option focuses your attention on interpretations by historians, and it is thus about secondary sources.
  
  In the lesson on the British Agricultural Revolution, we introduced you to historiographical thinking, and you will get to practice it in this assignment. When we talk about historiographical thinking, we mean the way that historians (and you) make sense of primary sources from the past in lectures, essays and books. This activity of making sense of sources from the past is an essential part of what historians do, since the past and sources that have survived from it do not have any clear and undisputed meaning on their own. Before they write histories, historians have to first decide on a subject, discover sources that can help answer questions about that subject, then choose which sources to focus on (since there are often too many) and how to analyze them. All of these actions shape the kinds of answers that historians develop to the questions about the past that they ask. And even if two historians ask many of the same questions and use many of the same sources to answer them, it is unlikely that they will come up with exactly the same answers, or shape those answers in the same way.
  
  The reason for these apparent disagreements, and for the multiplicity of histories about the same subjects, is not that historians are biased. Sure, people have preconceptions and motivations that might shape their views of the world, and historians are no exception. As we've highlighted in the instructions for the map analysis and other feedback and advice in this course, reducing differences and disagreements to authorial "bias" is not helpful. You should avoid this simplistic view -- for this assignment, and in the course overall.
  
  The disagreements are not a weakness or problem about historiography that should trouble us. Quite the contrary! Pay attention when historians disagree, because their competing views can help you see the same subjects or questions about the past from new perspectives. Think about historiographical differences and disagreements in these terms: Authors have to make choices when they write essays and books about history, since the past is far too vast and complicated to be summarized in any single account; therefore, we can and should think about each new, different and even competing historiographical interpretation as an attempt by the author to shed some new and important light on a "past" that might otherwise remain dark to us. This way of thinking about each historiographical interpretation as a new perspective on the past does not mean that all interpretations are equally good or important or strong. Some historians might propose ways of thinking about Jesuit history in New France that are incompatible with other histories of the subject. If you run across these kinds of disagreements, the best step that you can take is to try to better understand the disagreements. When you learn to do this well, you will be learning how to make better sense of other complex social, political, and historical issues.
  
  Your task: For this assignment option, write an essay of about 800 words (approximately 3 double-spaced, typed pages) comparing the ways three of the historians below interpret the role of Jesuit missions to Natives in New France in the 17th century. Devote about half of your paper to a close analysis of the interpretation of one of the historians, and then use the remainder of your paper to compare that historian's work to the other two (with approximately equal attention to each). Your task is not to decide which historian is right or "the best." Your task, instead, is analyze as clearly as possible about what is distinctive about one scholar's historiographical views, and then to compare and contrast that scholar's views with two others.
  
  Here is an important tip: Do NOT think about your essay's subject as though it were about early modern Jesuits. This is kinda, sorta, almost your subject. However, you should be clear with yourself and in your writing that your main subject is the ways that particular historians interpret the actions, motivations, beliefs, etc., of early modern Jesuits. What does Blackburn argue? Which primary sources does Seeman use, and how does he use them? How does McShea respond to the arguments of earlier historians? These are examples of just a few of the kinds of questions that you will be thinking about and trying to answer for this option. When you think in these kinds of terms, you will be practising historiographical thinking. You will be writing about historians' ideas about the past.
  
  You will notice that the lesson on missionaries that rounds out Module 2 is the basis for this assignment. In that lesson you learn about the relationship between Jesuit missionaries and Indigenous peoples in New France. You should review that lesson, and the sources in it (including the primary sources), before you start writing your essay. In that lesson you either read a chapter on this subject by Carole Blackburn and Erik Seeman. By contrast, for this assignment you have a choice of three chapters from a list of four. One of these four choices will the the main focus of your essay, and you will compare that text with two others from the list.
  
  The lesson on missionaries provides you with questions to help you think about the sources. But remember: Your purpose in this assignment is to write about the work of historians. This means that you have to turn all questions about primary sources into questions about how Blackburn, Clair, McShea, or Seeman would read, use, interpret, etc., those primary sources.
  
  In your analysis you should be as specific as possible about what each of the authors argues about Jesuit-Indigenous relations, and how their interpretations compare and contrast with each other. The following list of questions are among the kinds of questions that you should think about as you plan your paper:
  • Who is the author? Be clear about the author, title, date of publication and the larger collection (either the book from which a chapter comes, or the journal in which an essay was published) in which the text is found.
    • The dates of publication are important, since earlier authors cannot respond to works published after their work.
  • How does each author define the subject, and what does each author argue about that subject? What is most important and significant about this argument for understanding the subject of Jesuits in New France?
  • No argument is good without evidence and reasons? How does that author's argument use primary sources as evidence? What reasons or methods does the author provide for choosing that evidence or reading / using it in a particular way?
    • You know some of the primary sources from our lesson on missionaries. Even if the work you have read from an author does not discuss the particular primary sources you know from our course's lesson, what implications might the author's interpretation have for asking questions about and interpreting primary sources about early modern Jesuits?
  • No author makes a historical argument in a vacuum; instead, historians respond to earlier work. Figure out what you can about which / whose earlier arguments a historian is trying to build upon, and which / whose arguments a historian is rejecting.
  • What are the benefits or limitations of each approach to the study of early modern Jesuits in New France?
  • What are the main issues about which these authors agree and disagree? Why are these agreements and disagreements important historiographically?
  You do not have to answer these questions mechanically when you write your paper. You might also think of and address some other questions, but these can help guide your preparation. You will probably not be able to answer all of these questions to the same degree for each text, but try as best you can to highlight the most important and significant features of each of the three authors' interpretations.
  
  Many of the same guidelines and suggestions that applied to the previous two assignments apply to this one, as well. For example, you do not need to include a bibliography or footnotes, as long as you are always clear in your essay about which authors and titles you are writing. You may put references to pages in parentheses, for example. Nonetheless, if you cite additional sources, it is a good idea to list them in bibliographical form.
  
  You also are not required to do extra research, although you may certainly do some background research on each historian or about subjects or terms that you might not understand. If you write about a historian's background (e.g., education, current position, or other publications), make sure you write about what you discover only if you think it is significant for making sense of the similarities or differences of the three historians' interpretations in the assigned texts. This is because your comparative analysis of the texts is what matters the most.
  
  When you write about the historiography (i.e., the historians' texts), try to paraphrase the authors' ideas in your own words. However, you must put quotations in quotation marks and include a page number for them. Try to limit quotations to really, really important phrases or sentences. Avoid quoting long passages, and be sure to clearly introduce and explain the significance of the quotations you do use. You should also introduce and explain the significance of ideas that you paraphrase. If you are not sure of the difference between effective quotations and paraphrases, be sure to look it up.
  
  Here are the four texts, from which you will choose three:
  • Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 105-28. eBook
  • Muriel Clair, "'Seeing These Good Souls Adore God in the Midst of the Woods': The Christianization of Algonquian Nomads in the Jesuit Relations of the 1640s," Journal of Jesuit Studies, vol. 1 (2014), 281-300.
  • Bronwen McShea, "Introduction," in Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
    • Make sure also to check the endnotes for this attached chapter.
  • Erik R. Seeman, The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 59-79.
• 1 media/Lescarbot.jpeg 2022-08-29T15:47:07+00:00 Term 1 - Assignment 1 53 2024/5 image_header 2024-08-17T11:10:22+00:00 This page gives you an overview of the course assignments. Details about Term 1 assignment are on this page below. Term 2 assignment details will be available by the beginning of January 2025. See the "Course at a Glance" for an overview of all Term 1 activities.
  
  In this full-year course, each of you will complete four assignments - two in the first term, and two in the second term - and you have some choices (fewer initially and more as the course progresses).
  
  NOTE: Unless we inform you otherwise, you will submit all assignments using the Assignments Tool in Brightspace.
   

  The Overview

  
  Assignment 1

  • Options: One option only, with some choice of which parts of a book to transcribe and read closely
    • Topic: Transcription and analysis of John Stedman’s Narrative of Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam
  • Length: 3 pages of transcription, plus 500 words of reflection
  • Due: Friday, Nov 3 by 5 pm
  • Point value: 10
  • Details: see below

  Assignment 2

  • Options: You choose 1 option from a choice of 2 topics.
    • Option 1: The Jesuit Relations; involves close reading combined with "distant reading" using Voyant Tools
    • Option 2: "Reading" early modern maps of Africa
  • Length: 1,000-1,200 words of analysis plus selected screenshots from Voyant Tools
  • Due: Monday, Dec. 4 by 5 pm
  • Point value: 15
  • Details: See below
   

  The Details!

  
  Assignment 1:
   

  Transcription and analysis of John Stedman’s Narrative of Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam

  This assignment builds on the lesson you did in Week 05 ("Entering the Archives").

  There are 5 steps to completing this assignment. You should do them in order.
  • Step 1: Complete the lesson for Week 05, including all forum posts. We meet Stedman in Week 5, but this assignment looks to a later chapter in his memoir. This assignment builds on the skills you learned in Week 5's forum exercise.
  • Step 2: Closely read Chapter 9 (pp. 194-215) of John Stedman’s Narrative of Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), 
    • Be sure to use the edition linked HERE 
      • He presents several stories throughout this chapter, so choose one to focus on more deeply than the rest, and transcribe approximately 3 pages. What do we mean by story? Think of the chapter a series of related, but different observations/episodes.  I am calling them stories, but you may see them as something else.  If your episode/story is only a page long, keep transcribing! The aim is to transcribe 3 pages in both versions. Remember from your work in Chapter 2 that the pages from the manuscript do not always coincide with the printed version. Your story may begin in the middle of a page, and if so be sure to indicate when it begins. Do this either by citing the line number or describe where on the page it begins.
  • Step 3: Once you have chosen your story, go to the manuscript copy of John Stedman’s Narrative of Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, and select the corresponding story in the manuscript. This chapter is a little more challenging than Chapter 2, so be sure to read it carefully. You will find the manuscript HERE
    • Transcribe these pages correctly into a using the directions in the Week 05 lesson.
    • Double-space your transcription, and format the text in the same way that it appears in the original, as best as you can. Include page numbers and headings, for example. Start the transcription of each of Stedman’s pages on a new page of your work. Be sure to include page numbers for cross referencing.
  • Step 4: In your reflection, highlight the differences between the manuscript version, and the printed version of your selection, and suggest ways in which historians might question or account for these differences. The primary and secondary sources from weeks 6-8 to will help you contextualize Stedman’s account, so you should to make use of them in your reflection. (There is no minimum or maximum number of sources you should use here, nor is there a strict requirement that you do, but in order to situate this text in historical context, reference to one or two primary or secondary sources from these weeks should help you.) This analysis, including your discussion of the differences between the 2 accounts, should be about 500 words. Double space your reflection, but your transcription can be single spaced.
  • Step 5: Submit your transcription of your 3 chosen pages (from each version of Stedman) plus your analysis of it in one document using the Assignments Tool in Sakai.
  We will grade your work in equal parts on the accuracy of the transcription, as well as the depth of your reflection.

  Assignment 2

  Option 1: The Details
  Text analysis: The Jesuit Relations: Early Missionaries in New France

  In our forum and lesson for Week 11, we read an excerpt from Paul LeJeune; for this option you'll use Voyant Tools as a way to explore the full-text. There will be a workshop style lesson in November to give you some practice with this tool.

  In this exercise, we want you to read a primary source related to colonial-era North America. It's a source by a 17th century Jesuit missionary,  Paul LeJeune that we just discussed in our forum on Missionaries.
  
  For this assignment, you will use this specific version of the text from 1636:
  • The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. The Original French, Latin, and Italian Texts, with English Translations and Notes.Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. 73 volumes. Burrows Brothers, Cleveland, 1896-1901.
  You can find the text by clicking the link in the title.
  
  For the assignment we want you to read it the text a particular manner. You should already have read a short excerpt in the forum. We now want you to do three things:
  • First, "pre-read" the book, using only the titles, publication information and your now developing general knowledge.
  • Second, continue pre-reading using text-mining software (Voyant Tools) as a way to examine the patterns of topics and ideas present in the text. In particular, use these "pre-readings" to allow you to hypothesize about these texts. That is, use your pre-reading to develop questions with which you might approach the more detailed, close reading the text.
  • Then, finally, read the actual book more closely. Do so with an eye to both reading it critically and intelligently (as you always would) but also to testing the impressions/hypotheses you made in your pre-reading work. While you should plan to read the entire book, you may use your pre-reading and best judgement to focus most of your close and careful reading to particular parts. Then Write a 1000 word essay that discusses your process.  How does reading the title page help inform you of the book’s contents? Which tools did you explore with Voyant? What did they expose? How did they inform your approach to reading and understanding the book? Finally, what can we learn about European/Indigenous relations from reading LeJeune closely?
  Are you required to do any outside research? The short answer is some, but not a lot and not fancy research. We're not giving you many outside resources to work with. What you'll need, you'll have to determine. We do expect you to use resources from HIST 2F90 lessons (look to the planning tip at the bottom of this for suggest lessons that will have useful sources for you to use!) But, to be clear, most of your discussion should focus on the text itself.
  
  You must include visuals (screenshots/URLs) from your use of Voyant Tools to more clearly explain your pre-reading process and hypotheses that you have drawn from it. See the links below with instructions about using Voyant Tools, as well as upcoming hints from the instructor, for examples of how to use and include screenshots.
  
  The object here is to say something analytical about the book and how how Voyant Tools might help that analysis. Have a look at this video for quick pointers from Prof. Danny Samson (who leads the course next term) on using Voyant Tools.

  How to use Voyant Tools

  • The main link for learning how to use Voyant Tools is the one immediately above, by Prof. Samson. It's also here.
  • Additional link 1: Introduction to using Voyant Tools
  • Additional link 2: Further tips for using more aspects of Voyant Tools
  In the coming weeks we will offer open, optional workshops plus a "Sandbox" Forum in Sakai to help you practice and to guide you through the skills of using Voyant Tools. (See SAKAI FORUMS for the "Sandbox")
  • NOTE: While Prof. Samson's guide is really necessary for everybody who plans to do this option, these additional two links are recommended for those planning to submit Option 1.
    • (ignore the dates in the "additional links"; these were used in past versions of the course and some of the specific instructions relate to older course activities; you only need to focus on the instructions for using Voyant in general):
  • Also note: There will be a second assignment option in Term 2 that gets you to using Voyant Tools further.
  • Finally: We will be devoting a whole lesson to distant and visual reading at the beginning of Module 3, so take your cue from our workshops on which approach you wish to take for this assignment!
  Planning tip: in the weeks before this is due, we'll do lessons on North American Indigenous Societies and Missionaries, two topics that will both be useful for you in thinking about The Jesuit Relations.
  
  

  
  Option 2: 
  Critical reading of early modern maps of Africa

  An exercise in critical cartography: maps are not neutral data - they have points of view. Explore three maps' viewpoints.

  The Rationale

  
  We love maps, especially but not only historical maps. And while we love google maps and all the GIS-based tools we have at our fingertips these days, we also still own map books. Prof Samson still carries road atlases in his car because while Google offers great directions the broader map allows him to see more context, to have a physical sense of where we're going, where we are, where we should be, what’s nearby, how did we get lost?

  Historical maps are packed with data. They give us a view of landscapes, territory, communication networks, political relationships – in short, views of the political and spatial organization of societies. The image link to this text is a detail from the Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese map made in 1502 outlining Europe, Africa, and the then newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. The detail shows Elmino castle, a large Portuguese trading centre and military installation in what is today Ghana. The size of the castle is obviously not to scale, and may never have been meant to be. Its size and style suggests it was meant to symbolize Portuguese power in Africa. But this unusual representation raises the question of what's meant to be accurate and what's meant to be symbolic - and for that matter if there's a difference. At minimum it asks us to read this map critically and carefully.

  It's clear that maps can give us good, hard data. But it's also true that we tend to assume that such data are objective: that these lines and objects marking places/spaces are real and beyond any substantial degree of interpretation. Over the past few years, historians and geographers have demonstrated that in fact maps are, like most texts, social constructs and thus can be read in different ways. They typically bear a relationship to power and are thus historically situated in particular political, economic, and social worlds. Maps, the geographer J.B. Harley reminds us, make claims to truth, but they almost always betray that they are constructions designed to support claims to truth, more than simply "true" in any objective sense.
  
  Maps are representations of space but because they often bear a powerful resemblance to concrete geographic features of the planet, we tend to think they are factual, or true. As we've seen, they do contain real concrete facts. But they also contain interpretations; the map makers often made choices in what to represent and how to represent it. This human process of interpreting and selecting data adds complexity to how we must understand maps as sources and ask the same critical questions we'd ask of any sources. Are maps biased? Of course they are, but so is all human-produced data. Almost all maps contain elements that are objective, as well as elements that are subjective. The trick is to read it carefully, and critically. How then do we "read" historical maps as data?
  
  There's lots to look for. Some maps have a lot of textual data in addition to the basic details of names and locations. Look carefully at the maps by Herman Moll and Emmanuel Bowen for examples of this. What are your initial impressions of these data? Are they reliable? Does it matter that this information is only partly true, or misleading at best? Would it have mattered to an eighteenth-century observer? What inferences might such an observer have about this and similar information on the map? Think too about its production. Remember that maps are authored, like any text, and are usually intended for a particular audience.There were literally 100s of maps of Africa available in this period. Why commission another one? Why one with this level of detail? Or lack of detail, like Arrowsmith? Who would have wanted such a map? Why? Why was this map produced when it was produced? What about that moment made this information important?
  
  Look, too, beyond the geographic features of the map itself. The legend, for example, often contains important information that can be helpful in understanding the map: what it records, where, when and by whom it was made. Legends are often inside more elaborate and artistic renditions that are called a cartouche. A cartouche is usually a frame or image designed both to add additional information - often the publication information or a legend - as well as artistic embellishments. Some are more ornamental than others, but all contain potentially useful information. One can often see themes being represented in the cartouche: a kind of key to thinking about the map. The planisphere on our header was one of the first to depict the North And South America in relation to Europe and Africa. At this point, only the Portuguese were actively venturing along the western coast of Africa and thus this map presents knowledge more or less completely new to other Europeans. It's also worth noting however that Portuguese explorers had travelled as far south as modern-day Ghana, but had gone no more than a mile or two inland - the rest is pure imagination. But these images shouldn't be dismissed as mere flights of fancy. They very often offer symbolic clues to how the mapmakers understood their subjects and the purposes of these maps.

  The assignment

  Read chapter two from Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016) "Atlantic empires, map workshops and Renaissance geographical culture", to help you think about how early modern maps were made.
  
  Write a 1,000 word essay on the following early modern maps of Africa. Devote roughly half of your text to a discussion of one of the maps, and the other half comparing that map with the other two. They were produced in different times and different places and probably for different purposes. Each sought to show an audience how to see Africa: how it was shaped, who its people were, how they lived and governed themselves, and so on. And yet they also made other claims of knowledge, ones rooted more in their authors and their authors' contexts than in Africa itself. What can these maps tell us about Africa? What can these maps tell us about the early modern Atlantic World? 
  
  Resist the urge to dismiss them as all being biased. They are, no doubt, but so are most sources. The real trick is to critically examine these texts so as to find as much useful information as possible. And what is useful information? Well, that depends on what question we're asking. If we're asking about the map's ability to convey accurate geographic information, then we head in one direction. If we're asking how the map tells more about the map makers and their societies, then that sends us in other directions. But if we think those questions are unrelated, then we may be missing a lot.
  
  Here, as in your Forum entries, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. Just as historians have different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:
  • When was the map made and by whom and for whom? i.e. who was the author? what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person serve?
  • When did the cartographer create the source? Is there a broader historical context? (The Mitchell map above was made on the eve of the Seven Years War, after decades of political-military struggles over North America - that context informs much of the information Mitchell included, and what he didn't include.) 
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?
  • What information did the author wish to communicate?
  • We're speaking of "an author" here by which we mean the mapmaker, or cartographer. Who that individual was, matters. But you shouldn't imagine that these maps are like a book that this mapmaker thought he'd make up on a Tuesday afternoon [and sadly the vast majority are "he"]. All these maps were commissioned. That is, someone hired this mapmaker to make this map. That's not always the case. Sometimes, particularly in some of the bigger more famous firms, they would produce something believing there to be a market for such a map. In either case, you should be thinking about that context - and why there would be a demand for, or a market for, that map - i.e. a map that portrays that place in this particular way.
  • Finally, two hints:
    • (i) Most of you will assume that the map reflects the mapmaker's personal knowledge: that the person surveyed that territory and produced this map. Sometimes that's true (and in a map we'll look at later in the course, that is true), but usually it's not. And in the case of these African maps, it's absolutely clear that none of these mapmakers had ever been to Africa. Thus, you should think about how the mapmakers knew what they put to paper.
    • (ii) Many of you will also assume that the maps will become more accurate with time. Sometimes that's true; sometimes that's not. Just don't assume that's true.

  You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source. 
  
  Are you required to do any outside research? The short answer is some, but not a lot and not fancy research. We're not giving you much outside resources to work with. What you'll need, you'll have to determine. Basic online googling will get you a fair distance: be sure to cite what you use, and choose websites that don't appear random or problematic. Wikipedia iss fine for many things. But try the library. There are lots of guides and handbooks that often contain quick high-quality information. We do expect you to use resources from HIST 2F90 lessons (look to the planning tip at the bottom of the page for suggest lessons that will have useful sources for you to use!) But, to be clear, most of your discussion should focus on the maps themselves.

  Tip: the images included here are fairly high quality, but the links take you to much better high-quality scans from the Library of Congress. Close reading of some of the details on the high-quality scans may be very helpful.

  Herman Moll, Map of Africa “To the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Peterborow and Monmouth, &c This Map of Africa Is Most Humbly Dedicated”. (London, 1710) Source: Princeton University Library
  
  
  Aaron Arrowsmith, Africa: to the committee and members of the British association discovering the interior parts of Africa this map is with their permission most respectfully inscribed. London: A. Arrowsmith, 1802. Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Emanuel Bowen, A new & accurate map of Negroland and the adjacent countries (London,1747). Source: Library of Congress.

  Planning tip: in the weeks before this is due, we'll do lessons on European Expansion and Early Modern Africa, two topics that will both be useful for you in thinking about these maps and their construction. The story of these maps are very much related to their context in European expansion, early modern African politics, the slave trade, and the broader development of markets in the Atlantic World. And finally, we will be devoting a whole lesson to distant and visual reading at the beginning of Module 3, so take your cue from our workshops on which approach you wish to take for this assignment!
• 1 media/Moll West Indies 1702 DETAIL Raremaps.jpg 2022-10-04T14:09:32+00:00 Europe's Empires Expand 36 2023-24 image_header 2024-08-27T14:39:34+00:00

  This week's big question

  What were the motivations of the private adventurers who claimed land for European countries?

  Video Introduction
  
  

  Learning outcomes

  At the end of this week you should be able to:
  • describe some of the major locations and bases for European overseas expansion in the 15th through 17th centuries;
  • explain something of the different motivations for overseas expansion;
  • explain the basis for the integration of the New World into the emerging Atlantic economy;
  • outline some of the major economic, political, and cultural reasons for overseas exploration and colonization.

  Questions to consider, and learning activity

  Remember what you've learned about secondary sources and "historiographical thinking" from the Lessons just before Reading Week on Agricultural Revolutions. Once you've read over this page, begin your preparation for the Week's Forum by reading the chapter by Klooster for historical context and a deeper explanation of some of the motivating factors for European Expansion. Use this context to help you  read and analyze 3 of the primary sources plus one of the maps in order to answer one or more of the questions below.
  • How would you characterize the motives of these writers for colonizing the New World? Drawing on the cultural, political, or economic ideas you’ve seen in the first module (e.g., the Great Chain of Being, or Catholic vs Protestant views about authority), do you see some of those influences at work in the discussions of colonization? Do you see patterns of similarity among the different writers? Differences?
  • What can the images included on this page tell us about early modern understandings of the New World? What did early modern viewers “see” when they looked at these images? Discuss different ways the maps can help us understand the process of imperial expansion. Do the maps speak to the same motivations as the texts?
  • How did these authors justify their plans to take over these newly discovered lands?
  • Why did Parkhurst urge English colonization of Newfoundland?  Was Newfoundland different than the other cases?
  • Biard was a Jesuit missionary -- how does that influence how we should interpret this document?
  • How was America drawn into the Atlantic world?

  Background

  Paralleling the development of the centralized state and the agricultural revolution, western European states also began utilizing improvements in map-making, navigation devices, and ship construction that allowed them to explore further along the coasts of Africa and ultimately to venture further to the west. We will not, in this course, pursue these technological questions relating to navigation. Instead we will focus on the question of what encouraged Europeans to venture further afield, and what motivated them to colonize the Americas.  An interesting dimension of this early exploration is who was leading these expansive movements.  While we often speak of states as actors –- that is, that England (or France, or whatever) did things (explored, colonized, whatever) –- it was not the states themselves leading the way but private adventurers acting in the name of these states.  This in part explains why some of the most famous “explorers” were Italian seamen such as Cristoforo Columbo (who in English we call Christopher Columbus) and Giovanni Caboto (who we call John Cabot) sailing for Spain and England respectively.  ​Our questions this week focus on these adventurers’ motivations for exploring, what value they saw in the new lands, how they encouraged their sponsoring states to continue to support their endeavours, and ultimately what motivated the states to support expansion.
  
  In other words, our topic this week is the rise of European colonialism, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries.  This is very much one of those longer-term stories that we discussed in past weeks. But the exact parameters aren’t clear.  We might be tempted to say this story began with Columbus arriving in the Caribbean in 1492 –- and certainly in many ways it did –- but of course all that really happened on those voyages was that Europeans learned that there was another continent across the ocean, what they came to call the New World.  And while significant consequences began very quickly in places like Mexico and the Caribbean, the emergence of European power in the Americas, Africa, and Asia did not begin that day.  It took centuries to reach the point that we might now recognize as the colonial world being under the control, or domination, of Europe.  When we can begin to speak of a European dominance of the Americas is not clear.
  
  This raises several big questions: Why did the European empires form outside of Europe?  Why did European colonization take place? Why did it take so long? And if it took so long, and is not especially clear as to why it happened, how can we even understand it as a story?  We won’t answer that question this week.  Indeed, historians don't completely agree on the answers anyhow, but as we proceed over the next few weeks we’ll begin to see some patterns.
  
  This week, we’ll emphasize two features of this story. First, that much of the “imperial expansion” of Europe looked quite different on the ground than it did in the minds of (and as seen on the maps of) the European powers.  There are five early modern European powers that we should keep in mind: England, France, Holland, Spain, and Portugal.  While the Spanish and Portuguese did make significant inroads in terms of conquering and controlling territory in the Caribbean and South America, France, Holland, and England’s place on the ground in North America was much less impressive –- especially much less impressive than its cartographers imagined.  As we’ll see in a few weeks, New England and the other British colonies would grow quickly, but even by the time of the American revolution -– almost 300 years after Columbus! -– they remained tightly enclosed along the Atlantic seaboard.  Similarly, French maps depicted their control of much of eastern North America, but the actual place of French power was limited to a few enclaves along the St. Lawrence River.  
  
  Second, what the European states and their private adventurer-proxies thought the best actions on the ground were not always the same things, and often not at all compatible.  While private adventurers had to maintain the good graces of their Old World political supporters, in the New World they had a lot of latitude on the ground. There was no army –- i.e., no state force -– there in the New World or in Africa to enforce the expectations of Kings or legislators. Thus, these merchant-adventurers were taking risks if they tested their rulers' authority, but the lure of profit –- and power –- could be great.  Moreover, again as will become clear in future weeks, even that limited presence could have profound consequences.

  Toolbox

  In the First Module you practiced the effective analysis of primary and secondary sources, were introduced to historiographical debates in our lesson on Agricultural Revolutions, and practiced the slow reading of documents by transcribing them. These early lessons will provide a solid base upon which to build your skills throughout the course. You may wish to review the skills of "sourcing" that you learned about in Module 1.
  
  In your Forum entries for this week's Lesson, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. In a way similar to historians having different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:

  • Who was the author and what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person have?
  • When did he or she create the source?
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?

  To find out more about the general kinds of questions you should always have in mind when you consider a source's perspective, see the Historical Thinking worksheets available through the link. 
  
  In addition, this week we will spend some time thinking about maps!  You will notice that many of our lessons include images and maps as both tell us much about the imaginations, motivations, and ideologies of their creators.  Choose one map, and spend some time analyzing it in your forum post.

  • Observe the map, in other words, describe what you see. What area does the map describe? What do you notice first? What size and shape is the map? Does anything look strange or unfamiliar? Does the map offer any textual descriptions?
  • Analyze the map, using the same questions you might ask of any primary source. Who created the map? When? For what purpose? For whom (intended audience rather than a specific individual, although that may also be applicable)?  What does this map tell you about how much the creator understood the subject? Did they have first hand knowledge of the area?
  • Finally, can you connect the map to at least one of our primary sources? How might they support the interests of European Expansion described in the document?

  Primary sources

  Read and analyze any 3 of the primary sources plus one of the maps.
  • Pierre Biard, “Reasons why the Cultivation of New France ought to be Undertaken in Earnest”, Rueben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, volume IV (Cleveland, 1894), 111-7.
  • John Cotton, God’s Promise to his Plantation (1630).
  • John Brereton, A Briefe Relation of the Description of Elizabeth's Ile [Cape Cod] (London, 1602).
  • Richard Hakluyt, the elder, “Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended towards Virginia [1585]”, in David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, volume III (London, Macmillan, 1979), 64-69.
  • From: David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, volume IV (London, Macmillan, 1979).
    • “Petition of Merchants of London and Bristol for a Newfoundland Charter, 1610”, pp. 131-2.
    • "Letters from Newfoundland, 1583, and the establishment of a Colony in NFLD", pp. 20-22 and 131-133.

  Secondary sources

  Pay attention to the relationship between primary and secondary sources here. 
  
  Please read:
  
  Pope, Peter. “Adventures in the Sack Trade: London Merchants in the Canada and Newfoundland Trades, 1627-1648.” The Northern Mariner 6, no. 1 (1996): 1–19.
  
  OR
  
  Donovan, Kenneth. 2006. “Imposing Discipline Upon Nature: Gardens, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry in Cape Breton, 1713-1758”. Material Culture Review 64 (June).
  
  If you prefer to listen:
  
  Ewen, Misha "The Virginia Venture", Ben Franklin's World, Episode 355, podcast.

  
  Supplementary Materials

  
  EWEN, MISHA. “WOMEN INVESTORS AND THE VIRGINIA COMPANY IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.” The Historical Journal 62, no. 4 (2019): 853–74.
  
  Klooster, Wim,' The Northern European Atlantic World', in Nicholas Canny, and Philip Morgan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450-1850 (2011; online edn, Oxford Academic,18 Sept. 2012).
  
  Kennedy, Gregory M. W.. Something of a Peasant Paradise? : Comparing Rural Societies in Acadie and the Loudunais, 1604-1755. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014.

• 1 2021-09-07T18:56:21+00:00 Assignments (Term 1), 2021-22 35 plain 2021-12-06T20:26:37+00:00 This page gives you an overview of the course assignments. Details about Term 1 assignment are on this page below. Term 2 assignment details will be available by the beginning of January 2022. See the "Course at a Glance" for an overview of all Term 1 activities.
  
  In this full-year course, each of you will complete four assignments - two in the first term, and two in the second term - and you have some choices (fewer initially and more as the course progresses).
  
  NOTE: Unless we inform you otherwise, you will submit all assignments using the Assignments Tool in Sakai.
  
  ALSO NOTE: This page includes lots of images. Because of this, the page often takes a few extra moments to load all its parts. Please be a little patient.

  Assignment 1 Overview

  • Options: One option only, with some choice of which parts of a book to transcribe and read closely
    • Topic: Transcription and analysis of Daniel Defoe's account of the plague in London
  • Length: 3 pages of transcription, plus 750 words of analysis
  • Due: Monday, Oct. 18 by 5 pm
  • Point value: 7.5 of the 15 points for Term 1 assignments
  • Details: See below

  Assignment 2 Overview

  • Options: You choose 1 option from a choice of 2 topics.
    • Option 1: An 18th-century historian describes New England; involves close reading combined with "distant reading" using Voyant Tools
    • Option 2: "Reading" early modern maps of Africa
  • Length: 750-1,000 words of analysis plus selected screenshots from Voyant Tools
  • Due: Friday, Dec. 10 by 5 pm
  • Point value: 7.5
  • Details: See below
   

  Assignment 1: The Details
  Transcription and analysis of Daniel Defoe's account of the plague in London

  This assignment builds on the lesson you do in Week 05 ("How to Read Early Modern Books").

  There are 5 steps to completing this assignment. You should do them in order.
  • Step 1: Complete the lesson for Week 05, including all forum posts.
  • Step 2: Then spend an hour or two reading through all parts of the rest of Daniel Defoe's book Memoirs of the Plague [1722].
    • UPDATED: Be sure to use the edition linked HERE (the same one from Google Books that we use in the lesson). There are other versions of this book that are available, but they well not allow you to complete the assignment effectively and successfully. (The URL is https://books.google.ca/books?id=-iZcAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false). IF these links don't work, check out the link in the lesson on Reading Early Modern Books.
    • Consider this first reading of the entire book to be an exercise in "pre-reading" the book. By this we don't exactly mean speed reading. Instead of trying to read "everything" in full detail in a short amount of time, we are simply asking you to look over all parts and pages of the book. When you do this, your goal is to get a sense of how the author organized the book, what main parts it has, and which sections seem to stand out and might be worth further attention. If you can, try to scan the pages of some sections so that you get a sense of what the author is writing about on those pages.
  • Step 3: Select 3 consecutive pages from somewhere of your choice between pp. 21-286 of the book. (NOTE: "pp." the the proper abbreviation of "pages".)
    • Transcribe these pages correctly on your wordprocessor using the directions in the Week 05 lesson.
    • Double-space your transcription, and format the text in the same way that it appears in the original, as best as you can. Include page numbers and headings, for example. Start the transcription of each of Defoe's pages on a new page of your work.
  • Step 4: Analyze the main themes of the 3 pages you have transcribed, and compare it with the first 20 pages of the book that we read in the Week 05 lesson. This analysis should be about 750 words. Double space your work.
  • Step 5: Submit your transcription of your 3 chosen pages plus your analysis of it in one computer file using the Assignments Tool in Sakai.
  We will grade your work in equal parts on the accuracy of the transcription, as well as the quality of the analysis.
  
  If you discuss your assignment with others in this course, do not transcribe the same 3 pages.
  
  

  Assignment 2, Option 1: The Details
  Text analysis: An eighteenth-century historian describes New England

  In our forum and lesson for Week 09, we read an excerpt from Amos Adams; for this option you'll use Voyant Tools as a way to explore the full-text. Extra resources and sessions are available to help you learn how to use this tool.

  In this exercise, we want you to read a primary source related to colonial-era North America. It's a source by an 18th-century historian Amos Adams that we just discussed in our forum on the Columbian Exchange.
  
  For this assignment, you will use this specific version of the text:
  • Amos Adams, A concise, historical view of the difficulties, hardships, and perils which attended the planting and progressive improvements of New-England (Boston: Dilly, 1770).
  You can find the text by clicking the link in the title.
  
  For the assignment we want you to read it the text a particular manner. You should already have read a short excerpt in the forum. We now want you to do three things:
  • First, "pre-read" the book, using only the titles, publication information and your now developing general knowledge.
  • Second, continue pre-reading using text-mining software (Voyant Tools) as a way to examine the patterns of topics and ideas present in the text. In particular, use these "pre-readings" to allow you to hypothesize about these texts. That is, use your pre-reading to develop questions with which you might approach the more detailed, close reading the text.
  • Then, finally, read the actual book more closely. Do so with an eye to both reading it critically and intelligently (as you always would) but also to testing the impressions/hypotheses you made in your pre-reading work. While you should plan to read the entire book, you may use your pre-reading and best judgement to focus most of your close and careful reading to particular parts.
  You should include visuals (screenshots/URLs) from your use of Voyant Tools to more clearly explain your pre-reading process and hypotheses that you have drawn from it. See the links below with instructions about using Voyant Tools, as well as upcoming hints from the instructor (NOW AVAILABLE IN SAKAI FORUMS), for examples of how to use and include screenshots.
  
  The object here is to say something analytical about the book and how how Voyant Tools might help that analysis. Have a look at this video for quick pointers from Prof. Danny Samson (who leads the course next term) on using Voyant Tools.

  How to use Voyant Tools

  • The main link for learning how to use Voyant Tools is the one immediately above, by Prof. Samson. It's also here.
  • Additional link 1: Introduction to using Voyant Tools
  • Additional link 2: Further tips for using more aspects of Voyant Tools
  In the coming weeks we will offer open, optional workshops plus a "Sandbox" Forum in Sakai to help you practice and to guide you through the skills of using Voyant Tools. (See SAKAI FORUMS for the "Sandbox")
  • NOTE: While Prof. Samson's guide is really necessary for everybody who plans to do this option, these additional two links are recommended for those planning to submit Option 1.
    • (ignore the dates in the "additional links"; these were used in past versions of the course and some of the specific instructions relate to older course activities; you only need to focus on the instructions for using Voyant in general):
  • Also note: There will likely be a second assignment option in Term 2 that gets you to using Voyant Tools further.
  
  

  
  Assignment 2, Option 2: The Details
  Critical reading of early modern maps of Africa

  An exercise in critical cartography: maps are not neutral data - they have points of view. Explore three maps' viewpoints.

  We love maps, especially but not only historical maps. And while we love google maps and all the GIS-based tools we have at our fingertips these days, we also still own map books. Prof Samson still carries road atlases in his car because while Google offers great directions the broader map allows him to see more context, to have a physical sense of where we're going, where we are, where we should be, what’s nearby, how did we get lost?

  Historical maps are packed with data. They give us a view of landscapes, territory, communication networks, political relationships – in short, views of the political and spatial organization of societies. The image link to this text is a detail from the Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese map made in 1502 outlining Europe, Africa, and the then newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. The detail shows Elmino castle, a large Portuguese trading centre and military installation in what is today Ghana. The size of the castle is obviously not to scale, and may never have been meant to be. Its size and style suggests it was meant to symbolize Portuguese power in Africa. But this unusual representation raises the question of what's meant to be accurate and what's meant to be symbolic - and for that matter if there's a difference. At minimum it asks us to read this map critically and carefully.

  It's clear that maps can give us good, hard data. But it's also true that we tend to assume that such data are objective: that these lines and objects marking places/spaces are real and beyond any substantial degree of interpretation. Over the past few years, historians and geographers have demonstrated that in fact maps are, like most texts, social constructs and thus can be read in different ways. They typically bear a relationship to power and are thus historically situated in particular political, economic, and social worlds. Maps, the geographer J.B. Harley reminds us, make claims to truth, but they almost always betray that they are constructions designed to support claims to truth, more than simply "true" in any objective sense.
  
  Maps are representations of space but because they often bear a powerful resemblance to concrete geographic features of the planet, we tend to think they are factual, or true. As we've seen, they do contain real concrete facts. But they also contain interpretations; the map makers often made choices in what to represent and how to represent it. This human process of interpreting and selecting data adds complexity to how we must understand maps as sources and ask the same critical questions we'd ask of any sources. Are maps biased? Of course they are, but so is all human-produced data. Almost all maps contain elements that are objective, as well as elements that are subjective. The trick is to read it carefully, and critically. How then do we "read" historical maps as data?
  
  There's lots to look for. Some maps have a lot of textual data in addition to the basic details of names and locations. Look, for example, at this detail from John Mitchell's famous map of the territory Britain and France claimed in North America on the eve of the Seven Years War. Here we're looking at a tiny section of the map which includes the area east and north of Lake Huron. The map is exquisitely detailed, but also contains over 3000 words of text (not including place names!) referring to history, territorial claims, navigation routes, distances, and much else. Such information was useful, practical information for someone (one might ask for whom?); it was also felt to add credibility, additional proof of its careful and accurate research. But is the information accurate? This text points to a real event - the Mississauga people were defeated in a war with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the 17th century, but neither they nor any other peoples ever became "the eighth nation" of the Iroquois League. Does this matter? Does it matter that this information is only partly true, or misleading at best? Would it have mattered to an eighteenth-century observer? What inferences might such an observer have about this and similar information on the map? Think too about its production. Remember that maps are authored, like any text, and are usually intended for a particular audience.There were literally 100s of maps of North America available in this period. Why commission another one? Why one with this level of detail? Who would have wanted such a map? Why? Why was this map produced when it was produced? What about that moment made this information important?
  
  Look, too, beyond the geographic features of the map itself. The legend, for example, often contains important information that can be helpful in understanding the map: what it records, where, when and by whom it was made. Legends are often inside more elaborate and artistic renditions that are called a cartouche. A cartouche is usually a frame or image designed both to add additional information - often the publication information or a legend - as well as artistic embellishments. Some are more ornamental than others, but all contain potentially useful information. One can often see themes being represented in the cartouche: a kind of key to thinking about the map. The planisphere on our header was one of the first to depict the North And South America in relation to Europe and Africa. At this point, only the Portuguese were actively venturing along the western coast of Africa and thus this map presents knowledge more or less completely new to other Europeans. It's also worth noting however that Portuguese explorers had travelled as far south as modern-day Ghana, but had gone no more than a mile or two inland - the rest is pure imagination. But these images shouldn't be dismissed as mere flights of fancy. They very often offer symbolic clues to how the mapmakers understood their subjects and the purposes of these maps.
  
  The Newberry Library offers a nice overview of questions and important issues for when approaching historic maps as primary sources. 
  
  The assignment: Write an 750-word essay on the following early modern maps of Africa. Devote roughly half of your text to a discussion of one of the maps, and the other half comparing that map with the other two. They were produced in different times and different places and probably for different purposes. Each sought to show an audience how to see Africa: how it was shaped, who its people were, how they lived and governed themselves, and so on. And yet they also made other claims of knowledge, ones rooted more in their authors and their authors' contexts than in Africa itself. What can these maps tell us about Africa? What can these maps tell us about the early modern Atlantic World? 
  
  Resist the urge to dismiss them as all being biased. They are, no doubt, but so are most sources. The real trick is to critically examine these texts so as to find as much useful information as possible. And what is useful information? Well, that depends on what question we're asking. If we're asking about the map's ability to convey accurate geographic information, then we head in one direction. If we're asking how the map tells more about the map makers and their societies, then that sends us in other directions. But if we think those questions are unrelated, then we may be missing a lot.
  
  Here, as in your Forum entries, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. Just as historians have different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:
  • When was the map made and by whom and for whom? i.e. who was the author? what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person serve?
  • When did the cartographer create the source? Is there a broader historical context? (The Mitchell map above was made on the eve of the Seven Years War, after decades of political-military struggles over North America - that context informs much of the information Mitchell included, and what he didn't include.) 
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?
  • What information did the author wish to communicate?
  • We're speaking of "an author" here by which we mean the mapmaker, or cartographer. Who that individual was, matters. But you shouldn't imagine that these maps are like a book that this mapmaker thought he'd make up on a Tuesday afternoon [and sadly the vast majority are "he"]. All these maps were commissioned. That is, someone hired this mapmaker to make this map. That's not always the case. Sometimes, particularly in some of the bigger more famous firms, they would produce something believing there to be a market for such a map. In either case, you should be thinking about that context - and why there would be a demand for, or a market for, that map - i.e. a map that portrays that place in this particular way.
  • Finally, two hints:
    • (i) Most of you will assume that the map reflects the mapmaker's personal knowledge: that the person surveyed that territory and produced this map. Sometimes that's true (and in a map we'll look at later in the course, that is true), but usually it's not. And in the case of these African maps, it's absolutely clear that none of these mapmakers had ever been to Africa. Thus, you should think about how the mapmakers knew what they put to paper.
    • (ii) Many of you will also assume that the maps will become more accurate with time. Sometimes that's true; sometimes that's not. Just don't assume that's true.

  You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source. 
  
  Are you required to do any outside research? The short answer is some, but not a lot and not fancy research. We're not giving you much outside resources to work with. What you'll need, you'll have to determine. Basic online googling will get you a fair distance: be sure to cite what you use, and choose websites that don't appear random or problematic. Wikipedia iss fine for many things. But try the library. There are lots of guides and handbooks that often contain quick high-quality information. Or resources from HIST 2F90 lessons. But, to be clear, most of your discussion should focus on the maps themselves.

  Tip: the images included here are fairly high quality, but the links take you to much better high-quality scans from the Library of Congress. Close reading of some of the details on the high-quality scans may be very helpful.

  John Senex, Africa: corrected from the observations of the Royal Society at London and Paris (London, 1725). Source: Library of Congress.
  Aaron Arrowsmith, Africa: to the committee and members of the British association discovering the interior parts of Africa this map is with their permission most respectfully inscribed. London: A. Arrowsmith, 1802. Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Emanuel Bowen, A new & accurate map of Negroland and the adjacent countries (London,1747). Source: Library of Congress.
  

  Planning tip: in the weeks before this is due, we'll do lessons on European Expansion and Early Modern Africa, two topics that will both be useful for you in thinking about these maps and their construction. The story of these maps are very much related to their context in European expansion, early modern African politics, the slave trade, and the broader development of markets in the Atlantic World.
• 1 media/Jefferys Atlas Frontispiece.jpg 2024-08-17T11:11:27+00:00 Term 1 - Assignment 2 5 Under Construction - The basic structure will be the same, but maps and materials will change image_header 2024-08-30T11:25:37+00:00

  Assignment 2

  • Options: You choose 1 option from a choice of 2 topics.
    • Option 1:  Involves close reading combined with "distant reading" using Voyant Tools
    • Option 2: "Reading" early modern maps
  • Length: 750-1000 words of analysis plus selected screenshots from Voyant Tools
  • Due: Monday, Dec. 4 by 5 pm
  • Point value: 10
  • Details: See below

  The Details!

  Option 1: Text analysis: The Jesuit Relations: Early Missionaries in New France

   

  In our forum and lesson for Week 11, we read an excerpt from Paul LeJeune; for this option you'll use Voyant Tools as a way to explore the full-text. There will be a workshop style lesson in November to give you some practice with this tool.

  In this exercise, we want you to read a primary source related to colonial-era North America. It's a source by a 17th century Jesuit missionary,  Paul LeJeune that we just discussed in our forum on Missionaries.
  
  For this assignment, you will use this specific version of the text from 1636:
  • The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. The Original French, Latin, and Italian Texts, with English Translations and Notes.Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. 73 volumes. Burrows Brothers, Cleveland, 1896-1901.
  You can find the text by clicking the link in the title.
  
  For the assignment we want you to read it the text a particular manner. You should already have read a short excerpt in the forum. We now want you to do three things:
  • First, "pre-read" the book, using only the titles, publication information and your now developing general knowledge.
  • Second, continue pre-reading using text-mining software (Voyant Tools) as a way to examine the patterns of topics and ideas present in the text. In particular, use these "pre-readings" to allow you to hypothesize about these texts. That is, use your pre-reading to develop questions with which you might approach the more detailed, close reading the text.
  • Then, finally, read the actual book more closely. Do so with an eye to both reading it critically and intelligently (as you always would) but also to testing the impressions/hypotheses you made in your pre-reading work. While you should plan to read the entire book, you may use your pre-reading and best judgement to focus most of your close and careful reading to particular parts. Then Write a 1000 word essay that discusses your process.  How does reading the title page help inform you of the book’s contents? Which tools did you explore with Voyant? What did they expose? How did they inform your approach to reading and understanding the book? Finally, what can we learn about European/Indigenous relations from reading LeJeune closely?
  Are you required to do any outside research? The short answer is some, but not a lot and not fancy research. We're not giving you many outside resources to work with. What you'll need, you'll have to determine. We do expect you to use resources from HIST 2F90 lessons (look to the planning tip at the bottom of this for suggest lessons that will have useful sources for you to use!) But, to be clear, most of your discussion should focus on the text itself.
  
  You must include visuals (screenshots/URLs) from your use of Voyant Tools to more clearly explain your pre-reading process and hypotheses that you have drawn from it. See the links below with instructions about using Voyant Tools, as well as upcoming hints from the instructor, for examples of how to use and include screenshots.
  
  The object here is to say something analytical about the book and how how Voyant Tools might help that analysis. Have a look at this video for quick pointers from Prof. Danny Samson (who leads the course next term) on using Voyant Tools.

  How to use Voyant Tools

  • The main link for learning how to use Voyant Tools is the one immediately above, by Prof. Samson. It's also here.
  • Additional link 1: Introduction to using Voyant Tools
  • Additional link 2: Further tips for using more aspects of Voyant Tools
  In the coming weeks we will offer open, optional workshops plus a "Sandbox" Forum in Sakai to help you practice and to guide you through the skills of using Voyant Tools. (See SAKAI FORUMS for the "Sandbox")
  • NOTE: While Prof. Samson's guide is really necessary for everybody who plans to do this option, these additional two links are recommended for those planning to submit Option 1.
    • (ignore the dates in the "additional links"; these were used in past versions of the course and some of the specific instructions relate to older course activities; you only need to focus on the instructions for using Voyant in general):
  • Also note: There will be a second assignment option in Term 2 that gets you to using Voyant Tools further.
  • Finally: We will be devoting a whole lesson to distant and visual reading at the beginning of Module 3, so take your cue from our workshops on which approach you wish to take for this assignment!
  Planning tip: in the weeks before this is due, we'll do lessons on North American Indigenous Societies and Missionaries, two topics that will both be useful for you in thinking about The Jesuit Relations.
   

  
  Option 2: Critical reading of early modern maps of Africa

  An exercise in critical cartography: maps are not neutral data - they have points of view. Explore three maps' viewpoints.

  The Rationale

  
  We love maps, especially but not only historical maps. And while we love google maps and all the GIS-based tools we have at our fingertips these days, we also still own map books. Prof Samson still carries road atlases in his car because while Google offers great directions the broader map allows him to see more context, to have a physical sense of where we're going, where we are, where we should be, what’s nearby, how did we get lost?

  
  
  Alberto Cantino, "Planisphere" (1502)
  Cantino lived in Portugal at the time of the great discoveries of Columbus, Vespucci, Cabot and Cabral. This map, smuggled to Italy in 1502, shows some of the newly explored territories of the Caribbean, and the northeastern coast of South America. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

  Historical maps are packed with data. They give us a view of landscapes, territory, communication networks, political relationships – in short, views of the political and spatial organization of societies. The image link to this text is a detail from the Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese map made in 1502 outlining Europe, Africa, and the then newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. The detail shows Elmino castle, a large Portuguese trading centre and military installation in what is today Ghana. The size of the castle is obviously not to scale, and may never have been meant to be. Its size and style suggests it was meant to symbolize Portuguese power in Africa. But this unusual representation raises the question of what's meant to be accurate and what's meant to be symbolic - and for that matter if there's a difference. At minimum it asks us to read this map critically and carefully.

  It's clear that maps can give us good, hard data. But it's also true that we tend to assume that such data are objective: that these lines and objects marking places/spaces are real and beyond any substantial degree of interpretation. Over the past few years, historians and geographers have demonstrated that in fact maps are, like most texts, social constructs and thus can be read in different ways. They typically bear a relationship to power and are thus historically situated in particular political, economic, and social worlds. Maps, the geographer J.B. Harley reminds us, make claims to truth, but they almost always betray that they are constructions designed to support claims to truth, more than simply "true" in any objective sense.
  
  Maps are representations of space but because they often bear a powerful resemblance to concrete geographic features of the planet, we tend to think they are factual, or true. As we've seen, they do contain real concrete facts. But they also contain interpretations; the map makers often made choices in what to represent and how to represent it. This human process of interpreting and selecting data adds complexity to how we must understand maps as sources and ask the same critical questions we'd ask of any sources. Are maps biased? Of course they are, but so is all human-produced data. Almost all maps contain elements that are objective, as well as elements that are subjective. The trick is to read it carefully, and critically. How then do we "read" historical maps as data?
  
  There's lots to look for. Some maps have a lot of textual data in addition to the basic details of names and locations. Look carefully at the maps by Herman Moll and Emmanuel Bowen for examples of this. What are your initial impressions of these data? Are they reliable? Does it matter that this information is only partly true, or misleading at best? Would it have mattered to an eighteenth-century observer? What inferences might such an observer have about this and similar information on the map? Think too about its production. Remember that maps are authored, like any text, and are usually intended for a particular audience.There were literally 100s of maps of Africa available in this period. Why commission another one? Why one with this level of detail? Or lack of detail, like Arrowsmith? Who would have wanted such a map? Why? Why was this map produced when it was produced? What about that moment made this information important?
  
  Look, too, beyond the geographic features of the map itself. The legend, for example, often contains important information that can be helpful in understanding the map: what it records, where, when and by whom it was made. Legends are often inside more elaborate and artistic renditions that are called a cartouche. A cartouche is usually a frame or image designed both to add additional information - often the publication information or a legend - as well as artistic embellishments. Some are more ornamental than others, but all contain potentially useful information. One can often see themes being represented in the cartouche: a kind of key to thinking about the map. The planisphere on our header was one of the first to depict the North And South America in relation to Europe and Africa. At this point, only the Portuguese were actively venturing along the western coast of Africa and thus this map presents knowledge more or less completely new to other Europeans. It's also worth noting however that Portuguese explorers had travelled as far south as modern-day Ghana, but had gone no more than a mile or two inland - the rest is pure imagination. But these images shouldn't be dismissed as mere flights of fancy. They very often offer symbolic clues to how the mapmakers understood their subjects and the purposes of these maps.

  The assignment

  
  Read chapter two from Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016) "Atlantic empires, map workshops and Renaissance geographical culture", to help you think about how early modern maps were made.
  
  Write a 1,000 word essay on the following early modern maps of Africa. Devote roughly half of your text to a discussion of one of the maps, and the other half comparing that map with the other two. They were produced in different times and different places and probably for different purposes. Each sought to show an audience how to see Africa: how it was shaped, who its people were, how they lived and governed themselves, and so on. And yet they also made other claims of knowledge, ones rooted more in their authors and their authors' contexts than in Africa itself. What can these maps tell us about Africa? What can these maps tell us about the early modern Atlantic World? 
  
  Resist the urge to dismiss them as all being biased. They are, no doubt, but so are most sources. The real trick is to critically examine these texts so as to find as much useful information as possible. And what is useful information? Well, that depends on what question we're asking. If we're asking about the map's ability to convey accurate geographic information, then we head in one direction. If we're asking how the map tells more about the map makers and their societies, then that sends us in other directions. But if we think those questions are unrelated, then we may be missing a lot.
  
  Here, as in your Forum entries, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. Just as historians have different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:
  • When was the map made and by whom and for whom? i.e. who was the author? what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person serve?
  • When did the cartographer create the source? Is there a broader historical context? (The Mitchell map above was made on the eve of the Seven Years War, after decades of political-military struggles over North America - that context informs much of the information Mitchell included, and what he didn't include.) 
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?
  • What information did the author wish to communicate?
  • We're speaking of "an author" here by which we mean the mapmaker, or cartographer. Who that individual was, matters. But you shouldn't imagine that these maps are like a book that this mapmaker thought he'd make up on a Tuesday afternoon [and sadly the vast majority are "he"]. All these maps were commissioned. That is, someone hired this mapmaker to make this map. That's not always the case. Sometimes, particularly in some of the bigger more famous firms, they would produce something believing there to be a market for such a map. In either case, you should be thinking about that context - and why there would be a demand for, or a market for, that map - i.e. a map that portrays that place in this particular way.
  • Finally, two hints:
    • (i) Most of you will assume that the map reflects the mapmaker's personal knowledge: that the person surveyed that territory and produced this map. Sometimes that's true (and in a map we'll look at later in the course, that is true), but usually it's not. And in the case of these African maps, it's absolutely clear that none of these mapmakers had ever been to Africa. Thus, you should think about how the mapmakers knew what they put to paper.
    • (ii) Many of you will also assume that the maps will become more accurate with time. Sometimes that's true; sometimes that's not. Just don't assume that's true.

  You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source. 
  
  Are you required to do any outside research? The short answer is some, but not a lot and not fancy research. We're not giving you much outside resources to work with. What you'll need, you'll have to determine. Basic online googling will get you a fair distance: be sure to cite what you use, and choose websites that don't appear random or problematic. Wikipedia iss fine for many things. But try the library. There are lots of guides and handbooks that often contain quick high-quality information. We do expect you to use resources from HIST 2F90 lessons (look to the planning tip at the bottom of the page for suggest lessons that will have useful sources for you to use!) But, to be clear, most of your discussion should focus on the maps themselves.

  Tip: the images included here are fairly high quality, but the links take you to much better high-quality scans from the Library of Congress. Close reading of some of the details on the high-quality scans may be very helpful.

  Herman Moll, Map of Africa “To the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Peterborow and Monmouth, &c This Map of Africa Is Most Humbly Dedicated”. (London, 1710) Source: Princeton University Library

  
  
  Moll, Herman, d. 1732. “To the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Peterborow and Monmouth, &c This Map of Africa . . . Is Most Humbly Dedicated.” Copperplate map, with added color, 56 x 94 cm. [Historic Maps Collection, Princeton University]

  
  
  Aaron Arrowsmith, Africa: to the committee and members of the British association discovering the interior parts of Africa this map is with their permission most respectfully inscribed. London: A. Arrowsmith, 1802. Source: Library of Congress.

   

  
  Emanuel Bowen, A new & accurate map of Negroland and the adjacent countries (London,1747). Source: Library of Congress.

  
  
  Planning tip: in the weeks before this is due, we'll do lessons on European Expansion and Early Modern Africa, two topics that will both be useful for you in thinking about these maps and their construction. The story of these maps are very much related to their context in European expansion, early modern African politics, the slave trade, and the broader development of markets in the Atlantic World. And finally, we will be devoting a whole lesson to distant and visual reading at the beginning of Module 3, so take your cue from our workshops on which approach you wish to take for this assignment!
• 1 2021-09-07T19:09:15+00:00 Assignment 2 1 2021-22 plain 2021-09-07T19:09:15+00:00

  Topic 1
  An eighteenth-century historian describes New England

  
   

  In our forum, we read an excerpt of from Amos Adams; here you'll use Voyant Tools as a way to explore the full-text.

  Amos Adams, A concise, historical view of the difficulties, hardships, and perils which attended the planting and progressive improvements of New-England (Boston, Dilly, 1770). 
  In this exercise, we want you to read a primary source related to colonial-era North America. It's a source by an 18th-century historian Amos Adams that we just discussed in our Forum on the Columbian Exchange.
  
  But in this assignment we want you to read it in a particular manner. You should already have read the excerpt in our forum. We now want you to do three things:
  • First "pre-read" the book, using only the titles, publication information and your now developing general knowledge.
  • Second continue pre-reading using text-mining software (Voyant) as a way to examine the patterns of topics and ideas present in the text. In particular, can these "pre-reads" allow you to hypothesize about these texts? That is, can you develop questions by which you might approach reading the text?
  • Then, finally, read the actual book. Do so with an eye to both reading it critically and intelligently (as you alway would) but also to testing the impressions/hypotheses you made in your pre-read. 
  You should include visuals (screenshots/URLs) to more clearly explain your read/hypotheses.
  
  The object here is to say something analytical about the book and how how Voyant might help that analysis. Have a look at this video for quick pointers on using Voyant.
  
  750 words, due May 30th

   

  Option 2 - Critical Map Reading, I:
  Early Modern maps of Africa

   

  An exercise in critical cartography: maps are not neutral data - they have points of view. Explore three maps' viewpoints.

  We love maps, especially but not only historical maps. And while we love google maps and all the GIS-based tools we have at our fingertips these days, we also still own map books. Prof Samson still carries road atlases in his car because while Google offers great directions the broader map allows him to see more context, to have a physical sense of where we're going, where we are, where we should be, what’s nearby, how did we get lost?

  Historical maps are packed with data. They give us a view of landscapes, territory, communication networks, political relationships – in short, views of the political and spatial organization of societies. The image link to this text is a detail from the Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese map made in 1502 outlining Europe, Africa, and the then newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. The detail shows Elmino castle, a large Portuguese trading centre and military installation in what is today Ghana. The size of the castle is obviously not to scale, and may never have been meant to be. Its size and style suggests it was meant to symbolize Portuguese power in Africa. But this unusual representation raises the question of what's meant to be accurate and what's meant to be symbolic - and for that matter if there's a difference. At minimum it asks us to read this map critically and carefully.

  It's clear that maps can give us good, hard data. But it's also true that we tend to assume that such data is objective: that these lines and objects marking places/spaces are real and beyond any substantial degree of interpretation. Over the past few years, historians and geographers have demonstrated that in fact maps are, like most texts, social constructs and thus can be read in different ways. They typically bear a relationship to power and are thus historically situated in particular political, economic, and social worlds. Maps, the geographer J.B. Harley reminds us, make claims to truth, but they almost always betray that they are constructions designed to support claims to truth, more than simply "true" in any objective sense.
  
  Maps are representations of space but because they often bear a powerful resemblance to concrete geographic features of the planet, we tend to think they are factual, or true. As we've seen, they do contain real concrete facts. But they also contain interpretations; the map makers often made choices in what to represent and how to represent it. This human process of interpreting and selecting data adds complexity to how we must understand maps as sources and ask the same critical questions we'd ask of any sources. Are maps biased? Of course they are, but so is all human-produced data. Almost all maps contain elements that are objective, as well as elements that are subjective. The trick is to read it carefully, and critically. How then do we "read" historical maps as data?
  
  There's lots to look for. Some maps have a lot of textual data in addition to the basic details of names and locations. Look, for example, at this detail from John Mitchell's famous map of the territory Britain and France claimed in North America on the eve of the Seven Years War. Here we're looking at a tiny section of the map which includes the area east and north of Lake Huron. The map is exquisitely detailed, but also contains over 3000 words of text (not including place names!) referring to history, territorial claims, navigation routes, distances, and much else. Such information was useful, practical information for someone (one might ask for whom?); it was also felt to add credibility, additional proof of its careful and accurate research. But is the information accurate? This text points to a real event - the Mississauga people were defeated in a war with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the 17th century, but neither they nor any other peoples ever became "the eighth nation" of the Iroquois League. Does this matter? Does it matter that this information is only partly true, or misleading at best? Would it have mattered to an eighteenth-century observer? What inferences might such an observer have about this and similar information on the map? Think too about its production. Remember that maps are authored, like any text, and are usually intended for a particular audience.There were literally 100s of maps of North America available in this period. Why commission another one? Why one with this level of detail? Who would have wanted such a map? Why? Why was this map produced when it was produced? What about that moment made this information important?
  
  Look, too, beyond the geographic features of the map itself. The legend, for example, often contains important information that can be helpful in understanding the map: what it records, where, when and by whom it was made. Legends are often inside more elaborate and artistic renditions that are called a cartouche. A cartouche is usually a frame or image designed both to add additional information - often the publication information or a legend - as well as artistic embellishments. Some are more ornamental than others, but all contain potentially useful information. One can often see themes being represented in the cartouche: a kind of key to thinking about the map. The planisphere on our header was one of the first to depict the North And South America in relation to Europe and Africa. At this point, only the Portuguese were actively venturing along the western coast of Africa and thus this map presents knowledge more or less completely new to other Europeans. It's also worth noting however that Portuguese explorers had travelled as far south as modern-day Ghana, but had gone no more than a mile or two inland - the rest is pure imagination. But these images shouldn't be dismissed as mere flights of fancy. They very often offer symbolic clues to how the mapmakers understood their subjects and the purposes of these maps.
  
  The Newberry Library offers a nice overview of questions and important issues for when approaching historic maps as primary sources. 
  
  The assignment: Write an 750-word essay on the following early modern maps of Africa. Devote roughly half of your text to a discussion of one of the maps, and the other half comparing that map with the other two. They were produced in different times and different places and probably for different purposes. Each sought to show an audience how to see Africa: how it was shaped, who its people were, how they lived and governed themselves, and so on. And yet they also made other claims of knowledge, ones rooted more in their authors and their authors' contexts than in Africa itself. What can these maps tell us about Africa? What can these maps tell us about the early modern Atlantic World? 
  
  Resist the urge to dismiss them as all being biased. They are, no doubt, but so are most sources. The real trick is to critically examine these texts so as to find as much useful information as possible. And what is useful information? Well, that depends on what question we're asking. If we're asking about the map's ability to convey accurate geographic information, then we head in one direction. If we're asking how the map tells more about the map makers and their societies, then that sends us in other directions. But if we think those questions are unrelated, then we may be missing a lot.
  
  Here, as in your Forum entries, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. Just as historians have different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:
  • When was the map made and by whom and for whom? i.e. who was the author? what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person serve?
  • When did the cartographer create the source? Is there a broader historical context? (The Mitchell map above was made on the eve of the Seven Years War, after decades of political-military struggles over North America - that context informs much of the information Mitchell included, and what he didn't include.) 
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?
  • What information did the author wish to communicate?
  • We're speaking of "an author" here by which we mean the mapmaker, or cartographer. Who that individual was, matters. But you shouldn't imagine that these maps are like a book that this mapmaker thought he'd make up on a Tuesday afternoon [and sadly the vast majority are "he"]. All these maps were commissioned. That is, someone hired this mapmaker to make this map. That's not always the case. Sometimes, particularly in some of the bigger more famous firms, they would produce something believing there to be a market for such a map. In either case, you should be thinking about that context - and why there would be a demand for, or a market for, that map - i.e. a map that portrays that place in this particular way.
  • Finally, two hints: (i) most of you will assume that the map reflects the mapmaker's personal knowledge: that the person surveyed that territory and produced this map. Sometimes that's true (and in a map we'll look at later in the course, that is true), but usually it's not. And in the case of these African maps, it's absolutely clear that none of these mapmakers had ever been to Africa. Thus, you should think about how the mapmakers knew what they put to paper. (ii) many of you will also assume that the maps will become more accurate with time. Sometimes that's true; sometimes that's not. Just don't assume that's true.

  You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source. 
  
  Are you required to do any outside research? The short answer is some, but not a lot and not fancy research. We're not giving you much outside resources to work with. What you'll need, you'll have to determine. Basic online googling, will get you a fair distance: be sure to cite what you use, and choose websites that don't appear random. Wikipedia's fine for many things. But try the library. There are lots of guides and handbooks that often contain quick high-quality information. But, to be clear, most fo your discussion should focus on the maps themselves.

  Tip: the images included here are fairly high quality, but the links take you to much better high-quality scans from the Library of Congress. Close reading of some of the details on the high-quality scans may be very helpful.

  John Senex, Africa: corrected from the observations of the Royal Society at London and Paris (London, 1725). Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Aaron Arrowsmith, Africa: to the committee and members of the British association discovering the interior parts of Africa this map is with their permission most respectfully inscribed. London: A. Arrowsmith, 1802. Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Emanuel Bowen, A new & accurate map of Negroland and the adjacent countries (London,1747). 
  

• 1 2021-09-25T19:17:13+00:00 Assignments (OLD) 1 Term 1, 2020-21 plain 2021-09-25T19:17:13+00:00

  First Term Assignments

  NOTE: In addition to the weekly lessons and forums, as well as two end-of-module quizzes, there are two sets of assignments in Term 1. Each assignment has different dues dates. See the "Course at a Glance" for an overview of all Term 1 activities. More details are below.
  
  The two assignments for Term 1 together are worth 15 points (7.5 each) of your overall final grade.
   

  Term 1, Assignment 2

  • For the second assignment this term, there are two options. You will choose just 1 of the 2.
  • The due date for both options is the same: ...

  OPTION a -- Text Analysis: An eighteenth-century historian describes New England

  
  
   

  In our forum, we read an excerpt of from Amos Adams; here you'll use Voyant-tools as a way to explore the full-text.

  Amos Adams, A concise, historical view of the difficulties, hardships, and perils which attended the planting and progressive improvements of New-England (Boston, Dilly, 1770). 
  In this exercise, we want you to read a primary source related to colonial-era North America. It's a source by an 18th-century historian Amos Adams that we just discussed in our Forum on the Columbian Exchange.
  
  But in this assignment we want you to read it in a particular manner. You should already have read the excerpt in our forum. We now want you to do three things:
  • First "pre-read" the book, using only the titles, publication information and your now developing general knowledge.
  • Second continue pre-reading using text-mining software (Voyant) as a way to examine the patterns of topics and ideas present in the text. In particular, can these "pre-reads" allow you to hypothesize about these texts? That is, can you develop questions by which you might approach reading the text?
  • Then, finally, read the actual book. Do so with an eye to both reading it critically and intelligently (as you alway would) but also to testing the impressions/hypotheses you made in your pre-read. 
  You should include visuals (screenshots/URLs) to more clearly explain your read/hypotheses.
  
  The object here is to say something analytical about the book and how how Voyant might help that analysis. Have a look at this video for quick pointers on using Voyant.
  
  750 words, due May 30th

   

  Option 2 - Critical Map Reading, I:
  Early Modern maps of Africa

   

  An exercise in critical cartography: maps are not neutral data - they have points of view. Explore three maps' viewpoints.

  We love maps, especially but not only historical maps. And while we love google maps and all the GIS-based tools we have at our fingertips these days, we also still own map books. Prof Samson still carries road atlases in his car because while Google offers great directions the broader map allows him to see more context, to have a physical sense of where we're going, where we are, where we should be, what’s nearby, how did we get lost?

  Historical maps are packed with data. They give us a view of landscapes, territory, communication networks, political relationships – in short, views of the political and spatial organization of societies. The image link to this text is a detail from the Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese map made in 1502 outlining Europe, Africa, and the then newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. The detail shows Elmino castle, a large Portuguese trading centre and military installation in what is today Ghana. The size of the castle is obviously not to scale, and may never have been meant to be. Its size and style suggests it was meant to symbolize Portuguese power in Africa. But this unusual representation raises the question of what's meant to be accurate and what's meant to be symbolic - and for that matter if there's a difference. At minimum it asks us to read this map critically and carefully.

  It's clear that maps can give us good, hard data. But it's also true that we tend to assume that such data is objective: that these lines and objects marking places/spaces are real and beyond any substantial degree of interpretation. Over the past few years, historians and geographers have demonstrated that in fact maps are, like most texts, social constructs and thus can be read in different ways. They typically bear a relationship to power and are thus historically situated in particular political, economic, and social worlds. Maps, the geographer J.B. Harley reminds us, make claims to truth, but they almost always betray that they are constructions designed to support claims to truth, more than simply "true" in any objective sense.
  
  Maps are representations of space but because they often bear a powerful resemblance to concrete geographic features of the planet, we tend to think they are factual, or true. As we've seen, they do contain real concrete facts. But they also contain interpretations; the map makers often made choices in what to represent and how to represent it. This human process of interpreting and selecting data adds complexity to how we must understand maps as sources and ask the same critical questions we'd ask of any sources. Are maps biased? Of course they are, but so is all human-produced data. Almost all maps contain elements that are objective, as well as elements that are subjective. The trick is to read it carefully, and critically. How then do we "read" historical maps as data?
  
  There's lots to look for. Some maps have a lot of textual data in addition to the basic details of names and locations. Look, for example, at this detail from John Mitchell's famous map of the territory Britain and France claimed in North America on the eve of the Seven Years War. Here we're looking at a tiny section of the map which includes the area east and north of Lake Huron. The map is exquisitely detailed, but also contains over 3000 words of text (not including place names!) referring to history, territorial claims, navigation routes, distances, and much else. Such information was useful, practical information for someone (one might ask for whom?); it was also felt to add credibility, additional proof of its careful and accurate research. But is the information accurate? This text points to a real event - the Mississauga people were defeated in a war with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the 17th century, but neither they nor any other peoples ever became "the eighth nation" of the Iroquois League. Does this matter? Does it matter that this information is only partly true, or misleading at best? Would it have mattered to an eighteenth-century observer? What inferences might such an observer have about this and similar information on the map? Think too about its production. Remember that maps are authored, like any text, and are usually intended for a particular audience.There were literally 100s of maps of North America available in this period. Why commission another one? Why one with this level of detail? Who would have wanted such a map? Why? Why was this map produced when it was produced? What about that moment made this information important?
  
  Look, too, beyond the geographic features of the map itself. The legend, for example, often contains important information that can be helpful in understanding the map: what it records, where, when and by whom it was made. Legends are often inside more elaborate and artistic renditions that are called a cartouche. A cartouche is usually a frame or image designed both to add additional information - often the publication information or a legend - as well as artistic embellishments. Some are more ornamental than others, but all contain potentially useful information. One can often see themes being represented in the cartouche: a kind of key to thinking about the map. The planisphere on our header was one of the first to depict the North And South America in relation to Europe and Africa. At this point, only the Portuguese were actively venturing along the western coast of Africa and thus this map presents knowledge more or less completely new to other Europeans. It's also worth noting however that Portuguese explorers had travelled as far south as modern-day Ghana, but had gone no more than a mile or two inland - the rest is pure imagination. But these images shouldn't be dismissed as mere flights of fancy. They very often offer symbolic clues to how the mapmakers understood their subjects and the purposes of these maps.
  
  The Newberry Library offers a nice overview of questions and important issues for when approaching historic maps as primary sources. 
  
  The assignment: Write an 750-word essay on the following early modern maps of Africa. Devote roughly half of your text to a discussion of one of the maps, and the other half comparing that map with the other two. They were produced in different times and different places and probably for different purposes. Each sought to show an audience how to see Africa: how it was shaped, who its people were, how they lived and governed themselves, and so on. And yet they also made other claims of knowledge, ones rooted more in their authors and their authors' contexts than in Africa itself. What can these maps tell us about Africa? What can these maps tell us about the early modern Atlantic World? 
  
  Resist the urge to dismiss them as all being biased. They are, no doubt, but so are most sources. The real trick is to critically examine these texts so as to find as much useful information as possible. And what is useful information? Well, that depends on what question we're asking. If we're asking about the map's ability to convey accurate geographic information, then we head in one direction. If we're asking how the map tells more about the map makers and their societies, then that sends us in other directions. But if we think those questions are unrelated, then we may be missing a lot.
  
  Here, as in your Forum entries, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. Just as historians have different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:
  • When was the map made and by whom and for whom? i.e. who was the author? what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person serve?
  • When did the cartographer create the source? Is there a broader historical context? (The Mitchell map above was made on the eve of the Seven Years War, after decades of political-military struggles over North America - that context informs much of the information Mitchell included, and what he didn't include.) 
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?
  • What information did the author wish to communicate?
  • We're speaking of "an author" here by which we mean the mapmaker, or cartographer. Who that individual was, matters. But you shouldn't imagine that these maps are like a book that this mapmaker thought he'd make up on a Tuesday afternoon [and sadly the vast majority are "he"]. All these maps were commissioned. That is, someone hired this mapmaker to make this map. That's not always the case. Sometimes, particularly in some of the bigger more famous firms, they would produce something believing there to be a market for such a map. In either case, you should be thinking about that context - and why there would be a demand for, or a market for, that map - i.e. a map that portrays that place in this particular way.
  • Finally, two hints: (i) most of you will assume that the map reflects the mapmaker's personal knowledge: that the person surveyed that territory and produced this map. Sometimes that's true (and in a map we'll look at later in the course, that is true), but usually it's not. And in the case of these African maps, it's absolutely clear that none of these mapmakers had ever been to Africa. Thus, you should think about how the mapmakers knew what they put to paper. (ii) many of you will also assume that the maps will become more accurate with time. Sometimes that's true; sometimes that's not. Just don't assume that's true.

  You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source. 
  
  Are you required to do any outside research? The short answer is some, but not a lot and not fancy research. We're not giving you much outside resources to work with. What you'll need, you'll have to determine. Basic online googling, will get you a fair distance: be sure to cite what you use, and choose websites that don't appear random. Wikipedia's fine for many things. But try the library. There are lots of guides and handbooks that often contain quick high-quality information. But, to be clear, most fo your discussion should focus on the maps themselves.

  Tip: the images included here are fairly high quality, but the links take you to much better high-quality scans from the Library of Congress. Close reading of some of the details on the high-quality scans may be very helpful.

  John Senex, Africa: corrected from the observations of the Royal Society at London and Paris (London, 1725). Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Aaron Arrowsmith, Africa: to the committee and members of the British association discovering the interior parts of Africa this map is with their permission most respectfully inscribed. London: A. Arrowsmith, 1802. Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Emanuel Bowen, A new & accurate map of Negroland and the adjacent countries (London,1747). 
  
   

  
  (i)   Submit only one attachment
  (ii)  Only use file types: Word (docx), PDF, HTML, RTF, or plain text.
  (iii) Always include the file extension (.docx etc).
  
  

  Assignment 2

  Critical Map Reading (due Friday November 6th, 5 p.m. NEW: extended to Sun., Nov. 8 at the very end of the day)
   

  We love maps, especially but not only historical maps. And while we love google maps and all the GIS-based tools we have at our fingertips these days, we also still own map books. Prof Samson still carries road atlases in his car because while Google offers great directions the broader map allows him to see more context, to have a physical sense of where we're going, where we are, where we should be, what’s nearby, how did we get lost?

  Historical maps are packed with data. They give us a view of landscapes, territory, communication networks, political relationships – in short, views of the political and spatial organization of societies. The image link to this text is a detail from the Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese map made in 1502 outlining Europe, Africa, and the then newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. The detail shows Elmino castle, a large Portuguese trading centre and military installation in what is today Ghana. The size of the castle is obviously not to scale, and may never have been meant to be. Its size and style suggests it was meant to symbolize Portuguese power in Africa. But this unusual representation raises the question of what's meant to be accurate and what's meant to be symbolic - and for that matter if there's a difference. At minimum it asks us to read this map critically and carefully.

  It's clear that maps can give us good, hard data. But it's also true that we tend to assume that such data is objective: that these lines and objects marking places/spaces are real and beyond any substantial degree of interpretation. Over the past few years, historians and geographers have demonstrated that in fact maps are, like most texts, social constructs and thus can be read in different ways. They typically bear a relationship to power and are thus historically situated in particular political, economic, and social worlds. Maps, the geographer J.B. Harley reminds us, make claims to truth, but they almost always betray that they are constructions designed to support claims to truth, more than simply "true" in any objective sense.
  
  Maps are representations of space but because they often bear a powerful resemblance to concrete geographic features of the planet, we tend to think they are factual, or true. As we've seen, they do contain real concrete facts. But they also contain interpretations; the map makers often made choices in what to represent and how to represent it. This human process of interpreting and selecting data adds complexity to how we must understand maps as sources and ask the same critical questions we'd ask of any sources. Are maps biased? Of course they are, but so is all human-produced data. Almost all maps contain elements that are objective, as well as elements that are subjective. The trick is to read it carefully, and critically. How then do we "read" historical maps as data?
  
  There's lots to look for. Some maps have a lot of textual data in addition to the basic details of names and locations. Look, for example, at this detail from John Mitchell's famous map of the territory Britain and France claimed in North America on the eve of the Seven Years War. Here we're looking at the tiny section of the map which includes the area east and north of Lake Huron. The map is exquisitely detailed, but also contains over 3000 words of text (not including place names!) referring to history, territorial claims, navigation routes, distances, and much else. Such information was useful, practical information for someone (one might ask for whom?); it was also felt to add credibility, additional proof of its careful and accurate research. But is the information accurate? This text points to a real event - the Mississauga people were defeated in a war with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the 17th century, but neither they nor any other peoples ever became "the eighth nation" of the Iroquois League. Does this matter? Does it matter that this information is only partly true, or misleading at best? Would it have mattered to an eighteenth-century observer? What inferences might such an observer have about this and similar information on the map? Think too about its production. Remember that maps are authored, like any text, and are usually intended for a particular audience.There were literally 100s of maps of North America available in this period. Why commission another one? Why one with this level of detail? Who would have wanted such a map? Why? Why was this map produced when it was produced? What about that moment made this information important?
  
  Look, too, beyond the geographic features of the map itself. The legend, for example, often contains important information that can be helpful in understanding the map: what it records, where, when and by whom it was made. Legends are often inside more elaborate and artistic renditions that are called a cartouche. A cartouche is usually a frame or image designed both to add additional information - often the publication information or a legend - as well as artistic embellishments. Some are more ornamental than others, but all contain potentially useful information. One can often see themes being represented in the cartouche: a kind of key to thinking about the map. The planisphere on our header was one of the first to depict the North And South America in relation to Europe and Africa. At this point, only the Portuguese were actively venturing along the western coast of Africa and thus this map presents knowledge more or less completely new to other Europeans. It's also worth noting however that Portuguese explorers had travelled as far south as modern-day Ghana, but had gone no more than a mile or two inland - the rest is pure imagination. But these images shouldn't be dismissed as mere flights of fancy. They very often offer symbolic clues to how the mapmakers understood their subjects and the purposes of these maps.
  
  The Newberry Library offers a nice overview of questions and important issues for when approaching historic maps as primary sources. 
  
  The assignment: Write an 800-word essay (approximately three double-spaced pages) on the following early modern maps of Africa. Devote roughly half of your text to a discussion of one of the maps, and the other half comparing that map with the other two. They were produced in different times and different places and probably for different purposes. Each sought to show an audience how to see Africa: how it was shaped, who its people were, how they lived and governed themselves, and so on. And yet they also made other claims of knowledge, ones rooted more in their authors and their authors' contexts than in Africa itself. What can these maps tell us about Africa? What can these maps tell us about the early modern Atlantic World? 
  
  Resist the urge to dismiss them as all being biased. They are, no doubt, but so are most sources. The real trick is to critically examine these texts so as to find as much useful information as possible. And what is useful information? Well, that depends on what question we're asking. If we're asking about the map's ability to convey accurate geographic information, then we head in one direction. If we're asking how the map tells more about the map makers and their societies, then that sends us in other directions. But if we think those questions are unrelated, then we may be missing a lot.
  
  Here, as in your Forum entries, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. Just as historians have different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:
  • When was the map made and by whom and for whom? i.e. who was the author? what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person serve?
  • When did he or she create the source? Is there a broader historical context? (The Mitchell map above was made on the eve of the Seven Years War, after decades of political-military struggles over North America.) 
  • What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?
  • What information did the author wish to communicate?

  You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source. 
  
  Are you required to do any outside research? See the "Planning Tip" below the images of the maps.
  
  Due Friday November 6th, 5 p.m. NEW: extended to Sun., Nov. 8 at the very end of the day
  
  John Senex, Africa: corrected from the observations of the Royal Society at London and Paris (London, 1725). Source: Library of Congress.
  Aaron Arrowsmith, Africa: to the committee and members of the British association discovering the interior parts of Africa this map is with their permission most respectfully inscribed. London: A. Arrowsmith, 1802. Source: Library of Congress.
  
  Emanuel Bowen, A new & accurate map of Negroland and the adjacent countries (London,1747). 
  
  
  Planning tip: in the weeks before this is due, we'll do lessons on European Expansion and Early Modern Africa, two topics that will both be useful for you in thinking about these maps and their construction. The story of these maps are very much related to their context in European expansion, Early Modern African politics, the slave trade, and the broader development of markets in the Atlantic World.  And no need for bibliographies, footnotes, etc - you're not doing any additional research (just looking at these maps). If you make direct use of the Newberry Library piece noted above, or materials from the course, just say so.

  
  * * *

  Assignment 3

  Comparing historiographical interpretations
  
  So far, each of the assignment options has required you to focus your attention on a kind or type of source used by historians: the first option, Wikipedia articles, a kind of tertiary source; and the second option, digital reproductions of early modern maps, a kind of primary source. This third option focuses your attention on interpretations by historians, and it is thus about secondary sources.
  
  In the lesson on the British Agricultural Revolution, we introduced you to historiographical thinking, and you will get to practice it in this assignment. When we talk about historiographical thinking, we mean the way that historians (and you) make sense of primary sources from the past in lectures, essays and books. This activity of making sense of sources from the past is an essential part of what historians do, since the past and sources that have survived from it do not have any clear and undisputed meaning on their own. Before they write histories, historians have to first decide on a subject, discover sources that can help answer questions about that subject, then choose which sources to focus on (since there are often too many) and how to analyze them. All of these actions shape the kinds of answers that historians develop to the questions about the past that they ask. And even if two historians ask many of the same questions and use many of the same sources to answer them, it is unlikely that they will come up with exactly the same answers, or shape those answers in the same way.
  
  The reason for these apparent disagreements, and for the multiplicity of histories about the same subjects, is not that historians are biased. Sure, people have preconceptions and motivations that might shape their views of the world, and historians are no exception. As we've highlighted in the instructions for the map analysis and other feedback and advice in this course, reducing differences and disagreements to authorial "bias" is not helpful. You should avoid this simplistic view -- for this assignment, and in the course overall.
  
  The disagreements are not a weakness or problem about historiography that should trouble us. Quite the contrary! Pay attention when historians disagree, because their competing views can help you see the same subjects or questions about the past from new perspectives. Think about historiographical differences and disagreements in these terms: Authors have to make choices when they write essays and books about history, since the past is far too vast and complicated to be summarized in any single account; therefore, we can and should think about each new, different and even competing historiographical interpretation as an attempt by the author to shed some new and important light on a "past" that might otherwise remain dark to us. This way of thinking about each historiographical interpretation as a new perspective on the past does not mean that all interpretations are equally good or important or strong. Some historians might propose ways of thinking about Jesuit history in New France that are incompatible with other histories of the subject. If you run across these kinds of disagreements, the best step that you can take is to try to better understand the disagreements. When you learn to do this well, you will be learning how to make better sense of other complex social, political, and historical issues.
  
  Your task: For this assignment option, write an essay of about 800 words (approximately 3 double-spaced, typed pages) comparing the ways three of the historians below interpret the role of Jesuit missions to Natives in New France in the 17th century. Devote about half of your paper to a close analysis of the interpretation of one of the historians, and then use the remainder of your paper to compare that historian's work to the other two (with approximately equal attention to each). Your task is not to decide which historian is right or "the best." Your task, instead, is analyze as clearly as possible about what is distinctive about one scholar's historiographical views, and then to compare and contrast that scholar's views with two others.
  
  Here is an important tip: Do NOT think about your essay's subject as though it were about early modern Jesuits. This is kinda, sorta, almost your subject. However, you should be clear with yourself and in your writing that your main subject is the ways that particular historians interpret the actions, motivations, beliefs, etc., of early modern Jesuits. What does Blackburn argue? Which primary sources does Seeman use, and how does he use them? How does McShea respond to the arguments of earlier historians? These are examples of just a few of the kinds of questions that you will be thinking about and trying to answer for this option. When you think in these kinds of terms, you will be practising historiographical thinking. You will be writing about historians' ideas about the past.
  
  You will notice that the lesson on missionaries that rounds out Module 2 is the basis for this assignment. In that lesson you learn about the relationship between Jesuit missionaries and Indigenous peoples in New France. You should review that lesson, and the sources in it (including the primary sources), before you start writing your essay. In that lesson you either read a chapter on this subject by Carole Blackburn and Erik Seeman. By contrast, for this assignment you have a choice of three chapters from a list of four. One of these four choices will the the main focus of your essay, and you will compare that text with two others from the list.
  
  The lesson on missionaries provides you with questions to help you think about the sources. But remember: Your purpose in this assignment is to write about the work of historians. This means that you have to turn all questions about primary sources into questions about how Blackburn, Clair, McShea, or Seeman would read, use, interpret, etc., those primary sources.
  
  In your analysis you should be as specific as possible about what each of the authors argues about Jesuit-Indigenous relations, and how their interpretations compare and contrast with each other. The following list of questions are among the kinds of questions that you should think about as you plan your paper:
  • Who is the author? Be clear about the author, title, date of publication and the larger collection (either the book from which a chapter comes, or the journal in which an essay was published) in which the text is found.
    • The dates of publication are important, since earlier authors cannot respond to works published after their work.
  • How does each author define the subject, and what does each author argue about that subject? What is most important and significant about this argument for understanding the subject of Jesuits in New France?
  • No argument is good without evidence and reasons? How does that author's argument use primary sources as evidence? What reasons or methods does the author provide for choosing that evidence or reading / using it in a particular way?
    • You know some of the primary sources from our lesson on missionaries. Even if the work you have read from an author does not discuss the particular primary sources you know from our course's lesson, what implications might the author's interpretation have for asking questions about and interpreting primary sources about early modern Jesuits?
  • No author makes a historical argument in a vacuum; instead, historians respond to earlier work. Figure out what you can about which / whose earlier arguments a historian is trying to build upon, and which / whose arguments a historian is rejecting.
  • What are the benefits or limitations of each approach to the study of early modern Jesuits in New France?
  • What are the main issues about which these authors agree and disagree? Why are these agreements and disagreements important historiographically?
  You do not have to answer these questions mechanically when you write your paper. You might also think of and address some other questions, but these can help guide your preparation. You will probably not be able to answer all of these questions to the same degree for each text, but try as best you can to highlight the most important and significant features of each of the three authors' interpretations.
  
  Many of the same guidelines and suggestions that applied to the previous two assignments apply to this one, as well. For example, you do not need to include a bibliography or footnotes, as long as you are always clear in your essay about which authors and titles you are writing. You may put references to pages in parentheses, for example. Nonetheless, if you cite additional sources, it is a good idea to list them in bibliographical form.
  
  You also are not required to do extra research, although you may certainly do some background research on each historian or about subjects or terms that you might not understand. If you write about a historian's background (e.g., education, current position, or other publications), make sure you write about what you discover only if you think it is significant for making sense of the similarities or differences of the three historians' interpretations in the assigned texts. This is because your comparative analysis of the texts is what matters the most.
  
  When you write about the historiography (i.e., the historians' texts), try to paraphrase the authors' ideas in your own words. However, you must put quotations in quotation marks and include a page number for them. Try to limit quotations to really, really important phrases or sentences. Avoid quoting long passages, and be sure to clearly introduce and explain the significance of the quotations you do use. You should also introduce and explain the significance of ideas that you paraphrase. If you are not sure of the difference between effective quotations and paraphrases, be sure to look it up.
  
  Here are the four texts, from which you will choose three:
  • Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 105-28. eBook
  • Muriel Clair, "'Seeing These Good Souls Adore God in the Midst of the Woods': The Christianization of Algonquian Nomads in the Jesuit Relations of the 1640s," Journal of Jesuit Studies, vol. 1 (2014), 281-300.
  • Bronwen McShea, "Introduction," in Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
    • Make sure also to check the endnotes for this attached chapter.
  • Erik R. Seeman, The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 59-79.