The past and the future of ethnohistory

As Henry Hudson sailed up the broad river that would one day bear his name, he grew concerned that his Dutch patrons would be disappointed in his failure to find the fabled route to the Orient. What became immediately apparent, however, from the Indians clad in deer skins and good was that Hudson had discovered something just as tantalizing. The news of Hudson's 1609 voyage to America ignited a fierce competition to lay claim to this uncharted continent, teeming with untapped natural resources. The result was the creation of an American fur trade, which fostered economic rivalries and fueled wars among the European powers, and later between the United States and Great Britain, as North America became a battleground for colonization and imperial aspirations. In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was get the furs while they last. Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its native Indians were alternately enriched and exploited by the trade. As Dolin demonstrates, fur, both an economic elixir and an agent of destruction, became inextricably linked to many key events in American history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, as well as to the relentless pull of Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West. This work provides an international cast beyond the scope of any Hollywood epic, including Thomas Morton, the rabble-rouser who infuriated the Pilgrims by trading guns with the Indians; British explorer Captain James Cook, whose discovery in the Pacific Northwest helped launch America's China trade; Thomas Jefferson who dreamed of expanding the fur trade beyond the Mississippi; America's first multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, who built a fortune on a foundation of fur; and intrepid mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith, who sliced their way through an awe inspiring and unforgiving landscape, leaving behind a mythic legacy still resonates today. Concluding with the virtual extinction of the buffalo in the late 1800s, Fur, Fortune, and Empire is an epic history that brings to vivid life three hundred years of the American experience, conclusively demonstrating that the fur trade played a seminal role in creating the nation we are today.

Acknowledgements. Prologue Heidi Morrison. PART 1. Introduction. 1. The Discovery of Philippe Aries 2. Re-visioning Women and Social Change: Where are the Children? Barrie Thorne 3. Bastardy in South Germany: A Comment. Edward Shorter 4. Historical Perspectives on Illegitimacy and Illegitimates in Latin America. Nara Milanich 5. TheSun Match Boy and Plant Metaphors: A Swedish Image of a 20th-Century Childhood. Karin Aronsson and Bengt Sandin 6. Childhood Remembered: Parents and Children in China, 800 to 1700 Pei-Yu Wu 7. Infants, Children and Death in Medieval Muslim Society Avner Giladi 8. Introduction. Martha Saxton 9. Integrative Summary Irving Sigel PART 2. Introduction. 1. Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran Afsaneh Najmabadi 2. Children in Chains: Juvenile Convicts Jan Kociumbas 3. African American Childhood Joseph Illick 4. Children and Childhood in World Religions Don Browning and Marcia Bunge 5. A History of Childhood and Disability Elizabeth Safford and Philip Safford 6. Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe. Beverly Grier 7., Emphasizing the Islamic: Modifying the Curriculum of Ottoman State Schools Benjamin Fortna 8. Globalisation and Childhoods Peter Stearns PART 3. Introduction.1. A Most Remarkable Phenomenon: Growing Up Metis - Fur Traders' Children in the Pacific Northwest Juliet Pollard 2. Growing Up Poor: Home, Street, and School in London 1870-1914 Anna Davin 3. Thank you for the Wonderful Book: Soviet Child Readers and the Management of Children's Reading Catriona Kelly 4. Childhood and Child Labor in the British Industrial Revolution Jane Humphries PART 4. Introduction. 1. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. 2. Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 Hugh Cunningham 3. Children and the Politics of Culture in Late Capitalism Sharon Stephens 4. Lessons from the history of education for a 'century of the child at risk Ingrid Lohmann and Christine Mayer 5. Passages to Modernity: Motherhood, Childhood and Social Reform in Early Twentieth Century Japan Kathleen Uno 6. From Full-Time to Part-Time: Working Children in Norway from the nineteenth to the twentieth century Ellen Schrumpf 7. Statutory Rape Prosecutions in California Mary E Odem 8. The Disappearing Child Neil Postman

The fur trade of North America was part of a broader movement of European expansion into the northern forests of Asia and America. Its two branches started with similar timing near the beginning of the seventeenth century and continued until they changed form drastically in the early nineteenth. Both were driven by European economic demand for fur garments, and both were carried out within the institutional forms of a trading-post empire. This chapter will be concerned principally with the North Amerian fur trade, but with the Siberian fur trade in the background to help maintain the perspective of world history. The two branches of the movement were similar in many ways, but different in others. The North American setting: epidemiology and culture The most striking difference was epidemiological, arising from the long separation of the Americas from the disease environments of the Afro- Eurasian landmass. The Americas were originally populated from Asia, but regular contact was then broken for tens of thousands of years before it was reestablished by Columbus and his successors after 1492. In the interval, people in the Americas developed their own food crops, their own domestic animals, and their own patterns of culture. These American cultures lacked some of the technology that was crucial to Old World civilization. They lacked large animals capable of pulling carts; hence they had no need for applications of rotary motion like the wheel. More important, they lacked the patterns of disease that had become generalized through the Afro-Eurasian intercommunicating zone. A few diseases were peculiar to the Americas, but the serious problem was the lack of acquired immunities to the common diseases of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The historical drama TV series Frontier is driven by an ambiguous imaginary of Northern North America in the late 1700s. It portrays English, Irish, Scottish, French and U.S.-American settlers variously cooperating with and instrumentalizing Indigenous nations in order to undermine the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur trading monopoly. Through devices such as the episodes’ epigraphs and in its depiction of First Nations and Black characters, the series speaks to current debates and ongoing controversies surrounding the representation of Canadianness beyond the “two solitudes”. This paper analyzes how Frontier multiplies the “solitudes” in its re-imagination of the fur trade through various lines of interaction and conflict.

A Pictorial History of the Canoe The Canoe: A Living Tradition. Ed. John Jennings. Toronto: Firefly, 2002. What a beautiful book! I open it at random at pages 42-43, and there on the left is a picture of a North canoe, on the ground at the Hudson's Bay Company Bear Island post on Lake Temagami. It contains seven men and a dog. The caption points out that this picture must have been very carefully set up, because normally canoemen got out of a birchbark before reaching shore. On the right-hand page another birchbark fur-trade canoe, this time loaded with eight men and gear. Below it, a woodcut of a York boat on Lake Winnipeg by Walter Phillips, showing the artist's great debt to Japanese printmakers in his handling of waves, space and colour. It doesn't matter where you open this book; each page is a feast for the eyes. There are pictures from Canada's earliest times, through the first photographs of birchbark canoes, paintings from past to present times, photo essays on many types of craft including West Coast dugouts, birchbark canoes and the large Umiaks the Inuit built. The pictures form a pretty complete essay on the canoe, its history and use. Combined with these pictures is a series of essays on the history of the and other craft used by North America's Aboriginal peoples - it is after all a bit of a stretch to call a kayak, which is propelled with a double-bladed paddle, or Umiaks (the large skin-covered boats of the Inuit) canoes, any more than were York boats. But all have their place in the history of water craft in North America, either in their use by Aboriginal people or as crafts that rivaled the in some uses. It does not do to be a purist, and the broader interpretation of canoe does allow for a better overview of paddle-propelled craft on the rivers, lakes, and sea waters of North America. The first section is on Native craft, and the first essay, by John Jennings, introduces the Aboriginal birchbark canoe, the main protagonist of the book, in a thoroughly scholarly way. So does the second, on the frontier and by Jennings as well, which discusses the use of the birchbark by the early explorers, missionaries, and traders as North America was discovered, opened up and settled by Europeans. The history related in these two chapters needs to be told and retold. The exploits of the early travellers by canoe, especially the French coureurs de bois, stand among the great adventure stories of all time. They, and the evolution of the fur trade through the use of the canoe, explain why Canada is logically an east-west nation, at a time when so many of the commercial and cultural exchanges have become north-south at the expense of internal Canadian cohesion and identity. The fur trade, and the French in the North American West, get well-deserved attention in this chapter. The photographs and other illustrations in these two chapters nicely complement the text. The evolution from the comparatively small canoes of the pre-contact Aboriginal people, which rarely exceeded 25 feet, to the huge Montreal canoes of the fur trade, which reached 40 feet, is not only well covered, but also forms its own fascinating story of the cultural and economic exchanges between Europeans and Aboriginal peoples, and the evolution of an Aboriginal technology under commercial pressures. The next chapter, by Rick Nash, discusses the building of birchbark canoes by Aboriginal people, and the types of craft constructed by the various Aboriginal groups. This chapter as well is lavishly illustrated with appropriate photographs and drawings from a wide range of sources. Following it is a five-page, 28-photograph essay on the building of a birchbark canoe. Next comes a companion piece by David Finch and Don Gardner that describes the craft of the Aboriginal people of the inland Northwest. Much of this is devoted to the birchbark canoes of the Dogrib Indians, which in many ways are constructed and look like a cross between the birchbark canoes of the more southerly Indians and the kayaks of the Inuit. …

PREFACE, WITH A NOTE ON SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1. Suave Young Men: Creative Stirrings from Childhood through College 2. Wonders of Manhattan: Professional Beginnings in New York in the 1950s 3. Politics and Poker: The Body Beautiful and Fiorello! and the Late 1950s 4. Little Old New York: Tenderloin and the Early 1960s 5. To Broadway with Love: She Loves Me and the 1964 World's Fair 6. Tradition: Fiddler on the Roof 7. Here in Eden: The Mid-1960s and The Apple Tree 8. Have You Ever Seen a Prettier Little Congress?: The Late 1960s and The Rothschilds 9. Topsy Turvy: Separate Paths Since the Early 1970s APPENDIX A: CHRONOLOGY OF BOCK AND HARNICK ON BROADWAY APPENDIX B: SELECTED MEDIA RESOURCES ENDNOTES SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Harvest of polar bears by aboriginal peoples has occurred for millennia across the circumpolar Arctic. While harvest for sport and the commercial fur trade increased dramatically as southerners expanded into the Arctic, the 1973 international Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears curtailed harvest largely to aboriginal peoples. This Agreement, catalyzed by global concern for declining polar bear populations, is a hallmark for international cooperation in conservation. In Russia, polar bear harvest has been illegal since 1957, although there are concerns of poaching by local people for food security and also for the black market fur trade. Norway banned all harvest with their ratification of the Agreement. The USA allows for polar bear harvest by the Inupiat of Alaska. Quotas for the two populations shared with the USA are determined by an international user-to-user agreement between aboriginal people of Alaska and Canada and an international agreement between the USA and Russia, respectively. In Greenland, polar bears are harvested by professional Inuit hunters under a quota system, currently based on historic numbers. In most of Canada, where two-thirds of the world’s polar bears are harvested, anyone can harvest a polar bear but only within a quota system assigned to and managed by Inuit communities. This harvest is based not only on scientific information, but also on historic levels by treaty and local traditional ecological knowledge. Globally, polar bear harvest averages 798 (44 SD) per year. The vast majority is for subsistence, with 6% for sport (Canada), and a lesser proportion for defense of life and property. The legal international market for polar bear hides is supplied only by exports from Canada. Climate change poses a greater threat to polar bears than do the current levels of harvest. However, habitat change and harvest interact because of the increasing use of land by polar bears. Further, there are scientific and conservation questions about the appropriateness of harvesting polar bears, even for subsistence, from populations that are declining due to climate change.

Reviewed by: So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848 Clyde A. Milner II (bio) So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848. By Will Bagley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Pp. 458. Cloth, $45.00.) Will Bagley has begun an epic four-volume journey through the mountains of personal accounts, newspaper reports, government records, and scholarly studies that have recounted the saga of the overland trails. This book examines the era before the California gold rush, an event that changed dramatically both the number and destination of the emigrants. Starting in 1812 allows Bagley to recognize the importance of Robert Stuart's discovery of South Pass, the gateway through the Rocky Mountains that made transit to Oregon and California more accessible. Other extreme obstacles lay farther west, such as the formidable Sierra Nevada in eastern California. A public historian with over a decade of experience working in the National Park Service, Bagley knows both the terrain and the literature. Bagley is an accomplished writer and historian whose earlier book Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2002) produced enough concern within the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that a team of Mormon historians attempted a refutation. The book built on the heroic efforts of Juanita Brooks, the Mormon author who in 1950 exposed the Mormons' involvement in the 1857 killing of at least 120 men, women, and children. Here Bagley's first installment has another vital scholarly antecedent, John D. Unruh's monumental The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (1979). Unruh's foreshortened career never intersected with those of a new set of historians, like John Mack Faragher, who demonstrated that westward emigration had a greater complexity than popular assumptions about heroic pioneers and wagon trains. By the mid-1980s, a "new western history" arose exemplified best by the work of Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White. Bagley's interpretations are influenced by these no-longer-so-new historians, but his extensive research is impressive in its own right. He has utilized some five hundred overland narratives unknown to scholars before 1988. The desire of so many to record what they experienced in the journey has provided the greatest source of information. The prominent trails historian Merrill Mattes "estimated that of the almost 500,000 sojourners . . . [End Page 82] between 1812 and 1866, about 1 in every 250 left some sort of meaningful record of their adventure" (285). Perhaps only the accounts of Civil War soldiers can match such an outpouring. These records contain many surprises. For example, native peoples played an important peaceful role interacting with the overland migrants. John Unruh first researched this aspect of the journey, and Bagley effectively expands this analysis by looking at the work of Lillian Schlissel and Glenda Riley. Their examination of women's trail diaries revealed much fear of possible Indian hostilities but remarkably few, and in many cases no, incidents. As Bagley recognizes, "Until the 1860s, the level of violence on the road west was surprisingly low" (348). Women's stories along the trail demonstrate the dominant male attitude in gender relations. Bagley incorporates the accounts of two women—Lucinda Jane Saunders and Narcissa Burdette Land Vasquez—that are not included in earlier histories of the overland trails. Saunders's and Vasquez's accounts reveal the hostility, as well as the occasional admiration, that independent women elicited from male observers. Yet, Bagley does not ignore the better-known episodes and prominent characters. For example, John Charles Frémont appears regularly with his government expeditions and political ambitions. The two disastrously foolish purveyors of "shortcuts" to California, Lansford W. Hastings and Peter Lassen, retain their notoriety. And the Donner party becomes trapped in the high Sierra Nevada, with many succumbing to desperate measures and starvation. Very appropriately, Bagley uses the Jesuit missionary and traveler Father Pierre-Jean De Smet as a narrative bookend for his study. In 1841, De Smet journeyed with the Bidwell-Bartleson party, often proclaimed as the first pioneer train to reach the Oregon country. Before the end of...

This thesis approaches the imperialist narrative of Alexander Henry the Younger from two perspectives: first, it views the journal from a theoretical distance within a temporal network of related texts, each reflecting and mediating his imperial meanings; second, it sees Henry's work as an isolated text bearing its own imperial inscriptions. With the theoretical guidance of certain post-structuralist and post-colonial works, this thesis will first enter an intertextual field of traditional, popular history, in order to recognize the "central" role that historical narratives such as Henry's continue to play in present historical discourse; then it will attempt a resistant reading of Henry's journal in order to problematize traditional readings and to suggest future approaches. This study is intended to have broader implications for the historical genre of travel writing in Canada. Allegorical theory is used in this thesis to expose the fictionality of both Henry's journal and the scholarly discourse that surrounds it. Henry's discourse is imperialism: his ideologically driven, narrative associations are as much the product of Eurocentric mercantilism as realistic observation; and the traditional, academic climate of his reading has tended to perpetuate that system. In this "light," the meanings of Henry's narrative are seen as fundamentally imposed on the landscape and peoples of his accounts: rather than historic truths of natural history or native culture, they tell more about the ideologies of European imperialism and of the problematic nature of the allegorical "great" man of Western history. This thesis is concerned with the power of representation — particularly the discursive power of certain problematic texts to pose as authentic historical reflection; it seeks to identify such oppressive illusions and dispel them.

The Helms-Burton Bill and Canada's Cuba Policy: Convergences with the US

The normalization of post-war relations in the late 1980s has transformed the Vietnam–China border from a line of demarcation between two hostile neighbours into a zone of profitable economic opportunities. At the Lao Cai central market, Vietnamese small-scale traders and Chinese citizens interact with one another on a daily basis. Their narratives reveal that processes of constructing self-identity and otherness at the Vietnam–China border are ambiguous and multivocal. They attest to historically rooted stereotypes linked to China’s claim of civilizational and economic superiority as much as they are conditioned by face-to-face commercial transactions that challenge essentialized assumptions about the cross-border Other.

Cod all mighty

For decades, the story of the American West has been told as a glorious tale of conquest and rugged individualism--the triumph of progress. But recently, a new school of historians has challenged this view, creating what is known as the "new western history," an approach that gives a central role to the environment, native peoples, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Foremost among these historians is Donald Worster. In Worster's writings, the western past emerges not as a march of Manifest Destiny but rather as an unfolding relationship between humankind and nature. In Under Western Skies, Worster provides an eloquent introduction to the changing traditions of western historical writing and then demonstrates his own approach through fascinating case studies. For example, he takes a hard look at the struggle by the Lakota to regain ownership of the Black Hills, examining not only the legal history of treaties and court cases but also the importance of the Black Hills in Indian religion and the way they have been mismanaged by the U.S. government. He discusses the cowboy in terms of the new ecology that arose from livestock ranching--the endless miles of fences, the changes in the environment wrought by extensive grazing, certain species of animals almost wiped out because they were considered a danger to sheep and cattle. But Worster's view of nature is not as simple or as, linear as for instance, Bill McKibben's stark picture in The End of Nature, a picture Worster argues against. From the mining ghost towns of the Rockies to the uprooted farm families of the Dust Bowl, nature sometimes wins the struggle. Even the Hoover Dam, he reminds us, may one day be overcome by the patient Colorado River. Under Western Skies both offers intriguing insights into important aspects of our history and instills a new appreciation for the place of nature, native peoples, and the struggles over money and power in the western past.

Capitalism and the American West: Macrocosm and Microcosm David M. Wrobel (bio) William G. Robbins. Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994. xvi + 255 pp. Notes and index. $29.50 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Carroll Van West. Capitalism on the Frontier: Billings and the Yellowstone Valley in the Nineteenth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. xiii + 281 pp. Maps, tables, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $37.50. For a decade now, revisionist interpretations of the western past have increasingly gained the attention of both the profession and the general public. The term “New Western History,” while certainly not part of general parlance, has managed to permeate outwards from the walls of the academy. But how do Robbins’s Colony and Empire and Van West’s Capitalism on the Frontier relate to the new western revisionism? Robbins’s work lends itself a little more easily to categorization. Thanking Patricia Nelson Limerick “for failing to list the words ‘Canada’ or ‘capitalism’ in the index to Legacy [of Conquest]” (1979) (p. xv), Robbins places himself squarely in the tradition of recent revisionist work. In the book’s first part, “Western Myth, Western Reality,” he challenges readers to “turn from the easy and comfortable designs of triumphalism and success and look more closely at alternative approaches . . . especially examining the structural role of capitalism in our national culture.” Robbins further contends “that capitalism is the common factor essential to understanding power, influence, and change in the American West from the onset of the fur trade to the present” (p. 7). In doing this much, Colony and Empire serves as far more than an index appendage to Limerick’s seminal work. Indeed, in providing fairly comprehensive coverage of capitalism’s impact on the West, it makes a major contribution. Capitalism was also the primary focus of Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl (1979), and the tone of Robbins’s book most closely approximates this work. Worster focused on a defined western region—the Southern Plains—over the course of a single decade—the 1930s. Robbins’s analysis stretches [End Page 258] from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and takes on the whole West, “from the ninety-eighth meridian . . . west, to the Pacific, exclusive of Alaska and Hawaii,” but inclusive of the Mexican and Canadian borderland areas (p. x). Robbins acknowledges the influence of Dust Bowl on his work and reiterates Worster’s warning to scholars to not avoid using the word “capitalism.” Robbins provides an interesting analysis of the uneven relationship between U.S. capitalism and one of its targets of exploitation, Mexico, in the period since the Mexican-American War. He argues that the Mexican Revolution can be linked to the incorporation of Mexico into the U.S. capitalist sphere, an approach which, while compelling, seems to exonerate the Mexican elites, and the brutal dictator, Porfirio Diaz, from any blame in creating the horrible economic injustices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author’s comparative analysis of the Canadian and American Wests centers less on the exploitation of the former by the latter (as is the case in his analysis of Mexico and the United States), than on the lessons that can be learned from the United States northern neighbor. Canadian literature, Robbins notes, does not glorify the frontiersman; Canadian historical writing has not been straightjacketed by grand, exceptionalist myths “centered on conquest, domination, and progress” (p. 56); and Canada’s past has not been marred, like the United States’, by policies of genocide directed at indigenous populations. He further contends that “[i]n some respects American academics have been as imperial as their nation-state” (p. 57). The irony in Robbins’s comparative analysis, perhaps, is that its intended purpose is to de-emphasize American exceptionalism, yet he highlights those aspects of the American past, and past scholarship, that he deems exceptionally negative. The book’s second part, “Forces of Transformation” constitutes the heart of the analysis. Robbins examines the economic motivation behind the various western surveys and explorations of the nineteenth century in the chapter “In Pursuit of Private Gain.” In “The Industrial West: The Paradox of the Machine in...

The same press that produced The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, 1832–1834 in three massive volumes between 2008 and 2012 has released a user-friendly one volume condensed version of this important eyewitness source. The Joslyn Art Museum curator/historian Marsha Gallagher, who co-edited the complete version with Stephen S. Witte, chose the selections, representing around 200,000 words, or approximately one-third of the complete version. In her own words, she provides the reader “a good overview and understanding of where Maximilian went in North America, what he saw, and what he thought was significant about both” (p. xiii). The text is supplemented with thirty-two color and sixteen black-and-white illustrations from Maximilian’s own hand, as well as from that of the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer. As in her previous work, Gallagher provides the reader with short biographies of the most frequently mentioned Cast of Characters who appear in Maximilian’s journals. These include a few of the principal Indian leaders met on the journey, as well as many non-Indian hosts and acquaintances representing men of science in Boston and Philadelphia as well as fur traders and clerks from St. Louis to Fort McKenzie, below present-day Great Falls, Montana.