Abstract: For centuries, transferring ownership of land under common law was a slow, complex process requiring the construction of a chain of paper deeds evidencing multiple decades of prior possession. In 1858, colonist Robert Torrens developed a new system for the transfer of land in South Australia, where the land was understood by colonial powers as […]

Abstract: In the 1850s, the government of Canada West initiated a project to colonize a vast region of the Canadian Shield known as the Ottawa-Huron Tract. Later, in his influential interpretation, Arthur Lower argued the myth of the inexorable forward movement of the settlement frontier was here shattered by a reality of lakes, rocks, and […]

Abstract: This article uses the 1898 manslaughter trial of two Indian medical practitioners in Victoria, Australia, as a lens to explore the settler colonial politics of medicine. Whereas imperial and colonial historians have long recognised the close and complex interrelationship of medicine and race, the emotional dimensions to care-giving have been under-appreciated – as has the […]

Abstract: When it comes to the early American frontier, a great deal is known about the men who moved to form the first permanent settlements. Much less has been told about the women they brought with them, the fundamental role these women played in the creation of successful frontier colonies and they labor they performed as […]

Abstract: Canada was one of the civilizing outposts that formed part of the British plan of imperial hegemony. This liberal democratic white settler society is the context where the new female-dominated social work profession developed. Using various historical archives of the mission statements and practice of early Canadian social work, I critically examine how first-wave feminisms, […]

Description: Alike in many aspects of their histories, Australia and the United States diverge in striking ways when it comes to their working classes, labor relations, and politics. Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist curate innovative essays that use transnational and comparative analysis to explore the two nations’ differences. The contributors examine five major areas: World War I’s […]

Abstract: Around the turn of the twentieth century, the sculptor Cyrus Dallin made several American Indian equestrian monuments. Critics often construed these sculptures as a connected series that charted the temporal progression of a defeated and dying race. But primary sources reveal an important counternarrative: the artist’s criticism of US treatment of native communities during western […]

Abstract: Victorian literary criticism is yet to fully engage with the new historiography of the 19th‐century settler empire. That body of work has focused attention on a vast transnational network of population, capital, and information exchange, and attending to the centrality of shared ideas of British identity has revealed a uniquely close relationship between cultural and […]

Abstract: The Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) is a site embedded with historical legacies of plantation slavery and settler colonialism; as the largest maximum security penitentiary in the United States, the prison also reflects the racial injustice of contemporary US mass incarceration. Situated on the site of an old plantation, the prison hosts the Angola Rodeo twice […]

Abstract: This essay is a contextual analysis of the History of New Hampshire (1784–1792) by Jeremy Belknap, founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society. I situate Belknap’s historical and institutional achievements within the framework of settler colonialism studies to argue that Belknap used his profound knowledge of previous New England historiography to write a settler history of […]