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Settlers, revolution, counterrevolution: Charles Post, ‘The American Counterrevolution of 1776’, Science & Society, 79, 4, 2015, pp. 614-621

20Sep15

No abstract available: check the article.


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Colonising, looking sidewise’; colonisation as peer review: Elizabeth B. Jones, ‘Keeping Up with the Dutch: Internal Colonization and Rural Reform in Germany, 1800–1914’, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 3, 2, 2015

20Sep15

Abstract: Recent research on internal colonization in Imperial Germany emphasizes how racial and environmental chauvinism drove plans for agricultural settlement in the ‘polonized’ German East. Yet policymakers’ dismay over earlier endeavours on the peat bogs of northwest Germany and their admiration for Dutch achievements was a constant refrain. This article traces the heterogeneous Dutch influences on German internal colonization between 1790 and 1914 and the mixed results of Germans efforts to adapt Dutch models of wasteland colonization. Indeed, despite rising German influence in transnational debates over European internal colonization, derogatory comparisons between mediocre German ventures and the unrelenting progress of the Dutch persisted. Thus, the example of northwest Germany highlights how mounting anxieties about ‘backwardness’ continued to mold the enterprise in the modern era and challenges the notion that the profound German influences on the Netherlands had no analog in the other direction.


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On the need for a deep past when you have a short history (and on the indigenisation of the settler): David M. Krueger, Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America, University of Minnesota Press, 2015

19Sep15

Description: What do our myths say about us? Why do we choose to believe stories that have been disproven? David M. Krueger takes an in-depth look at a legend that held tremendous power in one corner of Minnesota, helping to define both a community’s and a state’s identity for decades.

In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer claimed to have discovered a large rock with writing carved into its surface in a field near Kensington, Minnesota. The writing told a North American origin story, predating Christopher Columbus’s exploration, in which Viking missionaries reached what is now Minnesota in 1362 only to be massacred by Indians. The tale’s credibility was quickly challenged and ultimately undermined by experts, but the myth took hold.

Faith in the authenticity of the Kensington Rune Stone was a crucial part of the local Nordic identity. Accepted and proclaimed as truth, the story of the Rune Stone recast Native Americans as villains. The community used the account as the basis for civic celebrations for years, and advocates for the stone continue to promote its validity despite the overwhelming evidence that it was a hoax. Krueger puts this stubborn conviction in context and shows how confidence in the legitimacy of the stone has deep implications for a wide variety of Minnesotans who embraced it, including Scandinavian immigrants, Catholics, small-town boosters, and those who desired to commemorate the white settlers who died in the Dakota War of 1862.

Krueger demonstrates how the resilient belief in the Rune Stone is a form of civil religion, with aspects that defy logic but illustrate how communities characterize themselves. He reveals something unique about America’s preoccupation with divine right and its troubled way of coming to terms with the history of the continent’s first residents. By considering who is included, who is left out, and how heroes and villains are created in the stories we tell about the past, Myths of the Rune Stone offers an enlightening perspective on not just Minnesota but the United States as well.


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Comparing settlers and comparing indigenes: David Wrobel, ‘Considering Frontiers and Empires: George Kennan’s Siberia and the U.S. West’, The Western Historical Quarterly, 46, 3, 2015, pp. 285-309

18Sep15

Abstract: This article examines the late nineteenth-century writings of American explorer, travel writer, and journalist George Kennan on Siberian indigenous peoples, the region’s incarceration and exile system, and his early twentieth-century commentary on federal Indian policy. Kennan’s work highlights the possibilities for comparative analysis of the U.S. empire in the Far West and Russia’s far eastern empire.


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Settlers who hunt and those who don’t: Shelley Burgin, ‘Why the difference in the recreational hunting ethic between Australians and North Americans? An opinion with emphasis on “furbearers”‘, International Journal of Environmental Studies, 2015

18Sep15

Abstract: Australia and North America have many similar cultural features. Yet, although North America has a strong recreational hunting culture, the sport is limited in Australia. This paper investigates why this difference may have developed. It appears that a major difference is the reason for settlement: Europeans were attracted to North America because of its abundant wildlife and the socio-economic value of furbearers already established, whereas Australia was settled as a penal colony. The colonists found Australia’s wildlife was scarce and unfamiliar, offering no prospect of socio-economic gain from hunting furbearers. With over-exploitation, both continents moved to conservation of their wildlife. North America developed a conservation ethic based on a social, utilitarian approach to sustainable management of furbearers. Australia embraced a holistic approach to conservation to protect biodiversity. The differences, therefore, result from zoological differences and not innate cultural difference.


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On urban settler colonialisms: David Hugill, ‘Settler colonial urbanism: notes from Minneapolis and the life of Thomas Barlow Walker’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

18Sep15

Abstract: http://This article considers the explicit link between the historical production of the Twin Cities metropolitan area (Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN) and the violence of settler colonization by examining the life and contributions of one of the urban region’s most celebrated ‘city builders’, Thomas Barlow Walker. Drawing on recent scholarship in the emergent subfield of settler-colonial studies, it demonstrates that Walker’s rise to local fame and fortune is inseparable from strategies of dispossessive accumulation that operated to valorize and legitimate the territorial and social claims of settler colonists, over and above those of Indigenous peoples. In doing so, this article aims to challenge revisionist presentations that interpret the urban region as a strictly settler creation and demonstrates that settler colonial dispossession retains an explicit material trace in the urban present. Full text HTML PDF


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On contemporarity frontiers: Carl Abbott, Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond, University of Oklahoma Press, 2015

18Sep15

Description: We live near the edge—whether in a settlement at the core of the Rockies, a gated community tucked into the wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains, a silicon culture emerging in the suburbs, or, in the future, homesteading on a terraformed Mars. In Imagined Frontiers, urban historian and popular culture scholar Carl Abbott looks at the work of American artists who have used novels, film, television, maps, and occasionally even performance art to explore these frontiers—the metropolitan frontier of suburban development, the classic continental frontier of American settlement, and the yet unrealized frontiers beyond Earth.

Focusing on writers and artists working during the past half-century, an era of global economic and social reach, Abbott describes the dialogue between historians and social scientists seeking to understand these frontier places and the artists reimagining them in written and visual fictions. This book offers perspectives on such well-known authors as T. C. Boyle and John Updike and on such familiar movies and television shows as Falling Down and The Sopranos. By putting The Rockford Files and the cult favorite Firefly in conversation with popular fiction writers Robert Heinlein and Stephen King and literary novelists Peter Matthiessen and Leslie Marmon Silko, Abbott interweaves the disparate subjects of western history, urban planning, and science fiction in a single volume.

Abbott combines all-new essays with others previously published but substantially revised to integrate western and urban history, literary analysis, and American studies scholarship in a uniquely compelling analysis of the frontier in popular culture.


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Mindanao as a case of settler colonialism: Sherwin Mendoza, Landlessness, War, and Displacement in Literatures of Mindanao and Sulu, Kritika Kultura, 25, 2015, pp. 89-141

18Sep15

Abstract: This monograph attempts to clarify the relationships of Filipino Americans to the diaspora of Christian settler colonists in Mindanao with the hope of facilitating solidarity between Filipino Americans and the peoples of Mindanao and Sulu. It begins with a consideration of Carlos Bulosan, perhaps the most prominent figure within the discipline of Filipino American Studies, in terms of the brief appearance of Mindanao in America is in the Heart. The bulk of the monograph, however, is centered on literatures of the Southern Philippines, a region that is often overlooked within the discipline of Filipino American Studies, and in particular it examines the historical evolution of landlessness, displacement, and war in the Southern Philippines through the close reading of texts produced there. The first text is “Blue Blood of the Big Astana,” a story from the Commonwealth period of US-Philippine history, written by Ibrahim Jubaira, the mostrecognized Muslim writer in English from the Philippines. Jubaira’s story is notable for its depiction of the persistence of ideas concerning land tenure, status, and kinship from a time just prior to US colonial rule within a context determined by the increasing inroads of merchant capitalism fostered by the US colonial state. However, Jubaira’s story is very partial when contextualized in terms of debates concerning the fate of Mindanao and Sulu during the years preceding the formal independence of the Philippines. The monograph then moves to the near-present to consider a story by the Maranao writer Loren Hallilah I. Lao, “The Trip to a Forbidden Land,” as a plea for peace that is
constrained by the middle-class setting of the story. Finally, the emphasis shifts to a set of oral histories collected in the volume Land Tenure Stories in Central Mindanao. The shift to this set of texts corrects an urban and middle-class bias in the stories of Jubaira and Lao that would prevent Filipino American readers from understanding the concerns of Muslims and indigenous peoples and the causes of conflicts in the Southern Philippines. The stories of a specific conflict over land told by Muslims and Manobos in Land Tenure Stories highlight the importance of land as a necessary part of the livelihoods of many of the indigenous, Muslim, and Christian people of Mindanao and the ways in which landlessness and the lack of livelihoods are causes of conflicts in the Southern Philippines.


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On settlers and contemporary conflicts: Oded Haklai, Neophytos Loizides (eds), Settlers in Contested Lands: Territorial Disputes and Ethnic Conflicts, Stanford University Press, 2015

13Sep15

Description: Settlers feature in many protracted territorial disputes and ethnic conflicts around the world. Explaining the dynamics of the politics of settlers in contested territories in several contemporary cases, this book illuminates how settler-related conflicts emerge, evolve, and are significantly more difficult to resolve than other disputes.

Written by country experts, chapters consider Israel and the West Bank, Arab settlers in Kirkuk, Moroccan settlers in Western Sahara, settlers from Fascist Italy in North Africa, Turkish settlers in Cyprus, Indonesian settlers in East Timor, and Sinhalese settlers in Sri Lanka. Addressing four common topics—right-sizing the state, mobilization and violence, the framing process, and legal principles versus pragmatism—the cases taken together raise interrelated questions about the role of settlers in conflicts in contested territory. Then looking beyond the similar characteristics, these cases also illuminate key differences in levels of settler mobilization and the impact these differences can have on peace processes to help explain different outcomes of settler-related conflicts. Finally, cases investigate the causes of settler mobilization and identify relevant conflict resolution mechanisms.


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Indigeneity through diaspora? Gregory D. Smithers, The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity, Yale University Press, 2015

13Sep15

Description: The Cherokee are one of the largest Native American tribes in the United States, with more than three hundred thousand people across the country claiming tribal membership and nearly one million people internationally professing to have at least one Cherokee Indian ancestor. In this revealing history of Cherokee migration and resettlement, Gregory Smithers uncovers the origins of the Cherokee diaspora and explores how communities and individuals have negotiated their Cherokee identities, even when geographically removed from the Cherokee Nation headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the author transports the reader back in time to tell the poignant story of the Cherokee people migrating throughout North America, including their forced exile along the infamous Trail of Tears (1838–39). Smithers tells a remarkable story of courage, cultural innovation, and resilience, exploring the importance of migration and removal, land and tradition, culture and language in defining what it has meant to be Cherokee for a widely scattered people.


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