Summer Reading: A Blog

Lauren MacDonald

Author: Lauren MacDonald

  • Frantic Accounts of Failed Exploits

    Reading: Kimberly C. Borchard, Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1715 (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021).

    This book has told the story of how colonial Appalachia emerged from the Spanish myth of Apalache, which quickly dissociated from the very real Apalachee people of the Florida panhandle in the early sixteenth century and migrated — along with the legions of European explorers who sought its fabled riches — north and east into the sprawling eastern mountains of the contemporary United States. This migration was the product of a protracted rivalry among three European empires, narrated in no less than five languages, as generation after generation of would-be conquistadors and fortune-seekers composed frantic accounts of their failed exploits to herald the imminent discovery of indescribable wealth just around the bend in the next river, just at the summit of the next mountain. [153]

  • Commensurable State Power

    Reading: Alejandra Dubcovsky, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale University Press, 2023)

    On the 1675 Chacato Revolt: The very norms and behaviors Diocsale regarded as foundational to his survival were the ones Franciscans opposed… Historians are often keen to see Native ambitions — especially Native male ambitions — as connected to state power. Native (male) decisions and actions then become commensurable with those of Europeans and fit together in a shared colonial narrative. But Diocsale prioritized his family and his matrilineal ties… [59]

  • Future Viable

    Reading: Alejandra Dubcovsky, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale University Press, 2023)

    This book’s first chapter performs a nifty trick: speculating on the human experience implied by an archival fragment as a shortcut to establishing the who-what-why-when historical context needed for the reader’s comprehension of the rest of the book. I guess I’ve seen this move made before in the history genre, but this is the first time I can remember thinking, All this source-less speculation is good and useful, and I like it. The first chapter imagines the life of an Indigenous Chacato woman who exists only in the Spanish sources as a nameless corpse. In so doing, the chapter makes it much easier to follow the complicated Indigenous politics of Chacato autonomy, Yamasee slave-raiding, and Apalachee diplomacy in late-seventeenth-century northwest Florida.

    Though most slave raids managed to take twenty to thirty individuals, if the majority of those captured were women, Indian slavery had the potential of eliminating the autonomy and reproductive capability of these matrilocal communities in which women not only determined succession lines but also kept their communities populated and fed, had a say in where their husbands lived and worked, and made their towns’ well-being and future viable. …Chacato relocation prioritized the safety of their remaining “young women” and the future of their entire communities. Without young women, Chacatos could not survive, and so they moved. [36]

  • Genomics

    Reading: Jennifer Raff, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas (Twelve, Hachette Book Group: 2022)

    Raff deliberately and persistently foregrounds collaboration between archaeologists and American Indigenous communities throughout the book. There are obvious reasons for that emphasis, but I increasingly wondered what this book would look like if it included tensions and conflicts between the two groups. Not to worry! Raff has anticipated this readerly criticism, and the last chapter is all about scientific abuses of the DNA of Indigenous peoples and the results of that eroded trust. I did not actually know that Indigenous groups in the United States now routinely decline to participate in many modern genome mapping and databank projects, including commercial ancestry testing services. Makes sense!

    Research that has caused harm to Indigenous communities in the Americas (and elsewhere) has poisoned efforts to understand their histories using genetics. As of this writing, there are very few publicly available genomes from contemporary Indigenous North Americans, and even fewer from ancient North Americans that have been sequenced enough to confidently do detailed population comparisons. In comparison, there are thousands of genomes from contemporary Europeans and hundreds of genomes from ancient European populations. This bias is problematic because it excludes Indigenous peoples of the Americas from potential benefits of genomics research (such as genomic medicine, the use of genomics for repatriation claims, or capacity building within communities). [265]

  • The Genomes of Dogs

    Reading: Jennifer Raff, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas (Twelve, Hachette Book Group: 2022)

    It is time once again to teach my undergrad survey on World History to 1500, which means it is time once again to think about revising my lectures and staying vaguely up-to-date with the scholarship. (The eternal, never-ending, Sisyphean labor of teaching slightly outside your own field of expertise.) To that end, I’m reading Jennifer Raff’s book on DNA and the earliest migrations of people into the Americas, which successfully threads the needle of “science writing for a non-specialist audience.” I enjoyed the surprise appearance of dogs in the narrative. (NB: “Beringian Standstill” refers to the apparently extended isolation of the peoples who settled along central Beringia when it was still above water.)

    In recent years, we have been able to get insights into human history from an unexpected source: the genomes of dogs… [Angela] Perri and her colleagues have suggested that the Beringian Standstill provided the ideal conditions needed for the domestication of dogs: an environment that favored close associations with humans for access to scarce food resources, isolation from other canid groups, and clear evidence of genetic adaptations for Arctic conditions in parallel with human adaptations. This intriguing hypothesis matches the timing for the emergence of domesticated dogs somewhere between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago (an admittedly wide range of time). [198, 200]

  • At A Punishing Cost

    Currently reading: James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)

    Axtell briefly argues that the exceptional nature of sixteenth-century Mississippian societies was the reason the Spanish conquistadors never meaningfully conquered the region — and while I don’t buy Axtell’s specific argument, I did find it refreshing to encounter a take on La Florida that emphasizes Indigenous power over Spanish incompetence.

    Similarly, I was both perplexed and delighted by his throwaway portrayal of the early Spanish Caribbean:

    “…the Caribbean chiefdoms, situated in tropical, often mountainous terrain and led by astute and powerful caciques, foiled Spanish grabs for power and gold longer and more effectively than would the more populous Aztecs and Incas, at a punishing cost in Spanish blood and treasure.” [5]

    Hmmm! He cites Samuel M. Wilson’s Hispaniola for this claim; this is not an argument that Wilson makes in Hispaniola. (I just pulled down my copy of the book to double-check.) And I can think of half a dozen ways to refute this claim. But! I’m so used to seeing the early Spanish Caribbean being portrayed apologetically as insignificant, unimportant, and a frail prelude to a more important history. (Caribbeanists write this way because they have been traumatized by the jeers and scorn of the Mexicanists and Andeanists, who are always beating up the Caribbeanists for their lunch money.) It’s unexpected to encounter any description of the early Spanish Caribbean as a triumphant success.

  • Momentary and Misleading Stillness

    Currently reading: James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)

    It is interesting reading this book nearly thirty years after its publication. Lots of little things in it are “wrong,” because later scholarship has clarified and revised, and it belongs to a very distinct genre of ’90s cultural history. (Among other highlights, the book features a breezy assertion that Native peoples just loved the novelty of European pigs.) But! It still makes a solid case for its larger arguments: Native people were central to the colonial history of southeastern North America, and those people creatively and strategically adapted to changing environments and societies.

    But we should also remember that the more focused snapshots of native culture we begin to get at first contact with literate and artistic Europeans freeze the fluidity of cultural time in momentary and misleading stillness, which we must not regard as a necessarily representative or encompassing picture of the larger and longer history of Indian America. [2]

  • The Dog of Alba

    Reading: Ana L. Méndez-Oliver, “Animal Imagery and Racial Marking in Coplas Del Perro de Alva,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 56, no. 2 (2026): 371–93. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-12354374

    This article analyzes the fifteenth-century story of a mythic black dog who devoured the Jews of the Spanish town of Alba de Tormes. While the article ultimately concludes that the dog probably symbolized the hardline Dominican order, I liked how it foregrounds the weird ambiguity of how Christians saw dogs — beloved as man’s best friend, abjured as an antisemitic symbol — in the context of medieval Spain.

    “While Coplas del perro de Alva portrays the dog as the protector of Christians in the town of Alba de Tormes, its exemplary depiction is questionable, as it exposes the fissures of the boundaries between human-nonhuman as well as the human inhabitants of the town, Christians and Jews. Indeed, the poem presents a story in which the lines between human law and cultural practices, human and animal behavior, and dog as loyal protector or menacing beast are blurred.” [377]

  • A Mess of Cottage

    Currently reading: James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)

    I last read this slim book (which was composed from a lecture series that Axtell delivered at Louisiana State University in April 1996) maybe ten years ago. Re-reading it now, I could not remember if my favorite groaner Axtell line appeared herein or in another Axtell book.

    I was delighted to reach page 40 and see:

    Although [Powhatan] was interested in trading corn for a few English goods, especially prestige items such as shiny copper and blue glass beads and useful metal tools and weapons, he would not sell his birthright for any price. Off and on for the colony’s first six years, he waged diplomatic and real warfare against the intruders. When he died in 1618, five years after Pocahontas’s marriage brought an uneasy peace, his brother Opechancanough succeeded him and kept a suspicious eye on the acquisitive English, who built him an English-style house with a lock to buy his acquiescence in their expansion. But he, too, could not be bought, certainly not for a mess of cottage.