"Imagining Environments: Navigating Space and Place in the Early Atlantic World" The Second James L. and Shirley A. Draper National Graduate Student Conference on Early American Studies at the University of Connecticut and Mystic Seaport 28 - 30 September 2006

The early Atlantic evokes images of Basque fishermen hand lining off the shores of Nova Scotia, Africans harvesting sugar cane in Barbados, hogs rooting through mussel beds on Cape Cod, a peddler selling Bibles on a Philadelphia street corner, Navajo women hustling sheep across the Rio Grande. Such images are at the heart of exciting new scholarship.

Encouraging innovative research on both real and imagined environments, both this conference and our Pulitzer prize-winning keynote speaker, Alan Taylor, seek to explore reconstructions and representations of space and place across the Atlantic world. Taylor’s William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic and his recent work, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution embody the thriving and contentious historical fields of space and place.

For more information on the conference, go to: http://www.conferences.uconn.edu/draper/

PROGRAM

Thursday, 28 September

3:00 pm, Conference Registration

4:00 pm, Plenary Address:

Alan Taylor, University of California Davis

"The Cultures of Land on the Late Colonial Frontier"

6:00 pm, Reception

6:45 pm, Dinner

Friday, 29 September

8:00 am, Continental Breakfast

8:30 am, Panel One: "Boundless Knowledge: Ideology and the Circulation of Information"

Chair: Helen M. Rozwadowski, University of Connecticut, Avery Point

Jennifer Egloff, New York University, Ralegh’s “Discoverie… of Guiana”: A Case Study on the Early Modern Transmission of Knowledge

Anya Zilberstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology – “A Nasty Dirty Way of Husbandry”: Northern Farmers and the Trans-Atlantic Discourse of Improvement in the Eighteenth Century

Mary Peterson Zundo, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign – Imagining Destiny: Cartography, Painting, and the Westward Buffalo

Commentator: Michael F. Robinson, University of Hartford, Hillyer College

10:00 am, Break

10:30 am, Panel Two: "Breaking Bodies and Borders in the Caribbean World "

Chair: Roger N. Buckley, University of Connecticut

Pablo F. Gomez, Vanderbilt University – Slavery and Disability in Cartagena de Indias, Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1650-1790

Jason Sharples, Princeton University – “Come into my Company”: Networks of Association in Town and Country among the Enslaved in 1730s Antigua

James Roberts, Johns Hopkins University – Environment, Place, and Settlement in Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774)

Commentator: Thomas L. Doughton, College of the Holy Cross

12:00 pm, Lunch

1:30 pm, Panel Three: "Mapping Maritime Movements in the Past "

Chair: Matt McKenzie, University of Connecticut, Avery Point

Steven Tobias, University of Washington – Thinking the Sacred/Secularism in Barbary

Sukanya Gupta, Louisiana State University – Shipwrecks in Early America and The Tempest

Ilana Xinos, Louisiana State University – Atlantic Studies in the Pacific? Conceptualizing Atlantic Space in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater

Commentator: Nancy Shoemaker, University of Connecticut

3:00 pm, Break

3:30 pm, Panel Four: "Contested Urban Spaces "

Chair: Peter Baldwin, University of Connecticut

Edward E. Andrews, University of New Hampshire – Of Trees and Slavery: Anglo-American Appropriation of African space in Revolutionary Newport, Rhode Island

Gabriel Loiacono, Brandeis University – Public Money, Race, and a Place of One’s Own in Early Republican Providence

Catherine McNeur, Yale University – The “Swinish Multitude”: Controversies over Hogs in Nineteenth- Century New York City

Commentator: Seth Rockman, Brown University

5:00 pm, Sessions Conclude

Saturday, 30 September , Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea

8:00 am, Depart for Mystic, CT (Nathan Hale Inn)

10:00 am, Research Opportunities in Early American History at Mystic Seaport

12:00 pm, Closing Remarks

Karen Halttunen, University of Southern California

Images courtesy of the Library of Congress Rare Book Room and MicroColour International