HIST 75100
Fear and Violence in Early America
Fall 2016, Graduate Center
Wednesdays, 6:30–8:30 p.m., 3 credits
Professor Benjamin L. Carp, Brooklyn College, [email protected]
Course Description:
This course will critically examine a number of major themes and scholarly disputes in
early American history, from the pre-contact period to the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing
from a number of scholarly disciplines, the class will investigate the historical impact and
changing contexts of fear and violence, which set the tone for many of the ideas and actions that
motivated people in the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods of American history.
Specific themes will include crowd violence; wartime violence, atrocity, and “total war”; legal
regimes, violent crime, and criminal punishment; rumors, propaganda, and the transmission of
fear; domestic violence and sexual violence; slave revolts and the violence of the slave system;
and the intersection of violence with themes of empire, intercultural encounters, colonization,
and nation-making. Students will use these interrelated topics as their window into a relatively
broad chronological period, and they will have opportunities to relate their own research interests
to the overall theme of the course.
Course Requirements:
1. Attendance, Participation, and Overall Conduct (25% of Grade):
Each student must complete all readings by the day for which they are assigned, and
come to class ready and willing to participate actively in class discussions. Participation requires
consistent engagement with assigned readings and course themes during discussion. You should
be prepared to respond to assigned readings and share your insights with your fellow classmates.
2. Discussion paper (25% of Grade):
Sometime after the first few weeks of class (depending on the number of enrolled
students), each week one or two students will write and present a five-page paper, to be
circulated by 8:00 p.m. the evening before class, on how the readings for the week relate to the
course’s themes and previous readings, with the goal of facilitating discussion.
3. Final Paper (50% of Grade):
Proposal due October 19, in class; final due December 12, 4 p.m.). Students will write a 15–18
page paper in one of two ways (see below), designed to link the themes of the course with their
own research interests. On a case-by-case basis, it may be permissible for students to pursue a
paper that extends outward from “early America,” either chronologically or geographically.
A) an analytical research paper based on a limited set of primary sources (i.e. a discrete
set of official documents, newspapers, correspondence, or diary entries, a selection of
material or visual evidence, etc.)
B) a historiographical paper on a particular subject within the overall theme of the
course; the possibilities here are quite broad.
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Schedule of Classes and Readings
A note on texts: Many of the shorter readings and essay volumes are available online, via
the CUNY or NYPL library systems: be sure to check both. In a few cases where the readings
are more difficult to obtain, I will do my utmost to facilitate student access to these texts. Please
e-mail the instructor if you have questions or concerns about accessing particular texts. Also
note: After conceiving of this course, I came across the syllabus of Matthew R. Bahar of Oberlin
College on “Violence and Terror in Early America.” Some of his ideas already aligned with my
own, but I also derived inspiration from his syllabus and I wish to credit him here.
WEEK 1 (August 31): Introduction
Marilynne Robinson, “Fear,” New York Review of Books (September 24, 2015)
WEEK 2 (September 7): History of Emotions and Fear
Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: an Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein,
and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49, 2 (May 2010): 237–65
Nicole Eustace, Eugenia Lean, Julie Livingston, Jan Plamper, William M. Reddy, and Barbara
H. Rosenwein, “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” American
Historical Review 117, 5 (December 2012): 1487–1531
Rob Boddice, “The Affective Turn: Historicizing the Emotions,” Psychology and History:
Interdisciplinary Explorations, ed. Cristian Tileag and Jovan Byford (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 147–65
Joanna Bourke, “Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History,” History
Workshop Journal 55 (spring 2003): 111–33
WEEK 3 (September 14): Social Science Approaches to Fear & Violence
Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003)
Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press 2004),
1–94, 249–52
WEEK 4 (September 21): Colonial Encounters
Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early
America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
Tobias Green, “Fear and Atlantic History: Some Observations derived from the Cape Verde
Islands and the African Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies 3, 1 (April 2006): 25–42
Sarah Barber, “Fortune’s Frowns and the Finger of God: Deciphering Fear in the Caribbean
(c..1600–c.1720),” in Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies, ed. Lauric
Henneton and L.H. Roper (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 60–75
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WEEK 5 (September 28): The Anglo-American Culture of War
Wayne E. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500–1865 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011)
Evan Haefeli, “Kieft’s War and the Cultures of Violence in Colonial America,” in Michael A.
Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New
York: New York University Press, 1999), 17–40
WEEK 6 (October 5): Fear and Violence in an Expanding Empire
Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)
Matthew Jennings, New Worlds of Violence: Cultures and Conquests in the Early American
Southeast (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011), xv–xxxiv
WEEK 7 (October 19): Rumor, Conspiracy, and Paranoia
DUE: Final Paper Proposal
Gregory Evans Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American
Frontier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)
Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth
Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39, 3 (July 1982): 401–441
WEEK 8 (October 26): Eighteenth-Century Cultures of Violence on the Frontier
Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York:
Norton, 2008)
Rob Harper, “Looking the Other Way: The Gnaddenhutten Massacre and the Contextual
Interpretation of Violence,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, 3 (July 2007): 621–44
Nicole Eustace, “The Sentimental Paradox: Humanity and Violence on the Pennsylvania
Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly 65, 1 (January 2008): 29–64
WEEK 9 (November 2): Fear and Slave Revolts
Philip D. Morgan, “Conspiracy Scares,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, 1 (Jan. 2002): 159–66
María Elena Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence,
and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, 3 (July
2004): 479–520
Jason Sharples, “Discovering Slave Conspiracies: New Fears of Rebellion and Old Paradigms of
Plotting in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” American Historical Review 120, 3 (June
2015): 811–43
Anne-Claire Faucquez, “‘A Bloody Conspiracy’: Race, Power and Religion in New York’s 1712
Slave Insurrection,” in Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies, ed. Lauric
Henneton and L.H. Roper (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 204–225
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WEEK 10 (November 9): Intimate Violence
Ann M. Little, “’Shee Would Bump His Mouldy Britch’: Authority, Masculinity, and the Harried
Husbands of New Haven Colony, 1638-1670,” in Michael A. Bellesiles, ed., Lethal
Imaginations: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York: New York
University Press, 1999), 43–66
Ruth H. Bloch, “The American Revolution, Wife Beating, and the Emergent Value of Privacy,”
Early American Studies 5, 2 (fall 2007): 223–51
Elaine Forman Crane, Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in
Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 84–118
WEEK 11 (November 16): Sexual Violence
Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006)
Wendy Anne Warren, “‘The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,”
Journal of American History 93, 4 (March 2007): 1031–49
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, 2 (June 2008): 1–14
WEEK 12 (November 23): Approaches to Crowd Violence in America
Gordon S. Wood, “A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly
23, 4 (October 1966): 635–42
Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” William
and Mary Quarterly 27, 1 (January 1970): 3–35
Alfred F. Young, “English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,” in
The Origins of Anglo–American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 185–212
Thomas Slaughter, “Crowds in Eighteenth-Century America: Reflections and New Directions,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 115, 1 (January 1991): 3–34
Scott W. See, “Nineteenth-Century Collective Violence: Toward a North American Context,”
Labour/Le Travail 39 (Spring 1997): 13–38
WEEK 13 (November 30): Fear and Violence in the New Nation
Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism
to Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), introduction
WEEK 14 (December 7): The Revolution and Control of Violence
Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onuf, and Brian Schoen, Between Sovereignty and
Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2015)
Monday, December 12, 4 p.m.: Final Paper due.