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  • Rethinking Time, Place, and Purpose: Histories of Indigenous North America, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and African Diaspora
  • Sharon Block (bio)
Ana Lucia Araujo, Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. xiv + 250pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95
Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. xxv + 469 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $32.00.
Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 316 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $34.95.

Men have long opined on the relation of the past and present. There is Faulkner’s “the past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Santayana’s “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” and E.H. Carr’s pronouncement that we understand the past “only through the eyes of the present.” How best to unfold United States and diasporic histories into our current timeline seems particularly contentious. A pair of historians at Oxford and Princeton have labeled the effort to remove Confederate monuments as “The New History Wars.” A European historian has called histories of settler colonialism, “The Myth of the Stolen Country,” and critiqued land acknowledgments that recognize Indigenous people as traditional landholders and enduring residents as “a sure route to self-doubt, impotence and societal failure.” Historians’ sprawling public arguments over The New York Times widely successful 1619 Project likewise indicates how the power and purpose of history is inseparable from challenges to traditional hierarchies, field definitions, and methods.1 Alongside such public projects, new generations of historians are challenging white supremacy and settler colonialism by creating a usable historical past in and about this contested present.

Ana Lucia Araujo, Christine M. DeLucia, and Jessica Marie Johnson have each written a book that raises questions about the way we do history, how we [End Page 10] interpret time and place, and the ethics of historical analysis and representation. These authors contribute to the field of scholarship that is alternatively known as Colonial America, Early America (sorry, South America!) #VastEarlyAmerica, or early U.S. History. These works remind us that even the naming of historical fields conveys versions of a historical past that are aspirational, anachronistic, or acquisitive. For instance, “colonial America” claims continents but traditionally refers to a sliver of a coastline, marking a United States history that had not yet come to pass. “#VastEarlyAmerica” seeks to push back on these limitations by embracing continents, oceans, diasporas, empires, and approaches but struggles to define the boundaries of its expanse.

All three of these authors’ monographs offer compelling historical narratives for a field that has outgrown its Puritan roots and reflect a multi-century, multi-continent approach to the history of the sixteenth- through eighteenth-century world. Read together, they reveal dynamic intersections in their approaches to knowing, presenting, and coming to terms with United States, Indigenous, and African diasporic histories. As a historian of race, gender, and colonialism in eighteenth-century British North America, I am familiar with, but far from expert in, the topics on which these books focus. It is a tribute to their scholarship that each author can make contributions to individual historiographic fields while still offering much to generalists. They provide an opportunity for those looking to embrace anti-parochial approaches to what used to be a study of the proverbial city upon a hill.

Ana Lucia Araujo’s Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past takes readers on a lively multi-continent field trip to trace how the history of Atlantic slavery has and has not been memorialized. This includes collective, cultural, public, and official memories as expressed in oral traditions, museums, historical sites, documentaries, artists’ renderings, and political movements. An opening chapter on the memories of descendants of the Atlantic slave trade points to the connecting threads tying enslaved and enslaver together to this day. Araujo traces memorial trajectories away from white abolitionist savior models to the many grassroots efforts to remove public monuments to slave traders and enslavers, alongside institutional reckonings with various communities...

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