Apache history before 1850 is poorly understood because of the long-standing mistaken assumption that Apaches were inherently violent raiders and warriors from time immemorial. Although Athapaskans fought surrounding Indigenous groups for control of the southern plains prior to European contact, their initial contacts with Puebloans and Spaniards were peaceful. Apaches began obtaining Spanish horses in the early 1600s, and, angered by Spanish enslavement of their people, began conducting equestrian raids on their enemies by at least the 1670s. Fighting for their freedom and the return of their kinsmen, Apaches played an active role in both the Pueblo and Great Southwestern Revolts, while expanding their territory southward, eastward, and westward. By 1686, eastern Apaches controlled the southern and central plains, and in the 1690s, Spaniards identified western groups in the Chiricahua and Pinaleño Mountains and along the Gila and Verde Rivers. Embroiled in war with Comanches, Utes, and Caddoan Norteños during the 18th century, Jicarilla and Lipan Apaches sought Spanish military aid and protection while utilizing the Catholic missions Spaniards established for them as supply posts. In the late 1760s, the Spanish military took an expanded role in trying to control Apaches and intensified their offensives against them during the 1770s and 1780s. After 1786, the Spanish military combined peace and war, attempting either to pacify Apaches by turning them into sedentary farmers, destroy them with the help of Indigenous allies, or extradite them to interior Mexico and Cuba. Thwarting these efforts, Apaches de paz (peaceful Apaches) largely shaped the system of Spanish-run reservations that extended from Laredo to Tucson by relying on well-established strategies of movement, trading, and small-scale raiding. The system declined unevenly, with Apache raiding escalating more quickly east of the Rio Grande than west of it. Because of political and economic instability in interior Mexico, competition from US traders, and a regional smallpox epidemic most Apaches left their reservations by 1832. Mexican–Apache relations subsequently deteriorated as northern Mexican states hired contract killers, implemented scalp bounties, and presidios and towns disintegrated into arenas of treacherous violence. Apaches, however, still managed to occupy and control the vast majority of their homeland.
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Apache Peoples before 1850
Matthew Babcock
Article
Philadelphia
Timothy J. Lombardo
Officially established by English Quaker William Penn in 1682, Philadelphia’s history began when indigenous peoples first settled the area near the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. Since European colonization, Philadelphia has grown from a major colonial-era port to an industrial manufacturing center to a postindustrial metropolis. For more than three centuries, Philadelphia’s history has been shaped by immigration, migration, industrialization, deindustrialization, ethnic and racial conflict, political partisanship, and periods of economic restructuring. The city’s long history offers a window into urban development in the United States.
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Indentured Servitude in Colonial America
Anna Suranyi
Indentured servitude was a constitutive factor in the development of colonial America and helped shape patterns of immigration, labor relationships, citizenship, and the economy of the colonies. During the 16th through the 18th centuries, about 320,000 indentured servants, primarily from England but also from Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere, crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the British colonies in the Americas, making up about 80 percent of white immigrants. About three-quarters of them were male, a quarter were female, and approximately a tenth were children. Most indentured servants were impoverished individuals, aged 18 to 25, who had agreed to a term of four to seven years of servitude with a payment of “freedom dues” at the end, but some were shipped or “transported” overseas involuntarily by the government, as vagrants or to serve criminal sentences, or were trafficked into servitude by kidnappers. Even those servants who had nominally agreed to indentured servitude had little understanding of what awaited them on the North American continent, because the indenture relationship gave their masters and mistresses much greater control over servants’ lives than employers had in Britain. Once indentured servants began their term of labor, many found themselves in abusive situations, with women and children particularly vulnerable to mistreatment. However, their circumstances were better than that of enslaved people of African ancestry, as a consequence of the limited duration of indentured servitude as opposed to lifelong enslavement and because indentured servants possessed legally and culturally defined rights as members of British society that were unavailable to the enslaved, including guidelines regulating their terms of labor, protections against abuses, and the ability to sue in court if mistreatment occurred. After servitude was completed, indentured servants were expected to join colonial society, and while many remained in dire poverty, some prospered.
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Female Slaveholders in British America
Christine Walker
Women actively contributed to the expansion of chattel slavery in British America. During the colonial era, female inhabitants living in every region claimed by Britain, from the northernmost colonies to the southernmost islands in the Caribbean, held other people in bondage. As enslavers, women exercised their authority over captives in various capacities. Female slaveholders treated enslaved people as personal property that could be bought, sold, or rented out in the marketplace. They commanded enslaved people to perform diverse types of labor. Some worked in households as servants, cooks, and laundresses, while others labored in taverns, shops, fields, and on waterways. Women also bequeathed captives to descendants, often preferring to transfer enslaved people along female lines. Inheritance became an important mechanism for women to maintain control of, and benefit from, slaveholding. Finally, women exercised their authority by subjecting enslaved people to a spectrum of abuses ranging from corporeal punishment, imprisonment, and transportation, to starvation and execution. Early modern gender inequalities intensified women’s participation in slavery, offering them an alternative form of support, profit, and command. By offsetting the economic, legal, and social limitations imposed by patriarchal societies, slaveholding thus empowered women.
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Motherhood in Early America
Nora Doyle
Women’s lives in British North America and the early United States were fundamentally shaped by the experiences of childbearing and childrearing and by the ideologies of motherhood that emerged from a range of cultural contexts. Most women in this period became mothers, either through choice or coercion, but their experiences of childbearing and motherhood differed sharply depending on their cultural background, social status, and experience of freedom or bondage. The history of motherhood was marked by significant continuities as well as change over time. For most women, motherhood was fundamentally defined by the physical rigors of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, and these experiences remained central across generations. Motherhood comprised a range of roles, activities, and areas of expertise, and as a result many women enjoyed considerable authority as mothers within their families and communities; this too remained constant.
Changes to childbearing, motherhood, and maternal ideology occurred gradually and unevenly and affected women from different backgrounds in distinct ways. The incursions of European settler colonialism and the later expansion of the new United States, for instance, brought growing instability to Native American communities and threatened to undermine Native women’s power as mothers, though they formulated strategic responses to preserve their authority. The second half of the 18th century saw changes to women’s experiences and to feminine ideology in Anglo-American society. Middle-class and elite White women precipitated a fertility revolution that resulted in steadily declining family size; in contrast, enslaved women of African descent generally experienced increasing rates of fertility in the 18th century, and their childbearing experiences were shaped by the commodification of their reproductive labor. At the same time, a gradual transition began in the realm of childbirth as some middle-class and elite white women called on male physicians to manage their births. Meanwhile, this same era also saw a significant ideological shift as motherhood gained new significance in Anglo-American culture, making the image of the ideal white mother the most potent symbol of feminine virtue and influence.
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Prisoners of War in the American Revolution
Susan Brynne Long
When battles end, the challenges continue for both prisoners and their captors. During the American Revolution, British and American forces took thousands of enemies captive. Officers and rank-and-file soldiers experienced captivity differently. While officers could expect parole allowances, private accommodations, and even social opportunities, enlisted men often lived in crowded barracks and jails, experienced food shortages, and ran a higher risk of dying in captivity from diseases and neglect. Both the British and the Americans balanced diplomatic imperatives against moralistic considerations in their approaches to prisoner management. The many responsibilities associated with caring for prisoners led the Continental Congress to create an office of Commissary General of Prisoners. For the British, prisoner management was an exercise in long-distance military support operations. At the end of the war, historians enshrined the horrific experiences of American prisoners in historical memory, but British prisoners also suffered while in captivity.
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Smuggling and Illicit Trade in British America
Andrew Rutledge
Illicit trade was an endemic feature of life in 17th- and 18th-century British America, shaping economies and societies from the Caribbean to Newfoundland. Owing to the illegal nature of smuggling in British America, its scale is impossible to estimate, but surviving records from traders and imperial officials testify to the determination of merchants to exchange goods and enslaved peoples across imperial borders and their success in doing so. The same was true for British Americans’ trading partners in the French, Spanish, and Dutch empires. Contraband trade was carried out in a variety of ways, ranging from open commerce in colonial ports to clandestine landings of cargoes on barren shorelines. The lives of both free and enslaved colonists were affected by it, either directly as sailors or laborers on smuggling voyages or indirectly as consumers of illegally imported goods such as tea, molasses, rum, or cloth.
Most interimperial trade was labeled illegal under a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts passed between 1661 and 1696 that sought to exclude foreigners from the trade of the British Empire and ensure its products flowed to the mother country. But hampered by insufficient resources and intransigent colonial attitudes, customs agents could do little to curtail smuggling. Yet despite the arguments of some historians seeking to tie illicit trade to the coming of the American Revolution, smugglers engaged in it, seeking profits, not political or economic independence. In British North America, merchants smuggled to French and Dutch territories because the returns outweighed the risks, and because smuggling offered a means of earning the funds needed to repay their creditors in the British Isles. While in the Caribbean, island merchants enjoyed imperial support for their trade with Spanish America even as they condemned the illicit commerce of their northern cousins.
Article
The California Missions
Steven W. Hackel
Twenty-one colonial-era missions traversed California stretching northward from San Diego to just beyond San Francisco. Founded by Franciscan missionaries beginning in 1769, these missions—along with four presidios (forts) and three pueblos (towns)—were central to Spain’s attempt to incorporate the Pacific Coast of northern New Spain into its enormous transatlantic colonial empire. Established in the late 18th century, just as Spain was secularizing missions elsewhere in New Spain, the California missions were cultural and institutional throwbacks and controversial from their inception. They prompted consistent and occasionally violent resistance from Native Californians. Furthermore, Europeans who visited Spanish California saw them as repressive colonial institutions. Indeed, during their sixty years of existence, the missions proved most adept at damaging the culture and shortening the lives of California’s Native Americans, the very people missionaries thought they would save by bringing them into the Catholic faith. By the time that Mexican government officials secularized the missions in the 1830s and parceled their lands and resources out to Mexican settlers, associates of the Mexican ruling elite, and a small number of Natives, California missions had shown themselves to be transformative and lethal agents of change. In the 21st century, their legacies are increasingly seen as negative, forever linked to the indefatigable and uncompromising missionary Junípero Serra, who was controversially canonized by Pope Francis in 2015.
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Slave Conspiracies in the British Colonies
James F. Dator
Slave conspiracies in the British colonies developed alongside the institution of slavery. They were terrifying events for colonists and enslaved people alike. For historians, they are complicated events to study because white British authorities left behind an archival record written from the perspective of the ruling class, which usually comprised slaveholders who were anxious to maintain their power and interpreted alleged plots in ways that accorded with their racialized view of the world. Nonetheless, studying these conspiracies tells us a considerable amount about the social climate of the period. Thus, studying them illuminates not only the emotions of fear and terror that haunted these societies but also the role that culture, economy, and political values played in their development.
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Climate and Climate Change in Early America
Matthew Mulcahy
European colonization of eastern North America and the Caribbean occurred against the backdrop of the Little Ice Age (LIA), a period between roughly 1300 and 1850 ce that witnessed generally colder conditions than in earlier and later centuries. Alone or in combination, shorter growing seasons associated with colder temperatures and periods of intense drought influenced Indigenous societies prior to the arrival of Europeans, interactions and conflicts between Europeans and Native Americans, and the development of colonial societies across the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Farther south in the Caribbean region, climatic threats such as hurricanes and droughts created distinct challenges to colonists as they sought to establish large-scale plantations worked by enslaved Africans. Such threats forced Europeans to alter their expectations and perceptions of the climate in North America and the Caribbean. Following the principle that locations at the same latitude would have the same climate, Europeans had anticipated that places like Virginia would have a climate similar to Spain’s, but that was not the case. As they adjusted to new American climate realities, colonists remained confident they could change the climate for the better. Far from a threat, human-induced climate change seemed to many colonists a desirable goal, one that marked the degree to which they might improve and civilize the “wilderness” of the New World. However, colonists also became aware of some negative consequences associated with their activities.
