2 The Development of Archaeological Knowledge in the Lower Mississippi Valley

1964 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 3-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Greengo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Lower Mississippi Valley ◽  
Archaeological Knowledge ◽  
Plausible Argument

Observations having some bearing on the archaeology of the Lower Mississippi Valley are to be found in the writings of the early travelers. As the country became settled, accounts of local and regional historical interest often included remarks or occasional papers devoted to the local antiquities. My purpose here is to sketch the conceptualization of prehistory as it was developed through the most significant writings.A plausible argument may be submitted in support of the contention that Thomas Jefferson was the first scientific archaeologist in the United States. Curiously enough, his archaeological influence extended to the Lower Mississippi Valley. This was through H. M. Brackenridge, who went into the Louisiana Territory soon after it was purchased and wrote a number of descriptive accounts of the country.

Astronomy and U.S. Expansion in the Lower Mississippi Valley

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-161
Author(s):  
Cameron B. Strang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Lower Mississippi Valley ◽  
William Dunbar

U.S. expansion into the lower Mississippi Valley from 1795 to 1810 evinced and inspired many of the ways that officials and experts in the early United States used astronomy to promote territorial growth. Yet Anglo-Americans did not simply export scientific practices to the United States’ new territories. Peaceful and violent encounters among Spaniards and Anglos, masters and slaves, inhabitants and administrators, and whites and Indians all shaped the practice of astronomy in the Gulf South and, moreover, influenced how astronomy and imperialism overlapped in the United States on the whole. Geopolitical competition motivated the work of the Spanish and U.S. commissions of the Florida boundary survey (1798–1800), violence against slaves enabled astronomers like William Dunbar to perform disciplined observations, and interimperial exchanges of data made José Joaquín de Ferrer y Cafranga a prominent figure in the United States’ scientific community.

Personal Empires: Mapping, Local Networks, and the Control of Land in the Lower Mississippi Valley

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. e021
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Franco
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial Representations ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Local Networks ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
Lower Mississippi Valley

The Louisiana and Florida territories sat at the intersection of empires in the late eighteenth century. Between 1750 and 1820 the area was controlled by the French and Spanish empires, the emerging United States of America, as well as the Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations. While political surveys produced images of the moving borders between sovereign powers, cadastral surveys show the constancy of local landowners. Landowners superseded national distinction and were a constant in an area in the midst of great change. As control of the region shifted, landowning families continued their way of life. The continued circulation of Spanish cadastral surveys after the transfer of the region to the United States of America shows how Spanish spatial representations of property ownership shaped the image of the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Allegiance, Identities, and National Scientific Communities

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-207
Author(s):  
Cameron B. Strang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Scientific Communities ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Lower Mississippi Valley ◽  
William Dunbar

This chapter studies how individuals in the lower Mississippi Valley fashioned identities as men of science. It focuses on the 1790s to the 1810s, an era when several empires and other groups competed for power in the region. Local experts tried to benefit from circulating information among a variety of actual and potential patrons, and, in the process, they manipulated and blurred the boundaries between the United States’ scientific community and those of other polities competing for the borderlands. The chapter includes case studies of the Spanish naturalist and spy Thomas Power, the Scottish planter and astronomer William Dunbar, and the French engineer and slave trader Barthélémy Lafon. Their stories reveal how territorial expansion both added to, and exacerbated deep tensions within, the United States’ scientific community.

scholarly journals Race and Politics in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-179
Author(s):  
Howard A. Palley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Race And Politics ◽  
Inalienable Rights

Abstract The Declaration of Independence asserts that “All men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nevertheless, the United States, at its foundation has been faced with the contradiction of initially supporting chattel slavery --- a form of slavery that treated black slaves from Africa purely as a commercial commodity. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom had some discomfort with slavery, were slaveholders who both utilized slaves as a commodity. Article 1 of our Constitution initially treated black slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representation in order to increase Southern representation in Congress. So initially the Constitution’s commitment to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” did not include the enslaved black population. This essay contends that the residue of this initial dilemma still affects our politics --- in a significant manner.

“A Stalwart Motor of Revolutions”: An American Merchant in Pernambuco, 1817-1825

2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin A. Fitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
New Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old World ◽  
Republican Government

A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century, or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all of Portuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe, casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governments instead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, as the new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well as offer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete European alliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together around republican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicians were no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from the hemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures and agricultural surplus.

The Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline

1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Macleod
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
John Adams ◽  
John Taylor ◽  
The Government ◽  
Style Of Writing ◽  
To Receive

After years of comparative neglect John Taylor of Caroline has recently begun to receive again a degree of attention more in keeping with his true importance. That his impact upon both his own generation and upon subsequent generations of historians has always been less than it might have been is due largely to his tortured style of writing and the tortuous thought processes it reflected. John Randolph of Roanoke once commented that Taylor needed only a translator to make an impact, and Thomas Jefferson, replying to a communication from John Adams in 1814, wrote that a book received by Adams must have been Taylor's An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States: “neither the style nor the stuff of the author of Arator can ever be mistaken. [I]n the latter work, as you observe, there are some good things, but so involved in quaint, in far-fetched, affected, mystical conceipts [sic], and flimsy theories, that who can take the trouble of getting at them?” Taylor himself appeared to hold a fluent style in contempt, commenting that “A talent for fine writing is often a great misfortune to politicians.”Although Taylor's style renders study of his writings far from congenial, the consistency of his purpose and thought make it relatively easy to extract the main thrusts of his arguments. Far from a rigorous theorist he provides a running commentary upon the politics of his times. In that capacity, however, he never felt compelled to define clearly, even to himself perhaps, some of the central premises from which his arguments derived.

3. The US rise to world power, 1776–1945

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter LaFeber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
World Power ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines how the United States evolved as a world power during the period 1776–1945. It first considers how Americans set out after the War of Independence to establish a continental empire. Thomas Jefferson called this an ‘empire for liberty’, but by the early nineteenth century the United States had become part of an empire containing human slavery. Abraham Lincoln determined to stop the territorial expansion of this slavery and thus helped bring about the Civil War. The reunification of the country after the Civil War, and the industrial revolution which followed, turned the United States into the world’s leading economic power by the early twentieth century. The chapter also discusses Woodrow Wilson’s empire of ideology and concludes with an analysis of U.S. economic depression and the onset of the Cold War.

The Eastward Extension of Puebloan Datings toward Cultures of the Mississippi Valley

1947 ◽  
Vol 12 (3Part1) ◽  
pp. 141-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex D. Krieger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Close Agreement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Central Plains ◽  
American Archaeology ◽  
Considerable Portion

This article is based on an address to the society for American Archaeology at its annual meeting on May 17, 1946 at Indianpolis. A following address by Dr. Waldo R. Wedel desalt with the chronology of central Plains cultures. As the two chronologies embraced a very considerable portion of the United States and were in rather remarkably close agreement, it was suggested by retiring editor Byers that they be published in this journal.

Mr. Jefferson's Rotunda

1992 ◽  
Vol 76 (5) ◽  
pp. 883-884
Author(s):  
Raymond C. Bice
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The University ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Fine Print

✓ After retiring from the presidency of the United States, Thomas Jefferson concentrated his latter years on establishing The University of Virginia. He personally undertook the design of the buildings and directed the early days of the institution. The Rotunda, with its famous Dome Room and outside porticos, continues to receive critical acclaim for its architectural design.

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