From Christian to Jew

The next crucial step in the siblings’ journey to gain the right to live and pray as they pleased came in 1811 when they moved to Suriname, a South American colony on the Caribbean Sea. In Suriname, Sarah and Isaac found their home among the largest multiracial Jewish community in the Americas and formally converted to Judaism. This community provided a spiritual home for Sarah and Isaac, but it also marked them as second-class citizens. Since their father, Abraham, had not married their mother, Surinamese law considered Sarah and Isaac people of color. This racial designation followed them into the synagogue, where they would sit separately from whites and couldn’t partake in synagogue honors. This chapter places the siblings’ experiences alongside that of other multiracial Jews who lived in Paramaribo at that time, highlighting their battles against oppression.

Ecclesiastical Geography of Colonial Brazil

For many years Brazil was a mission land, a space for evangelization mostly occupied by non-Christian peoples and targets of the conversion work of Catholic missionaries. Furthermore, the slowness of the colonizing—and missionary—advance toward the vast sertões of Portuguese America meant that a large part of the territory remained outside the principal organizing institutions of the colonial space, among which was the diocesan church. However, by confusing the space effectively occupied by colonization with what would eventually form the extension of the territorial possessions of the Portuguese monarchy, the field was opened to mistaken perceptions about the presence and importance of the diocesan Church in colonial Brazil. Since 2000, the proliferation of studies about the episcopacy and different aspects of the structures and actions related to episcopal power has contributed to a change in the understanding of its role and relevance in the development of the Church and the Luso-American colony. Contemporary historians, more attentive to documentary sources related to diocesan administration, have sought to show that the diocesan geography of Portuguese America had greater complexity and importance than has been attributed to it by incautious researchers convinced they were aware of the limitations of the role played by secular clergy in the construction of the Church and Catholicism. Emerging out of recent 21st-century studies is a better knowledge of diocesan structures—bishoprics, ecclesiastic administrations, parishes, chapels—and the functioning of the mechanisms of pastoral vigilance and the punishment of deviants, whether they were clerics or simple believers. This demystifies the idea that the royal Padroado was a nefarious obstacle to the development of the diocesan church in Brazil and shows the importance of the study of diocesan geography not only for the understanding of the history of the Church and Catholicism but also for the development of colonial society.

Sailing to Jerusalem

This chapter details the earliest stages of the American obsession with Palestine. It provides capsule narratives of visits to Ottoman Palestine by Herman Melville and Mark Twain, and early settler colonies of Christian missionaries, such as the Adams Colony and the free-living “American colony.” The content also sources the American obsession with Israel to the Bible, and a Christian desire to convert Jews to their beliefs.

The Trials of Jamestown: An Investigation of the External Factors Influencing England’s First American Colony

This paper closely examines the first years of the colony of Jamestown and the factors contributing to its initial failures. While drawing attention to the faults of the settlers themselves, investigations of different primary and secondary sources work to shine a light on outside influences such as the imbalance of political power in the governmental structure, a lack of proper preparation, as well as the extreme social circumstances and pressures the settlers would have endured. With these factors in consideration, this paper highlights the positive contributions of the colony, drawing on the works of Karen Kupperman to expand on the notion of Jamestown as a model for future colonies. This paper essentially argues that England’s first colony was ultimately a success, in spite of the many trials it faced, as it not only persevered through these hardships, but provided guidelines essential to the founding of future colonies in North America.

New Cures

Chapter 3 examines the creation and administration of the Caracas Company as an organization designed to increase trade to Venezuela but also to police its coastline. Although realizations of Spanish commercial vulnerabilities predated the Bourbon period, bureaucrats in the new dynasty singled out contraband trade as an especially troubling defect. Venezuelan commercial rejuvenation represented one of the earliest Bourbon reform projects. Crown ministers conceived of the Caracas Company as a solution to the province’s commercial dysfunction. Madrid allowed the Caracas Company to maintain its commercial privileges in Venezuela despite prickly relations with the colony’s subjects because it was a profitable enterprise. This reality delayed the implementation of comercio libre reforms in Venezuela until 1789, long after every Spanish American colony aside from New Spain had been permitted trade liberalization. Essentially, an early Bourbon reform had overpowered the designs of later ones. Continued Company control assured that the province would remain a conflict zone. As this chapter emphasizes, imperial reformers were not ignorant or inflexible where smuggling was concerned. Rather, their plans miscalculated how deeply it was stitched into the fabric of Venezuelan life.

The American Woman and the Invention of Paris

The chapter deals with a woman’s triumph in a man’s world during the Gilded Age. It chronicles the American take-over of a large section of Paris which becomes an American colony. The main character is a beautiful American woman, more cunning than intelligent, who uses her wits, and willingness to divorce and remarry to make her name in a largely Americanized Paris.