Transatlantic Lifelines: Anne Bradstreet’s “Elegie upon That Honorable and Renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney”

The legacy of Sir Philip Sidney, the distinguished Elizabethan courtier-poet, was the subject of numerous claims to memorialization. On 17 October 1586 Sidney died in battle at Arnhem in the United Netherlands. Less than a week later, his corpse was transported to Flushing, of which Sidney had been Governor, and in the following year Sidney’s body was “interr’d in stately Pauls”, as recorded by Anne Dudley Bradstreet—the first known poet of the British North American colonies. While Bradstreet is omitted from most early modern and contemporary literary accounts of Sidney’s legacy, this article demonstrates that Bradstreet’s commemoration of Sidney from across the Atlantic presents new insights into his afterlife and the female poet’s formulations of early modern nationhood. Bradstreet’s first formal poem, “An Elegie upon that Honorable and renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney” (comp. 1637–8), was a tribute to Sidney as well as to her own Anglo-American literary heritage and England’s rolls. Bradstreet exhibits her complex relationship to Sidney along the same lines that she reconceives her English identity. A comparison of the two published seventeenth-century editions of Bradstreet’s elegiac poem (1650, 1678) shows how she translates descent and lineage from kinship (and kingship) into poetic creation. In the process, Bradstreet takes her place not only as a “semi-Sidney”, as Josuah Sylvester characterized Sidney’s descendants, but also as a Sidneian Muse—in America.

‘True, Publick and Notorious’: The Privateering War of 1812

During the War of 1812, hundreds of private armed vessels, or privateers, carrying letters of marque and reprisal from their respective governments, served as counterweights to the navies of Great Britain and the United States. By 1812, privateering was acknowledged as an ideal way to annoy the enemy at little or no cost to the government. Local citizens provided the ships, crews and prizes while the court and customs systems took in the appropriate fees. The entire process was legal, licensed and often extremely lucrative. Unlike the navy, privateers were essentially volunteer commerce raiders, determined to weaken the enemy economically rather than militarily. So successful were they, that from July 1812 to February 1815, privateers from the United States, Britain, and the British provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (as well as those sailing under French and Spanish flags) turned the shipping lanes from Newfoundland to the West Indies, Norway to West Africa, and even the South Pacific into their hunting grounds. In the early months of the war, privateers were often the only seaborne force patrolling their own coasts. With the Royal Navy pre-occupied with defending Britain and its Caribbean colonies from French incursions, there were relatively few warships available to protect British North American shipping from their new American foes. Meanwhile, the United States Navy had only a handful of frigates and smaller warships to protect their trade, supported by 174 generally despised gunboats. The solution was the traditional response of a lesser maritime power lacking a strong navy—private armed warfare, or privateering.

John Stuart Mill and the liberal idea of Canada

The writer and politician John Stuart Mill played an important role in the two greatest constitutional moments of nineteenth-century Canada: he publicly supported Lord Durham’s 1838 report on Canada and he voted for the British North American Act (1867) that formed the Dominion of Canada. Mill had a part, in his own mind an important part, in Canada’s evolution from colony to self-governing dominion. I argue that his attitude to Canada was broadly consistent across these three decades and was consistent with his principled defence of liberal imperialism. But it was complicated by Mill’s relatively low opinion of the French Canadians who, he thought, lagged behind the rest of Canada in their development. That is why Mill supported Durham’s recommendation that they be assimilated into the English-speaking mainstream. I conclude that French Canada exposed the limits of Mill’s form of liberalism, which gave priority to the ‘civilising’ imperative over cultural diversity. And it remains questionable just how capacious Millian liberalism really is in accommodating cultural diversity.

Racializing American “Egyptians”: Shifting Legal Discourse, 1690s–1860s

This article situates the historical “Egyptian,” more commonly referred to as “Gypsy,” into the increasingly racist legal structures formed in the British North American colonies and the early United States, between the 1690s and 1860s. It simultaneously considers how those who considered themselves, or were considered by others, as “Egyptians” or “Gypsies” navigated life in the new realities created by such laws. Despite the limitations of state-produced sources from each era under study, inferences about these people’s experiences remain significant to building a more accurate and inclusive history of the United States. The following history narrates the lives of Joan Scott, her descendants, and other nineteenth-century Americans influenced by legalracial categories related to “Egyptians” and “Gypsies.” This is interwoven with the relevant historical contexts from American legal discourses that confirm the racialization of such categories over the centuries.

Ghosting history/historicizing the ghost: Time passage in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge

This article investigates the representation of time in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge as shaped by the writer’s British North American context as well as his political background and agenda. It pays attention to the manner in which the text prepares the ground for native identity formation by providing a version of Nova Scotia’s recent history that is nonetheless presented as bygone and ancient. In The Old Judge, temporal distance of the past, apart from its richness — both confirmed by the presence of the properly historicized settler ghost — is the condition for cultural distinctiveness, maturity and heritage. Approaching The Old Judge from the perspective of Cynthia Sugars’ Canadian Gothic and Lorenzo Veracini’s settler colonialism, I argue that the text represents the past of the province as curiously extended in time in the Old World fashion, so that it may encompass the stages of cultural development required to gain the Empire’s recognition. Simultaneously, the text’s intricate play with heterochronies suggests that Haliburton’s Nova Scotia contains heterotopic spaces in Foucauldian terms, where the ordinary time passage is necessarily breached for the colony to attain proper legacy and distinct cultural status.

Introduction

There have been many revolutions during the course of world history. Until what I would call “the age of revolution,” or the “short” twentieth century (1905–1991), those were the work of collective bodies (Puritans in England, Sons of Liberty in the British North American colonies, and Girondists and Jacobins in France). But in my designated age of revolution, paired revolutionaries is the key phenomenon. Each of the four most significant and influential revolutions during this period were led by a pair: Vladimir I. Lenin and Lev D. Trotsky (Russia); Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru (India); Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (China); Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (Cuba). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the godfathers of three of those revolutions, participated in one revolution but in their lifetimes did not witness the successful revolutions they had worked so hard to inspire....

Piracy in Colonial North America

Historians of colonial British North America have largely relegated piracy to the marginalia of the broad historical narrative from settlement to revolution. However, piracy and unregulated privateering played a pivotal role in the development of every English community along the eastern seaboard from the Carolinas to New England. Although many pirates originated in the British North American colonies and represented a diverse social spectrum, they were not supported and protected in these port communities by some underclass or proto-proletariat but by the highest echelons of colonial society, especially by colonial governors, merchants, and even ministers. Sea marauding in its multiple forms helped shape the economic, legal, political, religious, and cultural worlds of colonial America. The illicit market that brought longed-for bullion, slaves, and luxury goods integrated British North American communities with the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans throughout the 17th century. Attempts to curb the support of sea marauding at the turn of the 18th century exposed sometimes violent divisions between local merchant interests and royal officials currying favor back in England, leading to debates over the protection of English liberties across the Atlantic. When the North American colonies finally closed their ports to English pirates during the years following the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), it sparked a brief yet dramatic turn of events where English marauders preyed upon the shipping belonging to their former “nests.” During the 18th century, colonial communities began to actively support a more regulated form of privateering against agreed upon enemies that would become a hallmark of patriot maritime warfare during the American Revolution.

CANADA'S FIRST KNOWN DINOSAURS: PALAEONTOLOGY AND COLLECTING HISTORY OF UPPER CRETACEOUS VERTEBRATES IN SOUTHERN ALBERTA AND SASKATCHEWAN, 1874–1889

The early collecting history of dinosaurs and other fossil vertebrates in Western Canada during the 1870s and 1880s is poorly documented. Initial finds were made by the British North American Boundary Commission and the Geological Survey of Canada in modern Saskatchewan and Alberta but, beyond a few well-publicized examples, little is known about precisely what was found and where. Much of the collected material is now housed in the collections of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Gatineau, Quebec, and a recent survey of these historic finds allows for the first comprehensive narrative regarding their identity and procurement. The collection is heavily biased towards vertebral centra and phalanges, reflective of both taphonomic and collecting biases. Given current understanding of Upper Cretaceous assemblages of North America, ornithomimids and small theropods are overrepresented, whereas ceratopsids and ankylosaurs are underrepresented. Fossils from the Belly River Group are best represented, after repeated visits to the areas of present-day Dinosaur Provincial Park and Ross Coulee near Irvine, Alberta. Taxonomic identification of the material has yielded numerous first Canadian occurrences, in addition to some first global occurrences. The latter include the first ever occurrences of Caenagnathidae (1884) and Thescelosauridae (1889). The Upper Cretaceous fossil record of Western Canada is among the richest in the world, and has been thoroughly studied over the last century. These fossils have informed our understanding of dinosaur behaviour, taphonomy, ecology, diversity dynamics, and extinction, among other aspects. But, like the animals themselves, the story of Canada's dinosaur-hunting legacy had humble beginnings—a story that has not been fully revealed before now.