Overview

It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined by connection, Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and into the continent for centuries. As Taylor finds, their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland’s planters erected fences and forts, policed unfree laborers, and dispatched land surveyors. By chronicling English and Algonquian attempts to move along paths and rivers and to enforce boundaries, Taylor casts a new light on pivotal moments in Anglo-Indigenous relations, from the growth of the fur trade to Bacon’s Rebellion. Most important, Taylor traces the ways in which the peoples resisting colonial encroachment and subjugation used Native networks and Indigenous knowledge of the Bay to cross newly created English boundaries. She thereby illuminates alternate visions of power, freedom, and connection in the colonial Chesapeake.

Full Product Details

9780813949345

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Reviews

“There is much to admire about this book, including the quality of the research--the excellent use of archaeology, both published studies and unpublished site reports, is especially commendable--and the persuasiveness of its arguments. Taylor has made several signal contributions to long-standing historiographical debates.” - Matthew Kruer, University of Chicago, author of Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America“An exceptionally rich and well-researched book. Taylor weaves English and Indigenous perspectives together to make a unique intervention.” - Paul P. Musselwhite, Dartmouth College, author of Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake

Author Information

Jessica Lauren Taylor is an Assistant Professor of oral and public history at Virginia Tech.

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