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Research Abstracts from Short-Term Grant Recipients, 2006-Present
In 2006, the Seminar began soliciting brief summaries of the research conducted by its grant recipients. These reports are presented here as we receive them.
2006 Recipients
Charles Beatty Medina, University of Toledo
Marronage in Spanish America from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries
The Atlantic short-term grant allowed me to visit archives in two countries and to get a head start on my upcoming research on Spanish-American maroon societies. The work undertaken at the Archivo de la Nación in Colombia and the Archivo Nacional in Mexico City provided me with opportunities to view and acquire documents that I would have been unable to locate without the material support of this grant. In Mexico, as in Colombia, I discovered that maroonage has a more extensive and diverse history than I previously imagined. The archives brought forth new pieces in the puzzle of indigenous and African resistance previously left outside scholarly examinations. In both areas of study, which I intend to expand to other regions, the dimensions of this largely American form of resistance to colonial authority and control appears to have established both deep and broad roots in the Atlantic World.
Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California
Visible Empire: Colonial Botany and Visual Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic
With a Short-Term Research Grant from the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, I was able to conduct research in Madrid, Spain, during July 2007. This research is part of a book project provisionally entitled "Visible Empire: Colonial Botany and Visual Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic," which investigates the connections among natural history, visual culture, and empire in the late eighteenth-century Spanish world. The goal of this research trip was to expand the range of primary sources used in the project in order to include more visual materials. To that end, I worked with drawings and paintings in the collections of the Museo de América, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Real Biblioteca de Palacio, Real Archivo de Palacio, and Biblioteca Nacional de España, all in Madrid. I was also able to enter in conversations with scholars working on related areas in both Spain and Latin America, paving the road for potential future collaborations.
John Donoghue, Loyola University of Chicago
The Atlantic Unbound: The Ideological Origins of Anglo-American Abolition, 1630–1661
My research was undertaken at the John Carter Brown Library, with a brief venture to the seldom-open Rhode Island Historical Society, located a few blocks away on Providence’s East Side. While at the JCB, a treasure trove for colonial historians—especially those interested in New England—I decided to concentrate my research on Samuel Gorton, a radical colonist of great significance to my project. Gorton, of course, ranks alongside Roger Williams as an early American advocate of religious toleration; intriguingly, however, scholars frequently overlook both Gorton's republican and his abolitionist politics. Moreover, the transatlantic dimensions of his career have not been adequately recognized; these, I argue, unite his early days in the sectarian underworld of Coleman Street Ward London with his subsequent battles against persecuting clergy and magistrates in Massachusetts. These colonial controversies compelled Gorton to return to London for Parliamentary support, a journey that coincided with the rise of the Leveller movement, organized first in the Coleman Street Ward, where Gorton had temporarily taken up a position as a lay preacher. Part of my project involves a study of how these experiences help explain Gorton's republican abolitionism, fully in evidence during his leadership in the Rhode Island assemblies of the late 1640s and early 1650s. During my stay at the JCB I located a great deal of material in printed and mss sources about Gorton, slavery in New England during the mid-seventeenth century, and the Rhode Island assembly's 1652 abolition law.
Elizabeth Horodowich, New Mexico State University
Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World
This research project considers Venetian perceptions of the Atlantic world in the age of discovery. While relatively few Venetians actually traveled to the Americas in the sixteenth century, a variety of Venetian armchair travelers—writers, editors, mapmakers, and cosmographers—presented a series of reactions to the New World that betrayed a specifically Venetian vision of the age of expansion. Though a seemingly unassailable maritime and territorial empire in the late Middle Ages, Venice suffered substantial territorial losses in the first half of the sixteenth century. Its superiority in Mediterranean and European trade was slowly eclipsed by the emerging supremacy of Spain and Portugal, and the developing economy of the Atlantic world. Confronted with these changes, Venetians wielded a variety of editorial and artistic tools to make sense of new geographic knowledge and new paradigms. Venice developed a unique position with respect to the discoveries as the print capital of early modern Europe. Venetian presses published half or more of all the books printed in Cinquecento Italy, and the expansion of the Venetian press neatly coincided with the accelerated pace of exploration and discovery. As a result, Venice occupied a singular position in the transmission of information about the discoveries, so that, although the Venetians never figured prominently among the great discoverers of the New World, they were among its most significant virtual explorers. My research demonstrates how these armchair travelers betrayed profound anxieties about Venice's changing status in early modern Europe. They employed the cultural strategy of asserting the importance of the Venetian past in order to assuage their insecurities, and mobilized their forces to shore up images of Venetian superiority at a time when Venice's political and economic prestige in Europe was on the wane. In addition, Venetian mapmakers, artists, and writers consistently compared the newly found Americas with the islands of Venice when they were first settled, suggesting the ways that Venetians saw themselves reflected in the American and Atlantic worlds. For Venetians, Native Americans symbolized and mirrored the innocence and virtuosity of the founders of their city.
R. A. Kashanipour, University of Arizona
A World of Cures: Spanish and Indigenous Healing in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic World
In April 2007, funded by Harvard University's Atlantic History Seminar, I conducted research on Spanish Creole perspectives on the body, medicine, and the natural landscape at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London, England. My research focuses on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century development of a Mexican (or more appropriately New Spanish) humoral worldview that linked the body and healing to natural history and cosmology. In the seventeenth century, Spanish scholars in New Spain reshaped long-standing European ideas of the body and the natural world by accounting for new conditions and experiences in the Americas. A number of works have been critical to this position, including Juan de Barrios' Verdadera medicina, cirugia, y astrologia, Diego Cisneros' Sitio, naturaleza proprieties, de la ciudade de Mexico, and José de Escobar Salmeron y Castro's Discursos cometologico. Barrios' three-part treatise, which was published in Mexico in 1607, provided a detailed account of medicine in New Spain and covers a wide variety of topics including, childbirth, cosmetics, and medicinal plants. Similarly Cisneros's 1618 essay was the first (and possibly only) medical geography of New Spain. In this work, Cisneros situates New Spain at the center of the natural world and the universe. Escobar Salmeron y Castro's 1681 account detailed the passing of Haley’s comet and characterizes the event as a humoral exhalation. My research started with a few central issues, such as the European reception of New World plants and medicines. As with all research, new questions quickly emerged that enriched my initial interests. In this project, which is still in the dissertation phase, I now focus my research not simply on the exchange of goods and ideas (plants and cures), but rather on the development of an Ibero-American medical worldview.
Henk Looijesteijn, European University Institute
Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy (c.1620–?1664) and His Ideal Commonwealth
The protagonist of my dissertation-in-progress is the Dutch artisan and social and religious thinker Pieter Plockhoy (c.1620-?1664), an unusually internationally minded thinker who developed his first "idealist" projects in 1650s Britain before realizing them—if only briefly—in America, and thus provides a link among Dutch, English, and American thought about tolerance and an ideal commonwealth. Historians have nevertheless been slow to compare him with, or place him in the context of, other founders of colonies of an idealist nature, such as for example William Penn or Roger Williams, the founder of the Rhode Island colony whose ideas on tolerance seem very much comparable with Plockhoy's and perhaps even influenced the latter. One of the aims of my thesis is to reappraise Plockhoy as one of these Atlantic figures, and one of its ambitions is to reconstruct the Dutch share in the 'idealist' colonization of America. In order to do this I deemed it necessary to undertake research in American archives and libraries. During my research trip to the United States I consulted archives and libraries in Albany, New York, Dover and Lewes in Delaware, and in Philadelphia and New York City. Although the primary source material available turned out to be slim where Pieter Plockhoy himself was concerned, it supplied me with enough material to be able to place him in the seventeenth-century American context. Equally valuable proved to be the possibility of consulting published—and sometimes unpublished—materials such as articles and books unavailable, or only with difficulty, in Europe, such as the collections of genealogies and local historical periodicals in the respective institutions, which greatly assisted a better understanding of Pieter Plockhoy and the context—American and transatlantic—of his colonial venture.
Neil Safier, University of British Columbia
The Extraordinary Transatlantic Career of Hipólito da Costa, 1774–1823
The grant I received from the Harvard Atlantic History Seminar was used for archival research in Brazil on the transatlantic career of Hipólito José da Costa (1774–1823), an individual whose travels on both sides of the Atlantic can help us understand the pathways of socio-political dissent in an age of imperial crisis. Born in Colonia del Sacramento (present-day Uruguay) while it was still under Portuguese dominion, da Costa exemplified a new generation of cosmopolitan agents whose political and intellectual careers allowed them to pass freely between colony and metropole. Educated at the University of Coimbra, da Costa was soon sent to North America as a diplomatic agent, where he spent two formative years (1798–1800) studying and collecting botanical specimens and interacting with Philadelphia's cultural and scientific elite. Upon his return to Lisbon, da Costa went to work at the Casa Literária do Arco do Cego, a printhouse that produced several controversial texts related to natural history, economics, and politics during its brief existence (1799–1801). Later, government agents discovered the Masonic contacts he had developed while living abroad and the Lisbon Inquisition had him imprisoned. After escaping several years later, he sought refuge in London, where he established himself not only as the head of a new Portuguese Masonic lodge but also as editor-in-chief of the first Brazilian periodical, the Correio Braziliense, a monthly journal published between 1808 and 1823 that galvanized support throughout Europe and overseas for Brazil's independence from Portuguese rule. I conducted research on da Costa’s scientific career and journalistic development at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (IEB) of the University of São Paulo, which holds one of the most important collections of Brasiliana (both primary and secondary literature) in the world. I explored not only the secondary literature on da Costa's political life, but also the various texts on natural history produced at the Arco do Cego during the time he was serving this Crown-sponsored printhouse. I also consulted the collection of primary sources in Rio de Janeiro—from letters between da Costa and José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva to instructions sent by the Portuguese minister Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho—as well as works at both the Biblioteca Nacional and the Arquivo Nacional in order to place da Costa's expedition to Philadelphia within the administrative and natural historical context of late eighteenth-century Portuguese overseas bureaucracy, including the increasing imperial interest in the New World's intellectual, cultural, and natural historical life.
Molly Warsh, Johns Hopkins University
Adorning Empire: The History of the Early Modern Pearl Trade, 1492–1688
My dissertation explores the intersection of Iberian and British histories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the lens of a wide-ranging trade in a globally valued jewel. By examining the types of social, cultural, and economic encounters that the pearl trade generated across a broad swath of the globe, it offers a unique perspective on a world in which new connections were forming in familiar and unexpected ways. Pearls provided a wide variety of people with ways of negotiating the terms on which they lived their lives while simultaneously engaging with one of the most powerful and transformative commodities of the era. While focusing primarily on the paths of Atlantic pearls and their routes to market in the Americas and beyond, I place the Atlantic pearl trade in a firmly global perspective. By examining the interplay between the Atlantic pearl trade and the trade in Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf pearls, my dissertation explores the parallels and divergences in the histories of these distant counterparts, comparing actors and influences across a wide range of geographic and national boundaries. The Atlantic History Seminar's Short-Term Research Grant recently allowed me to travel to England and the Netherlands to examine the intersection of the trade in Eastern and Atlantic pearls as it played out in London and Amsterdam, specifically in the hands of East India Company importers, high-end jewelers, and wealthy private pearl purchasers.
© 2007 by The President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
Created: September 18, 2007.