1,720,970 research outputs found

    “No useless mouth”: Iroquoian food diplomacy in the American Revolution

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    After 1660, writes historian Michael LaCombe, Englishmen depicted Native Americans as “tragic, hungry, and helpless victims.” A century later, Anglo-Irishman William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, did otherwise. In describing the increased expense of Indian alliances in 1765 he complained, “All the Bull feasts ever given at Albany would not now draw down Ten Indians.” LaCombe’s English writers portrayed powerless, starving Indians, while Johnson worried about powerful ones uninterested in feasting. Historians must reconcile these contrasting portrayals. This article examines several ideas about Native hunger—that of the starving and useless mouth, that of the supplicant using hunger as a metaphor, and that of the warrior capable of doing without European provisions—which emerged over more than a century of Native and non-Native diplomacy. It contends that British misunderstandings of Iroquois (otherwise known as Six Nations, or Haudenosaunee) hunger during the American Revolution enabled Indians to use food diplomacy to retain power during a period that historians have characterized as disastrous for Natives. Indians accepted provisions and then refused to do what their allies wished, they explicitly ignored their hunger, and most significantly, they destroyed their allies’ food

    Rebellion or riot?: black Loyalist food laws in Sierra Leone

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    In 1800 black Loyalists in Sierra Leone participated in an event that historians have called a rebellion. Reinterpreting the 1800 rebellion as a food riot reveals more extensive black Loyalist political activity in the 1790s, greater cooperation between black Loyalists and white councilmen, and increased animosity between black Loyalists and Africans. Black Loyalists created food legislation with the approval of the Sierra Leone Council, but those laws fostered disagreements with Africans. When the Sierra Leone Council revoked the black Loyalists’ law-making abilities, colonists rioted to reclaim the political and legal rights that they developed through their food legislation

    "Their filthy trash": taste, eating, and work in Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative

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    After colonist Mary Rowlandson was captured by Native Americans during King Philip's War, food and labor came to represent her fraught position between Native American and colonial worlds. Rowlandson learned to eat previously disgusting foods, but she also tried to convince readers that she preferred non-Native commodities. If she described her tastes as an odd mix between Indian and English, however, she depicted her eating as Indian. Rowlandson's approach to labor proved similarly motley. Her manufacture of English-style clothing identified her definitively as an Englishwoman, and her inconsistent approach to work meant that she frequently went without food. Rowlandson's unwillingness to work illuminates different English and Indian attitudes regarding gender. Throughout the war, colonists and Natives toiled to maintain food supplies and targeted foodstuffs as a military strategy. People used food to communicate with each other in ways that ultimately solidified the gap between Native and non-Native in colonial Americ

    Claiming land, claiming water: Borders and the people who crossed them in the Early Modern Atlantic

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    Claiming Land, Claiming Water shares what historians and geographers wish readers knew about maps and borders before, during, and after the founding of the United States. The essays collected in this volume model how people can learn to interpret maps as arguments, rather than as historical facts, and to read maps for evidence of people and places that were elided, renamed, or destroyed. Contributors travel through the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in the place known by many names: the Atlantic World; the North American continent; borderlands; and homelands. Onto this place where people exercised power over space by forging relationships, colonizers came and imagined borders onto maps. Featuring reproductions of twenty historical maps, the book takes readers through this era of immense disruption to teach them strategies for reading and interpreting these maps critically. Essays attend carefully to water alongside land and land alongside water in search of new interpretive avenues that reframe what we know about space, control, and sovereignty. By using historical examples of people--farmers, fishers, hunters, religious leaders, colonial projectors, traders, sailors, soldiers, diplomats, and cartographers, it becomes possible to resist the temptation to impose modern geographical constructs backwards onto the histories we read, teach, and write. Claiming Land, Claiming Water investigates why some of these people imagined and made claims to bounded space, and how and why other people confounded and challenged those claims. Contributors: Sarah Chute, Edward G. Gray, Kim M. Gruenwald, Rachel B. Herrmann, Christian J. Koot, Chad McCutchen, Jennifer Monroe McCutchen, John Morton, Paul Musselwhite, Charles Prior, Karen Rann, Jessica Choppin Roney, Samuel Truett, Harvey Amani Whitfield, Alex Zukas

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    To feast on us as their prey: Cannibalism and the early modern Atlantic

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    Long before the founding of the Jamestown, Virginia, colony and its Starving Time of 1609-1610-one of the most famous cannibalism narratives in North American colonial history-cannibalism, and accusations of cannibalism, played an important role in the history of food, hunger, and moral outrage. Why did colonial invaders go out of their way to accuse women of cannibalism? What challenges did Spaniards face in trying to explain Eucharist rites to Native peoples? What roles did preconceived notions about non-Europeans play in inflating accounts of cannibalism in Christopher Columbus's reports as they moved through Italian merchant circles? Asking questions such as these and exploring what it meant to accuse someone of eating people as well as how cannibalism rumors facilitated slavery and the rise of empires, To Feast on Us as Their Prey posits that it is impossible to separate histories of cannibalism from the role food and hunger have played in the colonization efforts that shaped our modern world

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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