Grounded Histories: Land and Landscape in Early America

This essay emerges from a workshop, “Grounded Histories: Land, Landscape, and Environment in Early North America,” held at the Huntington Library in May 2010 under the sponsorship of theWilliam and Mary Quarterlyand the University of Southern California-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. The decline of the nationalist paradigm prompted many early Americanists to embrace geographically larger frameworks such as Atlantic world, hemispheric, and global histories, exploring the vast spaces through which peoples, commodities, and cultures flowed. The eight papers presented at the “Grounded Histories” workshop turned instead toward smaller frameworks of study, pursuing histories focused not on space but on local and regional place, and demonstrating the power of place to convey complex meanings of identity and power, possession and belonging. Whereas the panoramic view of oceanic and global histories can sometimes discern large-scale connections not visible to historical subjects on the ground, the Dutchlandskipperspective of grounded histories can perceive features of the historical landscape not discernible from a greater distance. Historians of early America, Halttunen argues, should not overlook those times and places when local attachments, vernacular knowledge, and a sense of grounded place proved more important to our subjects’ experiences than transatlantic connections, imperial knowledge, and oceanic or global movement.